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.
