The Brooklyn Rail

In my teens, the Stonewall Riots and ACT UP were a social upheaval that hit close to home. The struggles of others on the American margins I experienced largely secondhand; I read James Baldwin or caught a reading of the Nuyorican Poets. But I had friends and family carried off by AIDS or bruised by homophobia, and Queer Studies changed how I read and thought. Granted, I’ve spent a lifetime in the arts, animated by outsider energies. Still, the past half-century’s struggle—“America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel”—came to mind again as I read Blackouts. The history struck me powerfully, yet also magically.

Justin Torres features none of the materials that usually occupy a political novel. There are no riot scenes, no courtroom confrontations. Rather, the primary drama is intimate: the hushed conversations between two men in a hospice. This isn’t their first time in an institution: years earlier, their queerness taken as crazy, they’d been on the same psych ward. In those days, the narrator was “a teenager from bumfuck nowhere,” and to him the older Juan “transcended” everything he’d ever known “about sissies.” Now, they’re once more in withdrawal from the world, drifting “somewhere else … loops from the past playing and replaying in our minds.” Loops through queer life, in particular, the challenges of achieving an alternative wholeness and community. Juan has stories that reach back to the turn of the previous century. He’s haunted especially by the notorious 1941 compendium Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which perverted the testimony of gay men and women to promote theories of eugenics. Through him develops the text’s larger vision, that of “a subversive, variant culture; an inheritance.”

An inheritance the narrator needs: “I had no work … no pedigree … no man to support me.” The book opens with his offer to “play bed nurse,” and though Juan perceives his visitor’s desperation, he can use the help. Not just because of his “senescence,” either; also, he’s got his “project”: setting right the history surrounding the Sex Variants. So the two launch into their mutual disclosures. As they talk, too, they share documents and photos, and many of both are reproduced. The pages of text are most often from the perfidious Variants, but whatever their source, they’re full of redactions—blackouts. Perhaps one line in half a dozen will be legible. As for the photos, most of the faces are scratched out.

The technique can’t help but recall W.G. Sebald, his blurred reproductions, yet this novel stands up to the comparison. Torres has gone well beyond his accomplishment in We the Animals (2011), though that debut worked up a fine, creative combination of coming of age and coming out. The new one, despite the quiet simplicity of the premise, raises a marvelous ruckus. Its scrapbook elements amount to a third party in dialogue with the two men; stories emerge from the redacted texts as well, the legible pieces combining in fresh ways, in the manner of erasure poetry. Overall, the construction feels like a formal breakthrough, exciting in the same way as Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, or for that matter Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

What’s more, the construction feels open-ended. An early, arresting description conveys something of the affect: “The bones and joints moved under [Juan’s] skin with uncanny and fearsome beauty.” Such lyrical lightning flashes throughout Blackouts, but those movements under wraps, their uncertainty “fearsome,” also provide an apt image for both the central pair and a lot of what passes between them. For starters, there’s the question of whether the two ever touched, either in the past or now. The narrator keeps up a sex life, for cash he turns “tricks … in the village bar,” and while Juan never leaves the facility, until his final decline he doesn’t sound at all impotent. His gab never lacks for lascivious suggestion, even in its nimble allusions to Oscar Wilde or Tennessee Williams. Still, much about the men’s relationship remains a mystery, like the narrator’s name. In the novel’s latter half, during the younger man’s recollections of his own queer beginnings (details of which recall We the Animals), he may be identified as Salvatore, but this possibility winds up looking like the scratched-out faces of the photos.

At the novel’s close, we turn the page to find the close print of what are usually acknowledgements, the sources of the documents and photos. Such information does appear, but it’s been compiled by the narrator, and he’s not done with erasure and smudging: “This photograph, taken by Thomas Painter, maybe, could be Juan, though it could be anyone.” Such ambiguity even turns up in this section’s brilliant title: “Blinkered Endnotes.”

Indeed, the only un-queered data in this highly imaginative tumble through queer history might be the stuff of history: Berlin’s Institute for Sexology, destroyed by the Nazis, or the lesbianism implicit in the book of Ruth. The outstanding case, shadowing all of Blackouts, is the tragic figure Jan Gay. This woman, Juan claims, raised him; he calls her “Holy fairy, mother of grace,” and he took his name from hers. But then, the name was Jan Gay’s invention, originally, back about 1920 when she “came out … in a grand style” and began a doomed quest to normalize queerness. She was essential to the Variants project, and the most terribly betrayed by the men who took it over. Late in the novel appears a page of Gay’s writing, a kind of poem from her last years, funereal and soaked in scotch; for once, no one blots out a word. Then in the book’s actual acknowledgements, following the “Blinkered” masquerade, Torres declares “I’d love for someone more capable than I to write a true biography for the real Jan Gay.” A closing touch of wizardly ingenuity, it ends without ending, instead raising a cry to keep the revolution going.