Gay bar in puerto rico attack

Puerto Rico, Caribbean

Image by Nicolas Raymond; courtesy Flickr. El Vocero reported the devices did not cause significant rico to the club. A police spokesperson told the newspaper that no arrests have been gay and the motive behind the attack remains unclear. Roughly 20 percent of Puerto Ricans still do not have access to running water.

Washington Blade photo by Michael K. On June 23 of last year, I held the microphone as a gay man in the New Orleans City Council Chamber and related a lost piece of queer history to the seven council members. I told this story to disabuse all New Orleanians of the notion that silence and accommodation, in the puerto of institutional and official failures, are bar path to healing.

Around that piano in the s Deep South, gays and lesbians, white and Black queens, Christians and non-Christians, and even early gender minorities could cast aside the racism, sexism, and homophobia of the times to find acceptance and companionship for a moment. For regulars, the UpStairs Lounge was a miracle, a small pocket bar acceptance in a broader world where their very identities were illegal.

On puerto Sunday night of June 24,their voices were silenced in a murderous act of arson that claimed 32 lives and attack stands as the deadliest fire in New Orleans history — and the worst mass killing of gays gay 20th century America. As 13 fire companies struggled to douse the inferno, police refused to question the chief suspect, even though gay witnesses identified and brought the puerto man to officers idly standing by.

For days afterward, the carnage met with official silence. With no local gay political leaders willing to step forward, national Gay Liberation-era figures like Rev. Perry broke local taboos by holding a press conference as an openly gay man. Two days later, on June 26,as families hesitated to step forward to identify their kin in the morgue, UpStairs Lounge owner Phil Esteve stood in his badly gay bar, the air still foul with death.

He rebuffed attempts by Perry to turn the fire into a call for visibility and progress for homosexuals. Conspicuously, no photos of Esteve appeared in coverage of the UpStairs Lounge fire or its aftermath — and the bar attack rico remained silent as he witnessed police looting the ashes of his business.

Customs officer. The next day, gay bar owners, incensed at declining gay bar traffic amid an atmosphere of anxiety, confronted Perry at a clandestine meeting. Ignoring calls for gay self-censorship, Perry held a person memorial for the fire victims the following Sunday, July 1, culminating in mourners defiantly marching out the front door of a French Quarter church into waiting news cameras.

New Orleans cops neglected to question the chief arson suspect and closed the investigation attack answers in late August An attitude of nihilism and disavowal descended upon the memory of bar UpStairs Lounge victims, goaded by Esteve and fellow gay entrepreneurs who earned their keep via gay patrons drowning their sorrows each night instead of protesting the injustices that kept them drinking.

Bythe 15th anniversary of the fire, the UpStairs Lounge narrative comprised little more than a call for better fire codes and indoor sprinklers. The halls of power responded with intermittent progress. The New Orleans City Council, horrified by the story but not yet ready to take its look in the mirror, enacted an anti-discrimination ordinance protecting gays and lesbians in housing, employment, and public accommodations that Dec.

Even Esteve seemed to change his stance with time, granting a full interview with the first UpStairs Lounge scholar Johnny Townsend sometime around Most of the figures in this historic tale are now deceased. The story now echoes around the world — rico musical about the UpStairs Lounge fire recently played in Tokyo, translating the gay underworld of the French Quarter for Japanese audiences.

When I finished my presentation to the City Council last June, I looked up to see the seven council members in tears.