Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay Liberation movement.
Tinderbox restores honor to a forgotten generation of civil-rights martyrs..
Yet the impassioned activism that followed proved essential to the emergence of a fledgling gay movement.
The aftermath was no less traumatic--families ashamed to claim loved ones, the Catholic Church refusing proper burial rights, the city impervious to the survivors\' needs--revealing a world of toxic prejudice that thrived well past Stonewall.
Relying on unprecedented access to survivors and archives, Fieseler creates an indelible portrait of a closeted, blue- collar gay world that flourished before an arsonist ignited an inferno that destroyed an entire community.
Fieseler chronicles the tragic event that claimed the lives of thirty-one men and one woman on June 24, 1973, at a New Orleans bar, the largest mass murder of gays until 2016.
In revelatory detail, Robert W.
Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay Liberation movement
