Guy Andersen lives with his parents when he’s not traveling. In 1950 the population of Palatine was 4,079 people.įieseler explained, “It was not one for one in terms of understanding closeted life in New Orleans in the 1970s, but I tried to create an emotional empathy in myself. Of course, the depth of this experience informed “Tinderbox.” Andersen was a closeted gay man a generation before Fieseler, in Palatine, just 35 miles north of Naperville. The idea of being gay in Naperville was too terrifying.” So most of us were biding our time to go away to college. You could not have what was considered a happy life while you remained in town. After prom, high school kids had their limousines drive through Boystown in Chicago so that they could laugh at men holding hands. Closeted gay kids saw this and knew that was social death. And it was controversial but they’d be friends with openly gay kids. Generally, when they came out their only friends were girls who were in the choir. “I can only think of a handful of kids who came out in high school and they were usually in the choir. There was no categorization of someone being out and gay and a being a viable or decent citizen.
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It was all perceived as this two-prong life path: the moral code that you stayed a virgin until you married a woman. The frequent moments of silence during morning school announcements were laden with Christian meaning. “The default state of a queer person in Naperville was the state of being closeted and hidden. “In Naperville during the 1990s, there were basically no openly gay or lesbian people,” he said.
The future “Tinderbox” author graduated from Naperville Central High School in 1999. His family moved to Naperville in 1986 when he was five years old. Fieseler wrote, “The fates are strange, even cruel, and yet aware.”įieseler was born in Chicago. These victims would not be perceived as sympathetic to the ordinary consumer of this information.”įieseler, who is gay, dedicated “Tinderbox” to his husband, who was born on the 13th anniversary of the UpStairs Lounge fire. Because of the high number of dead, it went to the AP and UPI and wound up being reported nationally but only for one or two days. You had closeted gay reporters from the (New Orleans) Times-Picayune reporting in ways that would please their editors and the angle in some cases was unsympathetic.
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So when a major gay emergency strikes the city they didn’t know how to respond to it. “Which was the ‘open secret.’ You wouldn’t discuss someone’s sexuality if it was out of the heterosexual norm. “The New Orleans media operations operated under the old model of how liberal cities dealt with queer life,” said Fieseler, who has lived in New Orleans since 2014. The UpStairs Lounge event never received the attention of American civil rights markers like the 1969 Stonewall Inn riots in New York City or the 1963 firebombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. He said it even flew under the radar of New Orleans historians. Such neglected history is the subtext of “Tinderbox.” Fieseler reports how most newspapers ignored the event. He would not have wanted to be a mystery. I suppose in that sense he was a ‘mystery’. He did not leave a home, in a physical sense, or a family other than his birth family. In part, she wrote, “I have always felt Guy lost his life before he found his place in the world. She told Fieseler that her younger brother never came out to her and if he told their parents he never discussed it with her. As Fieseler was finishing up “Tinderbox” in 2018, Berg sent an email to him. Efforts to reach her for this story were unsuccessful. Lange has communicated with her through email but has not received a response in recent months. He is sitting in the front row of the picture at the time he portrayed Uncle Dudley in the comedy “Your Uncle Dudley.”Īndersen is now an actor with a face, thanks to the work of Lange.Īndersen had one sister, Avis Berg of Arizona. Andersen was club president during his senior year of high school. Among framed vintage playbills in the Cutting Hall lobby, there’s a black and white photo of the Palatine High School dramatic club, circa 1949-50.