and drink as much beer as they want for just a dollar. Working class people - including some straight and some female - gather from 5 p.m. A Sunday “beer bust” always marks the week’s end and the close of the day of worship. That’s when, during national Gay Pride week, the death toll was surpassed at Pulse, a gay bar in Orlando, Florida. was a piece of history forgotten on June 12, 2016. The death toll from that June 24, 1973, arson - the deadliest crime against gays in the U.S.
But because the Up Stairs Lounge was a gay bar and all but one of the dead were gay men, the police investigation of the arson was casual and incomplete. It had been the worst fire in New Orleans’ history. The smell of burnt flesh was overwhelming.īy the time the flames were extinguished, 32 people were dead. Firefighters found grisly spectacles: a dead man hanging from one window with horror seared on his face and, upstairs, piles of charred bodies, some melted together. Those trapped inside desperately tried to squeeze through the iron bars on the floor-to-ceiling windows. Mississippi Center For Investigative ReportingĪ fireball rushed inside the Up Stairs Lounge and raced through the bar, and the flammable decor and patrons’ polyester clothing.
