Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation
By: Robert W. Fieseler / Narrated By: Paul Heitsch
Length: 11 hrs and 25 mins
More a testament to FINALLY remembering a tragedy than a story about a fire
I imMEDiately zoned out upon beginning Tinderbox as it has a looooooong list of aaaallll the people involved. I mean, whazza? I’m expected to memorize? At the beginning of a book? Even before I know what I’m getting into? Seriously, lists of characters, even nonfiction ones, always rub me the wrong way.
But finally author Robert W. Fieseler settles on a few, mostly Buddy Rasmussen who was tending bar and juuuuust about to end his shift when the fire happened. Another is Bill Larson, a preacher at the Metropolitan Community Church, the New Orleans chapter, which was a haven for a very closeted gay community. Fieseler settles on these two as they start their day, but then he teeters over into the state of the gay community (Which was MAJORLY shamed… in freaking NEW ORLEANS of all places!!!) and the very few places where LGBTQ could congregate in safety. If you were found outside a very narrow slice of an area, you were NOT safe.
Then Fieseler gets into that evening of the fire that occurred when a mentally unstable man was chucked out of the Up Stairs Lounge. Upon being ousted, several patrons heard Roger Dale Nunez shout that he’d burn them all out, and a worker at Walgreens would later recall him buying lighter fluid.
Then things get reeeeeally intense, and they get reeeeeeally and MOST tragically graphic. Fieseler, while in no way sensationalizing a tragedy DOES write of the absolute horror of the nightmare situation. Nunez dumps the lighter fluid on the first floor staircase, lights it, and then he runs. INSTANTLY fire whips upstairs and, aaaaalmost going out for lack of oxygen, Luther Boggs is asked to open the bar’s door in response to a buzzer (Which might have been an alarm but which was thought to be a delivery). The fire bellows into the Lounge, almost immediately scorching Boggs and other patrons nearby. The bar, which was a study in reds, had tapestries covering the walls which went up in flames.
Rasmussen got several people to follow him to another room where they were able to escape to another building, but many people stayed behind to look for friends, partners, loved ones. Gases filled their lungs, fire consumed their bodies. Bill Larson of the MCC tried getting out a window before being overtaken by flames, and his scorched body was seen and left hanging out the window for all gawkers. A photo of Larson is what I initially saw of the Up Stairs Lounge fire, and it haunted me, compelled me, to where I HAD to learn the story.
After the brutality of the fire is the shame of the response. 31 men, 1 woman died, and very few got funerals they deserved. Even a memorial for them was sparsely attended, and very few in places of power even acknowledged the tragic loss of life. After all, in New Orleans at the time, there was an: Okay, you’re LGBTQ, but we don’t wanna see you, is that understood? mentality.
Even patrons/survivors wanted to keep it all quiet, didn’t want to dwell upon any of it when Fieseler contacted them about his research. It wasn’t until the mass shooting, the targeting of a known gay bar in Miami in 2016, that survivors came forward, determined to stop such senseless slaughter, to say something against the hate, the bigotry.
Paul Heitsch narrates this pretty well, it sounded like listening to a documentary… which had me neeeearly dozing at some of the more low-key points, but then the angst inspired by the text would wake me up. That said, the almost-monotone narration was only for the interpersonal parts (Say, Nunez’s crazy marriage to an older woman of means, where he lived in her backyard and hit her up for money even as he kept having breakdowns, or Nunez’s relationship with a nun who kept aaaaallll his secrets), but for the fraught parts, Heitsch was totally spot-on. When a patron tries to tell two friends that he reeeeally has a bad feeling about that guy that just said he’d burn the place down? Jiminy H. Cricket, I felt my skin crawl as tho’ I was the person who’d overheard the remark and felt dark and ominous things were forthcoming. So good job, Heitsch: Ya creeped me waaaay out!
The latter part of the book kinda drags (Tho’ Anita Bryant WAS an apt icon to fight against), but it FINALLY ends with the victims of the fire getting their traditional New Orleans Second Line parade, where survivors marched, where friends were remembered, where the country’s first mass martyrs were created. This didn’t happen until EONS after, but at least those people were finally remembered and served as a rallying cry for a community that had been closeted for far too long but who were coming out and were proud of it. Plus, they were passing the torch to younger standard bearers leading the way for new generations.
Some draggy parts having nothing to do with the fire, or that showed disarray rather than “the rise of gay liberation” but all in all a heartfelt piece full of respect and worthy of being a Stonewall Honor book in Nonfiction.
We’ve come a long way, but 2016’s mass slaughter shows we have a looooong way to go…
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