Tag: louisiana

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NEWLY PUBLISHED: Bloodstained Louisiana

New on our bookshelf today:

Bloodstained Louisiana: Twelve Murder Cases, 1896–1934

by Alan G. Gauthreaux

Historian Alan G. Gauthreaux chronicles 12 homicide cases from late 1800s and early 1900s Louisiana—where “unwritten law” justified jilted women who killed their paramours, and police took measures to protect defendants from lynch mobs. Stories include the 1907 kidnapping of seven-year-old Walter Lamana by the New Orleans “Black Hand,” the 1912 acquittal of Zea McRee (a woman of “good reputation”) in Opelousas, and the 1934 trial and execution of Shreveport’s infamous “Butterfly Man.”

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NEWLY PUBLISHED: Out for Queer Blood

New on our bookshelf today:

Out for Queer Blood: The Murder of Fernando Rios and the Failure of New Orleans Justice
Clayton Delery

On a September night in 1958, three New Orleans college students went looking for a gay man to assault. They chose Fernando Rios, who died from the beating he received. In perhaps the earliest example of the “gay panic” defense, the three defendants argued that they had no choice but to beat Rios because he had made an “improper advance.” When the jury acquitted the three, the courtroom cheered. The author offers a detailed examination of the murder and the trial.

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FORTHCOMING: Out for Queer Blood: The Murder of Fernando Rios

Clayton Delery’s Out for Queer Blood: The Murder of Fernando Rios and the Failure of New Orleans Justice is on its way to the printer.  Sarah Schulman, award-winning writer and gays rights activist, called it “a riveting and important work of grassroots LGBT history that reveals the connections and fissures between homophobia and anti–Latino prejudices in U.S. history.”   Schulman added that “Delery unmasks the origins of one of the most sinister legal and cultural foundations of anti-gay oppression: the false accusation of desire and how it has been used to excuse injustice.”

Delery’s 2015 work, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson: Thirty-Two Deaths in a New Orleans Gay Bar, June 24, 1973, was named a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was named book of the year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.