UpStairs Lounge arson attack
arson attack on a gay bar in New Orleans
The UpStairs Lounge arson attack, sometimes called the UpStairs Lounge Fire, occurred on June 24, 1973, at a gay bar called the UpStairs (or Up Stairs) Lounge located on the 2nd floor of the 3-story building at 604 Iberville Street in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the United States. 32 people died and 15 were injured as a result of fire or smoke inhalation. The official cause is still listed as "undetermined origin". The primary suspect, a gay man with a history of psychiatric impairment named Roger Dale Nunez who had been ejected from the bar earlier in the day, was never charged and died by suicide in November 1974.
Until the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, in which 49 people were killed, the UpStairs Lounge arson attack was the deadliest attack against LGBTQ people in US history.
Background
The club was located on the 2nd floor of a 3-story building at the corner of Chartres and Iberville Streets. Members of the Metropolitan Community Church, a pro-LGBT Protestant denomination, were there after service. The MCC was the United States' first national gay Christian fellowship, founded in Los Angeles in 1968; the local congregation had held services in the UpStairs Lounge's theatre for a while.
The fire was the third arson attack to affect the MCC, following a January 27, 1973, arson at the church's headquarters in Los Angeles (resulting in the destruction and collapse of the building with no injuries) and another 1973 arson at an MCC church in Nashville, Tennessee (also with complete destruction of the church and its furnishings but no injuries).
Incident
On June 24, 1973, the regular "beer bust" drink special attracted its usual blue-collar gay crowd to the UpStairs Lounge.
“UpStairs Lounge arson attack” enters the record as arson attack on a gay bar in New Orleans. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what UpStairs, Lounge and arson can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7897916. Authority coordinates are 29.953, -90.067. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1973, 1974, 2016 and 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “UpStairs Lounge arson attack” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.