The Up Stairs Lounge even hosted receptions for MCC “holy union” ceremonies, or spiritual conjugations for same-sex couples. Local members of a radical, gay-affirming Christian congregation called the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) found safe harbor at the Up Stairs Lounge, and their flock held Sunday services in the bar’s theater hall for several months. It served as a forerunner to modern queer spaces in that it was racially integrated, permitting Black and white gay courtship, as well as a haven for trans patrons, then self-identifying as “cross-dressers” in an era when gender dysphoria was not well understood. The Up Stairs Lounge once stood on the edge of gender, racial and religious mores.
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Local churches refused to bury the dead, and jokes that circulated after the blaze spoke of “flaming queens” who should be discarded in “fruit jars.” Bodies that went unclaimed were dropped into unmarked graves in a potter’s field and lost.Ī firefighter examines the remains of the UpStairs Lounge on June 24, 1973, after a fire that left 32 dead. City leaders failed to address or even acknowledge the tragedy and the pain it wrought. Bill Larson, was left hanging out a street-facing window as a public spectacle for four hours. The body of one victim, a gay religious minister named Rev. As I wrote in my book Tinderbox, a nonfiction account of the Up Stairs Lounge disaster, the police investigation closed without answers or an outcry, and the chief suspect was never questioned. The public response to the tragedy reflected those prejudices. Troy Perry, the legendary gay activist and minister. “They viewed homosexuality… as something heterosexuals did that was bad,” remembered Rev.
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Seven out of 10 of Americans, when polled, considered homosexuality to be “always wrong.” Yet, few Americans were willing to acknowledge such a catastrophe because a gay victim was then considered to be marginal and criminal. Intentionally set, it was the deadliest fire on record in city history and the worst mass killing of homosexuals in 20th-century America, claiming 32 lives and injuring 15 others. Forty-seven years ago today, on the night of June 24, 1973, fire struck a working-class gay bar called the Up Stairs Lounge on the ragged edge of New Orleans’ French Quarter. My concerns are rooted not in suspicion, but in history. (WATCH: Prejudice & Pride: Revisiting the tragic fire that killed 32 in a New Orleans gay bar) Religious conservatives would encourage such complacency, as they mean to fracture the LGBTQ alliance and then quash it through religious-based discrimination. Gay conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan, in the wake of the court decision, asked hypothetically whether now might be a good time for the gay rights movement to declare victory, having assimilated gay and lesbians into a society where they’ve supposedly ceased to be minorities.
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The week before, on the fourth anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting, the Trump administration announced a rule change rolling back healthcare protections for trans and gender-queer Americans by redefining sex as determined by “biology,” or birth gender, effectively allowing religious liberty advocates in medical facilities “of faith” to discriminate against the most vulnerable subgroup of the LGBTQ alliance.
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Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act protects LGBTQ employees from discrimination, finally extending federal workplace protections to the more than half of U.S. Queer Americans live in schizophrenic times. Until the Pulse nightclub massacre, the 1973 UpStairs Lounge fire was the deadliest attack on LGBTQ citizens in US history.