MURDER BETWEEN THE PAGES DISCUSSES TINDERBOX

Tuesday, November 10, 2020 - 7:00pm to 8:30pm

Murder Between the Pages discusses Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation by Robert W. Fiesler.

Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement. In revelatory detail, Robert W. Fieseler chronicles the tragic event that claimed the lives of thirty-one men and one woman on June 24, 1973, at a New Orleans bar, the largest mass murder of gays until 2016.

Fieseler handles contradictions with finesse, parsing the closet's long shadow over gay life in New Orleans, one reason the [Up Stairs Lounge] tragedy did not catalyze the kind of outrage and activism that followed the Stonewall rebellion.... The book is loving, sensitive, and diligent.--Parul Sehgal, New York Times

This vital book chronicles one of the worst outrages against gay people in modern America, and it does so with fantastic vividness. It restores a forgotten chapter of horror to our national narrative of rights. Robert W. Fieseler reminds us how deep prejudice was, not only on the part of the man who set the fire at the Up Stairs Lounge, but also in the media that ignored the story and the population that took no interest in it.--Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon

Robert W. Fieseler is a recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship and the Lynton Fellowship in Book Writing. A writer for BuzzfeedNarratively, and elsewhere, he currently resides in New Orleans.

Register by emailing awheatle@heightslibrary.org. The book club is brought to you in partnership with Mac's Backs. Borrow the book or buy from Mac's Backs at 20% off.

 

Event address: 
1820 Coventry Road
Cleveland Heights, OH 44118
Books: 
Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation By Robert W. Fieseler Cover Image
$16.95
ISBN: 9781631495953
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Liveright - June 4th, 2019