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Robert Fieseler writes with acuity and compassion about mythic themes-love, faith, death, grief. Tinderbox is a work of enormous significance that announces the arrival of a gifted new author. George Chauncey, Columbia University, author of Gay New York Its account of the aftermath of this tragedy is equally illuminating-and sobering. This book provides a vivid portrait of the hardscrabble lives of the dishwashers, grocery clerks, soldiers, and other working men for whom the Up Stairs Lounge became a sanctuary, and then a heart-wrenching reconstruction of the horrifying hour it turned into a deathtrap. Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt, Volumes 1–3 It is a call for our ongoing struggle to build movements for love and dignity for everyone everywhere. Fieseler has given us a profoundly moving and deeply researched reminder of the tragic and ghastly costs of bigotry, silence, and the closet. Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon Fieseler reminds us how deep prejudice was, not only on the part of the man who set the fire at the Up Stairs Lounge, but also in the media that ignored the story and the population that took no interest in it. It restores a forgotten chapter of horror to our national narrative of rights. This vital book chronicles one of the worst outrages against gay people in modern America, and it does so with fantastic vividness.
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The book is loving, sensitive, and diligent. Nicholas Lemann, author of The Promised Landįieseler handles contradictions with finesse, parsing the closet’s long shadow over gay life in New Orleans, one reason the tragedy did not catalyze the kind of outrage and activism that followed the Stonewall rebellion. In reminding us of the furtiveness of gay life even in a tolerant city, and of the official culture’s hostility to it, Tinderbox is riveting and unforgettable. In his impressive, meticulously reported debut as a nonfiction author, Robert Fieseler vividly re-creates the world that produced a galvanizing tragedy, a fire at a New Orleans bar in the summer of 1973 that took thirty-two lives. Their testimonies, Fieseler's rigorous research and his amiable prose make this a vital, inspiring volume in the annals of gay history. It's indescribably moving to learn in a final author's note that survivors hesitant to speak on the record for Tinderbox came forward with urgency after the Pulse massacre. Fieseler salvages unsettling moment in American history from the edge of forgetfulness in a remarkable, potent remembrance. Praise For Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation… 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. Markowitz Award for Emerging LGBTQ WritersĪ Stonewall Honor Book in Nonfiction (American Library Association)īest Book of the Year: Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal and Shelf AwarenessĪn essential work of American civil rights history, Tinderbox mesmerizingly reconstructs the 1973 fire that devastated New Orleans’ subterranean gay community.īuried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement.