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Most locations list current rules on social media or online. The coronavirus has impacted bars across metro Phoenix and many still require mask-wearing and social distancing.
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While many bars and nightclubs are hosting Pride events during the month of June, metro Phoenix has a bustling LGBTQ nightlife scene year round.įrom casual spots to grab a beer to lively clubs to dance until dawn, the Valley has got you covered.īring a friend or meet someone new on the dance floor, get a few laughs in at a comedy show, admire dazzling drag stars and snag a burrito from food trucks parked outside at these 10 essential metro Phoenix gay bars. He continued: “I think there’s a need for anything that can serve as a kind of counter-narrative to that pure invisibility in the the upper echelons of power today.View Gallery: Phoenix Pride Festival and Parade 2018 “We exist in a time where queer Americans are profoundly out of power – out of power – who represents us in this administration?” “The parallels start to fray at a certain point,” Fieseler said.Īnd as far as releasing the book now, Fieseler said it is a timely examination given the threat of progress rolling back for LGBT people under Donald Trump’s administration. For Fieseler, though, the two incidents don’t easily fall into a historical trajectory with one another. There were reports in 2016 that, like Nunez, the Pulse shooter was a sexually conflicted man who may have been engaged in gay relationships prior to his rampage. “Evidence of it was resuscitated suddenly, and in a lot of publications that for decades wouldn’t publish a word about the fire.” Fieseler said. Two years into Fieseler’s research for the book, the Pulse shooting inspired a brief public re-examination of the UpStairs inferno. “It almost highlights even more the degree of oppression that many homosexuals lived in in this time period.”ĭespite copious physical and circumstantial evidence, Nunez was never arrested for the crime. “That’s part of the more complex and really terrible and fascinating nature of the fire,” Fieseler notes. Within minutes, the entrance had been doused in lighter fluid bought from a nearby pharmacy and sparked into flames. As he was dragged out, his jaw broken, Roger Dale Nunez is reported to have yelled: “I’m going to burn you all out.” The likely perpetrator: a troubled and violent patron who had been ejected from the bar moments earlier after a fight. The likely perpetrator was a troubled and violent patron who had been ejected from the bar moments earlier. It was the deadliest US incident of violence against an LGBT population until the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. That safety came crashing down violently on 24 June 1973 when the lounge, which only had one public entrance/exit became a fiery tomb for 32. You’d lose your job, your home, everything,” Fieseler said.Īt the time, a residence occupied by two suspected gay men (or two “spinsters”) could be declared a house of ill-repute and seized with little to no due process.Įnter the relatively safe space of the UpStairs lounge, a quietly well-known place where gay men (Fieseler notes that during this era, the lesbian scene was politically and socially isolated from the gay scene) could openly be themselves. “Your name would be associated with what was considered a despicable, morally licentious behavior and you would become a pariah in the society you loved.
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“A gay man could, in 1973, live a very full life that he might not be able to enjoy in other places.”īut the city was also still mired in the sexually repressive dogma of the heavily Catholic population.Īccording to Fieseler, undercover police would regularly conduct sting operations to catch gay men soliciting for sex in public spaces, and if caught and arrested on a dreaded “crimes against nature” charge, the ramifications in the wider world were absolute. “It was the queer capital of the south in 1973,” said Fieseler. Thought New Orleans ‘was the queer capital of the south in 1973’ it was also a place of duality for LGBT people. Firemen giving first aid to survivors of the fire.