Welcome to DU! The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards. Join the community: Create a free account Support DU (and get rid of ads!): Become a Star Member All Forums Issue Forums Culture Forums Alliance Forums Region Forums Support Forums Help & Search

Behind the Aegis

(53,823 posts)
Thu Jun 27, 2019, 03:31 PM Jun 2019

New Evidence Shows That During the 1973 UpStairs Lounge Arson, Gays Had to Take Rescue Efforts Into

New Evidence Shows That During the 1973 UpStairs Lounge Arson, Gays Had to Take Rescue Efforts Into Their Own Hands

In a funeral home on the edge of the French Quarter, 12-year-old Patrick Schoen refused to accept his cousin’s dare to look inside the body bags that were lined up in the carriageway of the family business. His cousin was an embalmer, and the funeral home had received dozens of anonymous bodies of men who had died in an arson attack on a gay bar, the UpStairs Lounge, in New Orleans on June 24, 1973. Before the Orlando mass shooting in 2016, it had been the largest massacre of gay people in U.S. history, leaving 32 dead and 15 injured.

The history of this massacre has only been recently documented. I first came across details of it in 2006 when reading through brittle copies of 1970s newspapers at the William Way Community Center in Philadelphia, the only place that held gay sources in the city. I remember seeing a headline about a “blaze” in New Orleans that reporters compared to the Holocaust; but in 2006, there were no books at the Philadelphia Public Library about it, nor were there articles in the scholarly databases at Princeton, where I was teaching. In fact, in 2006, Google was in its infancy, and it produced no hits.

I continued, however, to read through surviving copies of the Advocate, the largest gay newspaper in the 1970s, and pieced together the chronology of the massacre, trying to understand why it had been forgotten. I soon realized that the chilling mortality rates that the HIV/AIDS epidemic caused in the early 1980s overshadowed the UpStairs Lounge massacre. Also, as I continued reading through gay newspapers, I found many other alarming examples of anti-gay violence. In the span of a less than a year, headlines in the Body Politic, a popular gay newspaper, read “Thugs Terrorize Parks,” “Three Murders Unsolved,” and “All Faggots Should be Castrated.” The attack on the UpStairs Lounge was absolutely horrific, but in the 1970s, it ranked as yet another example of the violence that undermined the decade of so-called liberation.

In 2013, for the 40th anniversary of the massacre, I published an article in Time magazine in order to draw public attention to this forgotten tragedy. Based on a decade of research, I then expanded on the history of the fire and placed it in the context of the larger history of the 1970s in my book, Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation.

I recently, however, uncovered new evidence about the fire that settles some long-standing debates. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, members of the gay community accused the Fire Department of not responding immediately and refusing to touch the bodies of many of the victims. Since the most comprehensive reports of the arson attack come from the pens of the police and fire authorities, there is little empirical evidence to corroborate gay people’s accusations.

more...

I meant to post this on the 46th anniversary (Monday), but forgot.

See: He Died In An Infamous Arson At A Gay Bar. Now, His Family Is Trying To Find His Remains
1 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight: NoneDon't highlight anything 5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
New Evidence Shows That During the 1973 UpStairs Lounge Arson, Gays Had to Take Rescue Efforts Into (Original Post) Behind the Aegis Jun 2019 OP
i was very young when the upstairs burned rampartc Jun 2019 #1

rampartc

(5,263 posts)
1. i was very young when the upstairs burned
Thu Jun 27, 2019, 04:04 PM
Jun 2019

but i knew several survivors in later years. i wish i could remember a few stories but that group was scattered by katrina and may be dead by now. the metropolitan community church was heavily involved in the disaster and its aftermath. there are a few links from this story.

nola.com did a good 40th anniversary story on the upstairs, and ambush, the local gay paper, does an occasional story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Community_Church_of_New_Orleans

http://exhibits.lgbtran.org/exhibits/show/upstairs-lounge-fire

Latest Discussions»Alliance Forums»LGBT»New Evidence Shows That D...