The office of the powerful, charismatic archbishop of New Orleans, Philip Hannan, forbade any memorial for victims in New Orleans’ St. A third of the Metropolitan Community Church’s congregation had died, along with the pastor. Among the casualties were 32 dead - three of them white males who remain unidentified - and 15 injured. The fire was extinguished in mere minutes, the last flame put out at 8:12 p.m. Firefighters and emergency medical personnel found one dead man hanging from a window and upstairs, many more dead. The rest tried unsuccessfully to squeeze through the scalding-hot iron bars. The fire burst inside.īartender Buddy Rasmussen managed to lead more than 20 patrons out the back exit to a rooftop. When patron Luther Boggs opened the heavy metal fire door at the bar’s entrance, he found the staircase engulfed in flames. Singing United We Stand was the closest any regular at Up Stairs Lounge got to gay solidarity.īy 7:56 p.m., the beer bust crowd had thinned to around 60 people. The 1969 Stonewall riots in New York’s Greenwich Village had launched the national gay pride movement, but it had yet to reach New Orleans.
The bar had a piano and sing-alongs, usually of Broadway tunes, and church goers often led the bar patrons in a series of hymns.Īt 7 p.m., toward the end of the beer bust, remnants of the bar crowd gathered around the piano, held hands in a circle, and sang the Brotherhood of Man’s hit, United We Stand. Until the church found other space, it held services in the theater in the back of the Up Stairs Lounge. The camaraderie was bolstered by the weekly attendance of at least a few members of the nearby Metropolitan Community Church - a local branch of a national church that ministers to gays. The Up Stairs Lounge was a place they could relax. This friendly, neighborhood gay community bar hesitated to live or socialize openly. The evening of June 24, 1973, began like any other Sunday night at the Up Stairs Lounge, at the edge of the French Quarter a couple of blocks from Canal Street. According to New Orleans author and tour guide Frank Perez, the staircase remains charred from the blaze. Today, a brass plaque with the names of the 32 dead is embedded in the sidewalk in front of what used to be the entrance from Iberville Street to the staircase leading to the second-floor lounge.
Before police fatally shot him, the gunman had killed 49 Pulse patrons and injured 53.īut the Up Stairs Lounge arson in 1973 occurred before there was a national gay pride day, week or month, and when homosexual activity was a crime.
and drink as much beer as they want for just a dollar. Working class people - including some straight and some female - gather from 5 p.m. A Sunday “beer bust” always marks the week’s end and the close of the day of worship. That’s when, during national Gay Pride week, the death toll was surpassed at Pulse, a gay bar in Orlando, Florida.
was a piece of history forgotten on June 12, 2016. The death toll from that June 24, 1973, arson - the deadliest crime against gays in the U.S.
But because the Up Stairs Lounge was a gay bar and all but one of the dead were gay men, the police investigation of the arson was casual and incomplete. It had been the worst fire in New Orleans’ history. The smell of burnt flesh was overwhelming.īy the time the flames were extinguished, 32 people were dead. Firefighters found grisly spectacles: a dead man hanging from one window with horror seared on his face and, upstairs, piles of charred bodies, some melted together. Those trapped inside desperately tried to squeeze through the iron bars on the floor-to-ceiling windows. Mississippi Center For Investigative ReportingĪ fireball rushed inside the Up Stairs Lounge and raced through the bar, and the flammable decor and patrons’ polyester clothing.