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Newsrooms and readers of the era would express almost universal revulsion when dealing with the topic of “deviate” sexualities, and no leading paper in the country would print the radical word “Gay” without enclosing it in patronizing quotation marks. Had this editor known, Reed suspected that he never would have been assigned the story. Then it dawned on Reed, as he recalled in our interview: “This was the first assignment I ever received concerning the American homosexual community.” Reed figured that the sexuality of the victims was an undercurrent that eluded the editor who tasked him to report the fire. The grotesque carnage, men marked by smoke and crying out the names of the missing, reminded him of the scene at the bridge in Selma after the horses charged the crowd amidst the teargas. In his mind, he kept seeing that burnt man in the window. deadline for next day coverage, Reed selected his quotes and cried while outlining a story on his quick trip to the Times’ downtown offices on Carondelet Street. Dashing to his typewriter to try to meet a 10:30 p.m. Making efficient use of his approximately 30 minutes at the site, Reed even spoke to a photographer who’d been permitted into that upstairs bar to document the piles of bodies. Reed’s spur-of-the-moment assessment that this conflagration was intentional, and that anger lit the match, has therefore proven prescient.
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“Those few minutes of unmanageable rage when they impulsively lit that fire.” Historians now recognize that the blaze was most likely set by a disturbed sex worker named Rodger Dale Nunez, who fellow patrons overheard threatening to “burn” the establishment when he was forcibly ejected by bar staff several minutes before the start of the fire. “I tried to put myself in the mind or minds of those guys,” he recalled decades later. Reed pressed ahead, sensing what may have sparked this deadly fire: Explosive anger. Some reporters of the day would have flinched at the notion of interviewing any openly gay man. Suppressing his natural shock, clicking into action, the veteran reporter interviewed gay Up Stairs Lounge bartender Buddy Rasmussen and pieced together a narrative of a blue-collar gay haven incinerated with the aid of lighter fluid. Though Reed arrived well after the emergency was in hand, he still witnessed Larson in his death pose because authorities would leave the man’s body dangling out of the building for hours. That ashen figure in the window was Reverend Bill Larson, pastor of the local gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church. “Then the sight of the man in the window, the expression of horror on his face.” “The first thing that hits you was the odor, burning flesh,” remembered Reed in one of his last living interviews for my book Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, a nonfiction account of the fire. This was the Up Stairs Lounge fire, a notorious arson attack on a gay bar that would claim 32 lives.