Reviews in American History

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 [End Page 286] of what was, until the 53 fatalities of the 2016 Pulse Nightclub attack, "the largest mass killing of gay people in United States History" provides historians rich fodder for future explorations into the full complexities of gay lives in the 1970s, including parenthood and military experience, the role of religion in gay community building, and the uneven, regional, and schismatic nature of gay liberation (xviii). Fieseler showcases the eloquence and exhaustive research that journalists often bring to historical works, but flounders in defining greater context, forging arguments, and assigning historical meaning to this particular act of arson in the larger arc of gay liberation. Thus, the book is at once enlightening and frustrating. Above all, it illuminates just how little of the gay liberation period historians have explored and the vast and exciting landscape of possible future research.

Tinderbox luxuriates in its details and pace, with the first one hundred pages of the book dedicated to less than twelve hours leading up to and including the fire and the following seventy-five pages staying within just a week of the deadly blaze. Fieseler makes good use of this space by showing off his prodigious research as he sets the various tableaus important to the Up Stairs Lounge, including the bar itself, and provides intricate backstories for victims, survivors, and the suspected arsonist. He reveals in cinematic detail the red wallpaper and tchotchke decorations within the bar as well as the proximity of bar patrons' homes to one another and perfectly captures a slow and tender start to a Sunday morning after an obligatory bacchanalian New Orleans Saturday night. Through beautiful prose, Fieseler molds these details of specific scenes, sites, and people until they emerge as complex, textured, and viscerally alive in a way and scale that is rare in historical...