Thanks to a raucous weekly beer bust, Sundays at New Orleans’s Up Stairs Lounge were always the busiest nights. From 5 to 7 p.m., you could buy a pitcher of suds for pocket change back in the early 1970s — more than 100 people could easily gather there during the event, with no small amount of patrons being World War II vets.
The party came to a tragic end one of those Sunday evenings, leaving a legacy of secrecy, homophobia, and trauma in its wake. Fifty years ago, 32 people died
