Throwaway Boy: The True Story of a Quarter Rat and His “Most Important Asset”

Abstract: A Cajun Louisianan, Pierre “Peter” Rene DeLancey (1969–1998), was born with a set of physical attributes that doomed his prospects and spelled his early death because those attributes were sexually coveted in his lifespan. Suffering molestation as a child, he ran away from home only to contract HIV at age sixteen when he was raped by a male prison guard at a Louisiana juvenile facility. DeLancey found allies as an unhoused street kid in the New Orleans queer community. As an eighteen-year-old illiterate sex worker, he was informally adopted by a chosen family and inspired into AIDS activism by a local queer politico named Stewart Butler. DeLancey took a stand against President Ronald Reagan at the 1988 Republican National Convention before being sidetracked into a brief pornography career. He endured poor health before dying young and creating, in his passing, an activist tradition still honored in the Queer South.