Clayton Delery is a Louisiana native who was raised in the New Orleans area. He has a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, and a Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  

 

For twenty-six years, he was a member of the faculty at the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts, one of the nation's premier high schools for academically gifted students.

 

Though he was an English teacher, in the later years of his career he found his interests shifting to LGBT+ History. His book, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson (McFarland, 2014) is a nonfiction account of the deadliest fire New Orleans has ever seen. Until the Orlando Pulse shooting in 2016, this fire was also the largest mass-killing of LGBT people in the nation's history. More recently, he published Out for Queer Blood: The Murder of Fernando Rios and the Failure of New Orleans Justice (Exposit, 2017). This book tells the story of three young men who decided to entertain themselves one weekend by beating up a gay man. In the process, they killed him. Out for Queer Blood examines the social context that promoted and forgave such a crime, which today would be called a hate crime, though that language did not exist when Rios was murdered in 1958.

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Clayton Delery is currently working on a book tentatively titled Demented Women and Other Heroes, which concerns New Orleans' history of drag queen activism in the early years of the AIDS crisis. He has also recently partnered with McFarland Publishing to be series editor for a collection of books, LBGT+ In America.

 

Clayton Delery retired from teaching in 2015. He currently lives and writes in New Orleans.