A Day History Tried To Forget - Remembering The Upstairs Lounge

June 24, 1973. To many people this is an insignificant date. Perhaps to some it is a wedding anniversary, a birth date, or even a death date, but this date has a far more significant meaning to the LGBT Community. However, not everyone in the LGBT Community knows what this date means. I'm ashamed to say I didn't know the significance of this day until just a little while ago. So what is this significance that I'm talking about? That history itself seems to have forgotten?

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the massacre at the Upstairs Lounge. The United States' largest LGBT massacre to date.

40 years ago today, just a few days short of the 4th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, it was a Sunday in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the final day of national Pride week. Back in those days pride celebrations weren't open like they are today. In the 70's things like gay slurs and discrimination against LGBT members was still part of the norm (as horrible as that is...). So celebrations were held in private locations. That is what was occurring on this particular day.

Members of the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) (the nation's first gay church - founded in 1969 in LA) gathered for drinks and good company at the Upstairs Lounge, a second-floor bar on the corner of Iberville and Chartres Street. Everyone was having a nice time. The atmosphere was so peaceful and friendly that two gay brothers, Eddie and Jim Warren, were comfortable enough to bring their mother, Inez, with them to the bar.

In order to enter the bar, you had to ring the bell and wait for someone on the inside to unlock a steel door that opened onto a flight of stairs leading down to the ground floor. Just before 8:00 pm the door's bell rang. The bartender that night, Buddy Rasmussen, sent his friend Luther Boggs to answer the door thinking it was a taxi driver he was expecting. What Boggs found when he opened that door was much more sinister and deadly then any mere taxi driver.

Someone had sprayed Ronsonol lighter fluid all over the steps leading to second floor entrance and lit it on fire resulting in a powerful fireball exploding into the Lounge as Boggs opened the door. Sources say the next 15 or so minutes were full of smoke, fear, screams, and the sound of glass breaking as panicked patrons tried to escape the burning inferno. The windows of the Lounge were covered with steel bars 14 inches apart intended to keep people from falling out of them. While some managed to squeeze through those bars to escape, sadly, that night those bars caused many to perish inside. The MCC's Pastor, Rev. Bill Larson, was one the patrons that tried to escape through those bars. He got stuck half way through and perished screaming “Oh, God, no!”. When police and firefighters appeared on scene that night, they found Larson's body fused to the window bars and left it there until the next morning.

Thirty-Two people perished that night in the fire. Among them were the Warren brothers and their mother as well as Luther Boggs and the MCC's assistant pastor, George “Mitch” Mitchell. Mitchell originally did escape, but, he went back in to try to save his boyfriend, Louis Broussard. The lovers died clinging to one another in an embrace.

As for the aftermath of this horrible event, the tragedy continues. Churches refused to do funeral services or burials, and when Rev. William Richardson, of St. George’s Episcopal Church, agreed to hold a small prayer service for the victims, he was rebuked by the New Orleans' Episcopalian bishop. News programs wouldn't cover the story, radio shows made jokes, and the event was barely a blip on the nation's radar. The New Orleans' police barely conducted an investigation for the arson, going as far as to say the fire wasn't arson but started from an "undetermined origin". The one person that came forward to confess, SEVERAL TIMES, was Rogder Dale Nunez, a troublemaker with known mental problems. He wasn't even taken seriously by police. Nunez eventually committed suicide in 1974. To this day, three victims remain unclaimed.

Even 40 years later, in this day and age, we still don't talk about this horrific massacre in LGBT history. Yes, the past can be painful and full of anguish, but both those that lived through the Upstairs Lounge massacre and those that didn't deserve to have it remembered, to have themselves remembered.

History has tried to let us forget what happened on this day, but we must always remember the Upstairs Lounge.

xoxo