On the sweltering Sunday afternoon of June 24, 1973 gay men and a small handful of predominantly straight women crowded into a roomy second-floor New Orleans bar on Iberville Street, adjacent to the French Quarter, called the Up Stairs Lounge. Crowds had gathered there weekly for nearly the entire three years the bar had operated out of the hundred-year-old building. The Sunday drink special known as the beer-bust drew a regular and familiar clientele of mostly employed, blue-collar gay men, many of them fathers, churchgoers, and veterans of either WWII, Korea, or Vietnam. The friendly but protective management ensured safety from potentially harassing strangers, belligerent drunks, and police raids as much as they welcomed, “men of any stage of ‘outness’” (p. 16). The bar provided sanctuary for the gay men of New Orleans, both literally as it served as the first home of the city’s gay Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) congregation and figuratively as patrons gathered around the old piano to sing “United We Stand” together, cut up the dancefloor, or simply chat at the bar. As twilight set in that evening, someone, most likely a patron who had just been ejected for drunken fighting, poured a can of lighter fluid on the carpeted stairs that led to the bar’s entrance, set alight two ten-dollar bills, and then dropped them on the saturated treads before fleeing the scene. No fire marshal had inspected the bar for years. The management had put metal bars over the large windows to keep patrons from falling out when they were open, as they often were in the summer, and failed to realize the light in the exit sign marking the little-known back entrance was no longer working. Virtually every décor choice from the flooring to the wallpaper was highly flammable. The steel front door was actually defective. The bar was a deathtrap and the flames completely consumed the Up Stairs Lounge and many of its patrons in less than ten minutes. Robert Fieseler’s Tinderbox provides an impressively and intensely detailed rendering of this catastrophic 1973 fire that resulted in 32 deaths. His retelling

中文翻译：

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阴影中的火

1973 年 6 月 24 日，一个闷热的星期天下午，男同性恋者和少数以异性恋为主的女性挤进了位于伊伯维尔街的新奥尔良二楼宽敞的酒吧，毗邻法国区，名为 Up Stairs Lounge。几乎整整三年时间里，人们每周都会聚集在那里，这家酒吧在这座拥有百年历史的建筑内运营。被称为“啤酒半身像”的周日特别饮品吸引了大多数受雇的蓝领男同性恋者，他们中的许多人是父亲、去教堂的人，以及二战、韩国或越南的退伍军人。友好但保护性的管理确保了安全，免受潜在骚扰的陌生人、好战的醉汉和警察突袭，正如他们欢迎的那样，“任何阶段的‘外人’”（第 16 页）。酒吧为新奥尔良的男同性恋者提供了庇护所，从字面上看，它是该市同性恋大都会社区教会 (MCC) 会众的第一个家，从形象上讲，顾客聚集在旧钢琴周围，一起唱“我们站在一起”，在舞池里剪裁，或者只是在酒吧聊天。傍晚时分，有人，很可能是因为醉酒打架被驱逐的顾客，在通往酒吧入口的铺有地毯的楼梯上倒了一罐打火机液体，点燃了两张十美元的钞票，然后掉了下去。在逃离现场之前，他们在饱和的踏板上。多年来，没有消防队长检查过酒吧。管理层在大窗户上放了金属条，以防止顾客在打开时掉下来，因为他们经常在夏天，并没有意识到出口标志上的灯标志着鲜为人知的后门不再工作。从地板到墙纸，几乎所有的装饰选择都是高度易燃的。钢制前门实际上是有缺陷的。酒吧是一个死亡陷阱，火焰在不到十分钟的时间内完全烧毁了 Up Stairs Lounge 及其许多顾客。Robert Fieseler 的 Tinderbox 对 1973 年导致 32 人死亡的这场灾难性火灾提供了令人印象深刻且极其详细的渲染。他的复述 Robert Fieseler 的 Tinderbox 对 1973 年导致 32 人死亡的灾难性火灾提供了令人印象深刻且极其详细的渲染。他的复述 Robert Fieseler 的 Tinderbox 对 1973 年导致 32 人死亡的灾难性火灾提供了令人印象深刻且极其详细的渲染。他的复述