Blackouts

BLACKOUTS

by Justin Torres

 

Award: National Book Winner 2023


Nomination: Los Angeles Times Finalist 2023, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2023, PEN/Jean Stein Longlist 2024

 

Date Read: November 25, 2023

 

The unnamed narrator of Blackouts has come to The Palace to be with a dear friend, Juan, as he dies. Fleeing a flooded kitchen, Juan provides No Name a place to stay in exchange for continuing his life’s work: completing a 1941 study called Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns.

 

Between the two’s memories and education, they explore queer history and how this history has affected their own lives. Interspersed throughout the novel is redacted text from the study that forms more of a personal history between the lines or what Juan calls “…little poems of illumination.” The text was originally written by Jan Gay as an anthropological study in homosexuality but Dr. George Henry co-opted her work and turned it into a study of homosexuality as a deviance from the norm that needed to be fixed.

 

Some of the vignettes that are shared are true and others fictional and Torres leaves it up to the reader to decide for themselves which is which. Full of his own promise, Torres has embarked on a creative journey that reclaims gay history and includes the reader in that journey. How meaningful this journey was for me is debatable.

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