Blackouts
by Justin Torres
Summary
A young man the dying call Nene arrives at the Palace, a crumbling refuge somewhere in the desert, to sit the deathwatch of Juan Gay, an old queer raconteur he knew years before, when both were patients in the same psychiatric institution, the boy a teenager, the man already old. The bargain between them structures the book: Juan, going out story by story, wants Nene's memories, the childhood, the family, the blackouts that eat his past, and in exchange he hands down an inheritance, a project, a person.
The person is real: Jan Gay, born Helen Reitman, a lesbian journalist and researcher who in the 1930s gathered hundreds of intimate life histories of gay men and women, science meant to serve her own kind, and then watched a committee of physicians absorb her work into Sex Variants, a 1941 medical study that pathologized every voice in it, her name reduced to a footnote in the machinery that made her subjects into specimens. Torres reproduces the study's actual pages throughout, blacked out by his own hand into erasure poems, the redactions performing the book's title: what the record deleted, recovered as literature.
Around the documents float photographs, film stills, fables and the two men's voices trading tenderness and history in the dark, Scheherazade inverted, the stories accompanying a death instead of postponing it.
Around three hundred and twenty pages, half of them images and air.
Best for readers who want fiction working as queer counter archive, a novel assembled from what the official record blacked out.
Historical Context & Significance
Blackouts won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2023, twelve years after Justin Torres's incandescent autobiographical debut We the Animals, a gap that became part of the story: the follow up as slow built reliquary, and the prize as vindication of patience. The award also completed a run of formally radical winners, screenplay, collage, erasure, that redefined what the fiction category would honour.
Jan Gay and the Sex Variants study are historical fact, and the novel's documentary spine is genuine recovery work: Torres spent years in the archives, and the book has sent historians of sexuality a new readership. The blacked out pages are his own redactions of the actual 1941 text, erasure as both wound and craft.
We the Animals had become a prize winning film in 2018; Torres teaches at UCLA. His ceremony speech thanked his partner and his queer family, and the moment stated the project outright: the novel as restitution.