Memory / Comment

50 Years Later, the UpStairs Lounge Fire Is More Important to Remember Than Ever

The arson attack on a New Orleans nightclub was the largest massacre of queer people in 20th-century America—and it remains relevant to our present moment.

by Andrew Sciallo via The Nation on June 22, 2023

...the exact location of the bodies is unknown. “A lot of older people, even if they were alive at the time, don’t recall the UpStairs Fire because the story just got swept under the rug at the time,” says Frank Perez, cofounder and executive director of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisana.

Johnny Townsend, who wrote a history of the fire titled Let the Faggots Burn (a reference to a comment that survivors of the fire reported hearing) agrees. “The way the city reacted after the fire was a hate crime in and of itself,” he says. “Victims who survived couldn’t tell anyone they were there [at the bar] or that their friends or lovers, had died, for fear of being out.”

By 1973, the French Quarter had been a center of queer life in New Orleans for decades. For queer people raised in the rural South, neighborhoods like the French Quarter gave them a unique serenity. Part of what made the fire so sinister was that, after the attack, the anti-gay climate prevented many victims from being able to fully seek justice, lest they be outed.

“The city’s reaction 50 years ago was so horrible and homophobic that it made it political. There was the initial crime of the arson and the second crime, the city’s neglect,” says Townsend.

Now, with the 50th anniversary of the fire taking place at a time when LGBTQ+ rights are under more of a sustained threat than they have been for years, the people who have worked so hard to keep the memory of the victims alive say that it’s especially important to connect today’s struggles with the past.

Because of the stigma associated with queer people at the time, the city quickly and quietly moved on from the fire.

“Louisiana has a long history of ignoring queers to death,” says Robert Fieseler, author of Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the UpStairs Inferno. “I was horrified by even my own ignorance. When a professor brought this story to my attention, I hadn’t heard of it.”

The book took Fieseler nearly five years to research, but he says that, because so much of the event’s history was buried, he is constantly learning new details. “Whenever I give a lecture about the book now, someone will inevitably approach me and tell me they knew one of the 32 victims, or survivor, or someone that was a part of gay New Orleans society in the 1970s and I will find out something new about the event,” he says.