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TINDERBOX
The multi-Award-winning DEBUT
An essential work of American civil rights history… Winner of the Edgar Award and Louisiana Literary Award, shortlisted for the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, Robert W. Fieseler's Tinderbox mesmerizingly reconstructs the 1973 fire that devastated New Orleans’ subterranean gay community. Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement.
In revelatory detail, 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. Relying on unprecedented access to survivors and archives, Fieseler creates an indelible portrait of a closeted, blue-collar gay world that flourished before an arsonist ignited an inferno.
“Fieseler unflinchingly recounts the fire and sets it firmly in the context of the times.” -- Chicago Tribune
“Loving, sensitive, and diligent.” -- The New York Times
“This was a book which reaffirmed and renewed in my own heart the quest, the yearning for dignity and justice in my homeland.” -- Walter Holland, LAMBDA Literary
“An important work of memory…finally giving the account its rightful place in America's national story.” -- Los Angeles Times
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WORK
Books & Anthologies
Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation
Liveright Publishing, June 2018
(Winner of 2021 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award, Winner of 2020 Louisiana Literary Award; winner of 2020 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Nonfiction Prose; shortlisted for 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing; winner of 2019 Edgar Award in Best Fact Crime; winner of 2019 Lambda Literary Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers; winner of 2019 NLGJA Excellence in Book Writing Award; winner of 2019 Nautilus Book Award (Silver) in Journalism & Investigative Reporting; finalist for 2019 Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction; finalist for 2019 Housatonic Book Award in Nonfiction; 2019 American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book and Over the Rainbow selection; Best Book of 2018 Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal and Shelf Awareness; Notable Selection, Best True Crime of the Decade CrimeReads; Best Book by Emerging Writers Book Riot)
Red Rabbit
My Gay New Orleans Anthology, July 1, 2016
ESSAY
FireBrand
River Teeth, June 2024
still beloved
Commonweal, May 31, 2022
Top gun was my gay porn
Slate, May 27, 2022
My Marriage Was Broken. The Coronavirus Lockdown Saved It.
HuffPost, April 18, 2020
horned god
Tahoma Literary Review, June 2018
(Nominated for Pushcart Prize)
One Hostage in Play
Columbia Journal, March 14, 2017
Red Rabbit
Hippocampus, April 1, 2016
Men about Business
Concis, November 13, 2015
(Nominated Best of the Net)
New Miserable Experience
RKVRY Quarterly, October 2015
(Finalist, nonfiction 41st New Millennium Literary Awards)
JOURNALISM
Gay Geographer
NEH Humanities magazine, March 22, 2024
A Bar Called Charlene’s
64 Parishes, June 1, 2023
(Winner of 2024 Green Eyeshade Awards Best of Show; Recipient of 2024 Honorable Mention, General Feature Society for Features Journalism)
‘UNITED WE STAND’
Gambit, June 1, 2023
(Winner of 2024 Green Eyeshade Awards First Place, Serious Commentary)
The Fiery Life of Stewart Butler
Slate, June 25, 2022
The Formation of Reggie Adams
64 Parishes, December 1, 2021
(Winner of 2022 Green Eyeshade Award Best of Division: Magazine; winner of 2021 Sigma Delta Chi Award in Magazine Writing)
OPINION: Roy Reed was first to report the truth of the Up Stairs lounge
The Daily Beast, July 5, 2021
OPINION: HISTORY SHOWS US WHY THE FIGHT FOR LGBTQ EQUALITY IS FAR FROM OVER
ABC News / Good Morning America, June 24, 2020
(Winner of 2021 NLGJA Excellence in Opinion/Editorial Writing Award)
Inside The Metropolitan Community Church, Which Has Been Telling LGBTQ People God Loves Them For 50 Years
The Daily Beast, Sept 1, 2019
A SUICIDE ON ROHS STREET
Columbia Journalism Review, July 2, 2019
High Falls: A Human Chain
The Delacorte Review , June 28, 2019
The UpStairs Lounge Fire Killed 32 People. Its Legacy Still Haunts Black Gay New Orleans
The Daily Beast, May 11, 2019
This Mass Murder Of Gay People Sparked A Movement 43 Years Before Pulse
Buzzfeed, May 30, 2018
Up the Monkey River
Quartz, November 12, 2015
Ghost in the Machine
Narratively, March 25, 2015
Taste the Action (The superhero saga of Brooklyn's weirdest burger joint)
Narratively, October 7, 2014
Consider the Can
The Big Roundtable, June 9, 2014
(The Atlantic's "Roughly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism" 2014)
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ABOUT THE author
Fieseler in ironic Ayn Rand shirt as penance for his teenage beliefs
ROBERT W. FIESELER
Robert W. Fieseler is a journalist who investigates marginalized groups and an author who excavates forgotten histories. He’s also the public scholar who convinced the New Orleans City Council to pass an apology resolution for the city's apathetic response to the 1973 Up Stairs Lounge fire. He married his longtime partner at Walden Pond and proudly lives in the Crescent City.
Fieseler graduated co-valedictorian from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is a recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. He was the 2019 NLGJA (National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association) Journalist of the Year and won the Columbia Journalism School Alumni Association’s First Decade Award. To be honest, none of these accolades massage his existential dread or impress his husband.
As a little boy in flat flat Chicago, Fieseler’s favorite movie was The Wizard of Oz, and he thought he lived in Kansas. He loved the Wicked Witch and melted everywhere he could, including one time in the middle of Cook Country traffic court when his mother was disputing a ticket. As a grown-up, he wrote his debut book beside an opinionated Cairn Terrier – same breed as Toto – who accompanied him to the library. (Sadly, after a long happy life, that beautiful dog crossed over the rainbow in 2021.) Perhaps unsurprisingly to his mother, Fieseler grew to be a proud gay American.
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CONTACT
Say hello to Robert W. Fieseler and/or give him your email in the odd event that things get dicey and he decides to start a newsletter.