This was a place where people hadn’t even heard of Stonewall. If anyone tried to stand up and give a political speech, no one would know what they were talking about. They had a lot of social traditions that were built around being welcoming. The Up Stairs Lounge was egalitarian and apolitical. So many of our gay spaces are still so segregated by race, by gender, by other characteristics used to divide, but the Up Stairs Lounge seemed to be able to overcome that to be a true community meeting place. They’re important from the perspective of heterosexism and heteronormativity to see and imagine how the other 5% lives and what it might be like to not be represented in a room besides oneself. Spaces like that are profound from the perspective of a social education. But gay bars provide an important atmosphere where you can walk into a room, and be queer, and not be a minority. I’m not saying there are not gay bars that are creepy. Gay bars are vital oases that are disappearing and they’re meccas still where individuals who want to seek out others like themselves, be part of a community, or pick up a trick can engage in a more human way than a phone app. Having done so much research into this one gay bar, what words do you have to offer about their place in society? We talk so much about the importance of gay bars, especially now that they are limited during COVID. I want the Up Stairs Lounge story to shatter that practice. And we use our membership in these to do harm to one another.
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We all cling so profoundly to our religion, to our class, to whatever our letter is in our LGBTQ acronym, to race, to caste, to so many characteristics. The last thing I want is for people to allow the Up Stairs Lounge to enter a side door into the human heart and to rattle people’s preconceived notions. The second thing I want people to understand is the context of the 20 th century closet and to fathom the degree to which the closet was an institution of great corruption and great violence. When you do these speaking gigs, besides getting people to buy the book–which they should definitely do–what do you want them to know about the Up Stairs Lounge?įirst, I want them to acknowledge that the Up Stairs Lounge existed and have a basic knowledge of this historical event. If you had the camera on me, you would have seen me Oprah-level crying. The first gay man who had ever run for the presidency mentioned the Up Stairs Lounge. And then I eventually clicked on the video and it took me a day to believe that talked about my book.
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Then I get a random Instagram direct message from a fellow author who I don’t really talk to socially, so I ignored it for a day. But, yeah, I was in Kentucky because a loved one of mine had just had an emergency surgery, so I was emotionally exhausted. He’s the kind of guy you just know would be the most well-read person in the briefing room. I was hoping he would do it for a long time because his book has the same publisher and editor as Tinderbox and I had known he had a copy of the galley for a long time. What is it like when someone like Pete Buttigieg endorses the book?
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I have something like 15 speaking gigs this fall. That’s naturally how this happens for authors. I’ve been waiting for the invitations to speak about The Up Stairs Lounge to stop which would tell me that I need to stop and more fully move on to my next project. The audience for this book still keeps organically gravitating towards it. Tinderbox actually was released two years ago, yet interest with the Up Stairs Lounge seems to keep growing. In advance of his virtual appearances at Cincinnati’s Mercantile Library on September 15 and Columbus’ Gramercy Books on October 7, we chatted with Fieseler about his remarkable book and truly important research into a fire no one seems to remember. Fieseler, author of Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation. “The Up Stairs Lounge became an obscure event that was minimized not just nationally, but locally in New Orleans, by the straight community and the closeted gay community who desperately wanted this event not to matter and not to change business in the city,” explains Robert W. Still, most people have never even heard of this monumental tragedy. history when arson claimed the lives of 32 people on June 24, 1973. Rarely does the the Up Stairs Lounge of New Orleans make it onto the list.Īnd yet before the shooting at Pulse in 2016, the Up Stairs Lounge was the site of the largest mass murder of LGBTQ+ people in U.S. The historic Stonewall Inn? The legendary Abbey in Los Angeles? The tragic specter of Pulse in Orlando? The fictionalized ridiculousness of The Birdcage? Outside of your local haunts, where does your mind go when you think of notable gay bars?