"We're gonna burn this place down": the New Orleans massacre
32 dead, no culprit, no compassion: the arson attack on the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans in 1973.
On 24 June 1973, a fire broke out in a gay bar in the French Quarter of New Orleans. It claimed 32 lives and is still considered the worst attack on queer people in 20th-century America.
The UpStairs Lounge was a bar on the second floor in Iberville Street, hidden behind a narrow stairway that served as both the only way in and the only way out. On Sundays the bar was particularly busy: for one dollar there were two hours of free beer, and the congregation of the Metropolitan Community Church, a queer Protestant church, met there after the service to socialise. Around 60 people were present that evening when, shortly before eight o'clock, the doorbell downstairs rang. The stairway was opened, and someone poured petrol into the stairwell and set it alight. Within minutes the whole bar was in flames. The inferno lasted 19 minutes. 32 people died and at least 15 were injured. Some tried to escape through the windows, not knowing that the bars could be opened from the inside. The bartender, Buddy Rasmussen, led a group to safety through a back exit.
The main suspect was Roger Dale Nunez, a man who had been thrown out of the bar shortly before after harassing customers and threatening to "burn down" the place. The police closed the case on 30 August 1973 without ever having questioned Nunez. Officially, the cause of the fire was unknown. No one was ever charged.
What followed was as painful as the fire itself. No elected politician made a public statement. Archbishop Philip Hannan refused church funerals. Radio presenters joked that the victims should be buried "in fruit jars". Families refused to identify the bodies of their relatives for fear of the stigma. Three unidentified victims were buried in a pauper's field. A police officer told a reporter: "After all, it was a gay bar." For years the crime sank into collective silence. Only the research of the 1990s and a wave of books, documentaries and finally a musical ("The View Upstairs") brought what had been forgotten back into memory.