Win Out For Queer Blood by Clayton Delery
Win Out For Blood by Clayton Delery! To enter the contest, fill out the form below between Tuesday, April 10 and Tuesday, May 1.
Out For Blood: The Murder of Fernando Rios, and the Failure of New Orleans Justice
About the Book:
In September of 1958, three young men in the French Quarter were looking for a way to pass time on a Saturday night. They decided to beat up a gay man. They chose Fernando Rios, a tour guide from Mexico City who was visiting New Orleans as part of his job. The beating Rios received at their hands was so severe that he died of his injuries fifteen hour later. Though the assailants were arrested and tried, they were acquitted by a sympathetic jury, and when the verdict for acquittal was announced, the courtroom erupted into loud and sustained cheers.
Clayton Delery has written a riveting account of the crime itself, and the social and political context in which the events took place. He shows that New Orleans in the 1950's did not have the free-spirited, laissez-faire attitude with which it is now credited, and was, in fact, engaged in an official municipal known as the drive against the deviates, which was intended to rid the city of homosexuality. Anti-Mexican prejudice was also at a high point, with thousands of people of Mexican heritage being forcibly deported as part of Eisenhower's "Operation Wetback." Fernando Rios had the misfortune to belong to two groups who were in particularly low regard at that place and time. Thus, Delery convincingly argues that both the crime and the verdict were not only predictable, but virtually inevitable.
Out for Queer Blood is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction.
About the Author
Clayton Delery is also the author of The Up Stairs Lounge Arson (McFarland 2014). This non-fiction account of the deadliest fire in the history of New Orleans was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction, and was named Book of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for Humanities. Clayton Delery lives in New Orleans, where he continues to write about LGBTQ history.
