UpStairs Lounge arson attack


The UpStairs Lounge arson attack occurred on June 24, 1973 at a gay bar called the UpStairs Lounge located on the second floor of the three-story building at 141 Chartres Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the United States. Thirty-two people died as a result of fire or smoke inhalation. The official cause is still listed as "undetermined origin". The most likely suspect, a gay man named Roger Nunez who had been ejected from the bar earlier in the day, was never charged and took his own life in November 1974. No evidence has ever been found that the arson was motivated by hatred or overt homophobia. Until the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, in which 49 people were murdered, the UpStairs Lounge arson attack was the deadliest known attack on a gay club in U.S. history. The incident is also the subject of the 2015 full length documentary, UPSTAIRS INFERNO , and the 2017 musical The View UpStairs.

Incident

On Sunday June 24, 1973, the final day of Pride Weekend, the regular "beer bust" was taking place at the club, located on the second floor of a three-story building at the corner of Chartres and Iberville Streets. Members of the Metropolitan Community Church, a pro-LGBT Protestant denomination, were there after service. The MCC was the United States' first gay church, founded in Los Angeles in 1968; the local congregation had held services in the UpStairs Lounge's theater for a while. The club hosted free beer and dinner for 125 patrons. At the time of the evening fire, some 60 people were listening to pianist David Gary perform and discussing an upcoming MCC fundraiser for the local Crippled Children's Hospital.
At 7:56PM, a buzzer from downstairs sounded, and bartender Buddy Rasmussen, an Air Force veteran, asked Luther Boggs to answer the door, anticipating a taxi cab driver. Boggs opened the door to find the front staircase engulfed in flames, along with the smell of lighter fluid. Rasmussen immediately led some twenty patrons out of the back exit to the roof, where the group could access a neighboring building's roof and climb down to the ground floor. Others saw the floor to ceiling windows as the most promising means of escape despite the fact that there were safety bars on the windows with a 14 inch gap between them to prevent dancers from breaking through the glass. Several people managed to squeeze through, some still burning when they reached the ground below. Luther Boggs was one who came through the window in flames after pushing his female friend through the gap, the flames put out by the owner of a neighboring bar, but his injuries were too severe to survive. Reverend Bill Larson of the MCC removed an air conditioning unit from the bottom of one of the floor to ceiling windows and was attempting to get out when the upper pane of glass fell on top of him, pinning him to the window frame half in the building and half out. His charred remains would be visible to onlookers for hours afterward, recorded in many pictures taken of the front of the building in the aftermath of the 16 minute fire. MCC assistant pastor George "Mitch" Mitchell managed to escape, but returned in an attempt to rescue his partner, Louis Horace Broussard. Both died in the fire, their remains found clinging to each other. Mitchell's children were visiting from out of town and watched the same movie seven times as they waited for their father's return. Eventually, a friend took them to the airport and sent them home to their mother without telling them what happened to their father and his partner.
Firefighters stationed two blocks away found themselves blocked by cars and pedestrian traffic. One fire truck tried to maneuver on the sidewalk but crashed into a taxi. They arrived to find bar patrons struggling against the security bars and quickly brought the fire under control. Twenty-eight people died at the scene of the sixteen-minute fire, and one died en route to the hospital. Another 18 suffered injuries, of whom three, including Boggs, died.

Investigation

The official investigation failed to yield any convictions. The only suspect in the attack was Roger Dale Nunez who had been ejected from the bar earlier in the evening after fighting with another customer. Police attempted to question Nunez shortly after, but he was hospitalized with a broken jaw and could not respond. When questioned later on, police records show that he did not appear nervous. Nunez had a witness who claimed that he had been in and out of the bar during the 10–20 minutes before the fire, and that he had seen nobody enter or leave the building. Because police observed that the witness was stressed, they dismissed the witness as a liar.
Nunez was diagnosed with "conversion hysteria" in 1970 and visited numerous psychiatric clinics. He was released from a treatment facility in the year before the fire. After his arrest, Nunez escaped from psychiatric custody and was never picked up again by police, despite frequent appearances in the French Quarter. A friend later told investigators that Nunez confessed on at least four occasions to starting the fire. He told the friend he squirted the bottom steps with Ronsonol lighter fluid, bought at a local Walgreens, and tossed a match. He did not realize, he claimed, that the whole place would go up in flames. Nunez took his own life in November 1974.
In 1980, the state fire marshal's office, lacking leads, closed the case.

Media coverage

Coverage of the fire by news outlets minimized the fact that LGBT patrons constituted the majority of the victims, while editorials and talk radio hosts made light of the event. No government officials made mention of the fire. As Robert L. Camina, writer/director of a documentary about the fire, said in 2013, "I was shocked at the disproportionate reaction by the city government. The city declared days of mourning for victims of other mass tragedies in the city. It shocked me that despite the magnitude of the fire, it was largely ignored."

Funerals and memorial services

Many churches refused to hold funerals for the dead. Reverend William P. Richardson of St. George's Episcopal Church agreed to hold a small prayer service for the victims on June 25. Approximately 80 people attended the event. The next day, Iveson B. Noland, the Episcopal bishop of New Orleans, rebuked Richardson for hosting the service. Noland received more than 100 complaints from parishioners concerning the service, and Richardson's mailbox filled with hate mail.
Soon after two additional memorial services were held on July 1 at a Unitarian church and St. Mark's United Methodist Church, headed by Louisiana's Methodist bishop Finis Crutchfield and led by MCC founder Reverend Troy Perry, who came from Los Angeles to participate. Mourners exited through the church's main door rather than an available side exit, a demonstration of a new willingness to be identified on camera. Several families did not step forward to claim the bodies of the deceased. A few anonymous individuals stepped forward and paid for the three unknown men's burials, and they were buried with another victim identified as Ferris LeBlanc in a mass grave at Holt Cemetery. LeBlanc's family would not learn of his death in the arson attack until January 2015. In 2018, Robert L. Camina, director of the UpStairs Inferno documentary, announced after extensive family interviews that one of the three unknown men was likely 32-year-old Larry Norman Frost.
In June 1998, the 25th anniversary of the fire, as part of Gay Pride celebrations, a memorial service was organized by Rev. Dexter Brecht of Big Easy Metropolitan Community Church and Toni J. P. Pizanie. It was held at the Royal Sonesta Hotel Grand Ball Room and attended by New Orleans Councilman Troy Carter, Rev. Carole Cotton Winn, Senior Rabbi Edward Paul Cohn of Temple Sinai, Rev. Kay Thomas from Grace Fellowship in Christ Jesus, Rev. Perry, and 32 members of the New Orleans community representing the victims. Carter then led a jazz funeral procession to the building on the corner of Chartres and Iberville Streets, the site of the club, and members of the local MCC laid a memorial plaque and wreaths at the grave. Among the attendees was the niece of victim Clarence McCloskey.

Legacy