When Justin Torres worked as a bookseller, he was assigned to deal with a collection of donated books most likely from the home of someone recently dead., What he found in these boxes were works by writers like Radclyffe Hall, Jean Genet, and a smattering of “vintage erotica…gay smut and lesbian smut in equal quantities.” Torres started to imagine the person who might have owned this library: someone queer, someone who’d come of age and lived through a series of cultural moments that echoed broader queer histories in America – and maybe beyond.
Torres’s unconventional and exceptionally-haunting novel builds on his fantasy of this unknown person and their carefully-compiled “archive of voices” but also draws on a lesser-known set of books found buried among the others. These books were highly influential in the treatment and ongoing stigmatization of queer people. Published in the 1940s, <i>Sex Variants</i> by George W. Henry rested on years of field and experimental research. An attempt to map and find the origins of queer identities that Henry classified as arrested development, a potential threat to heterosexual norms and so-called “healthy” reproduction. But the origins of his study lay somewhere very different in the work of Jan Gay (Helen Reitman) a lesbian activist who interviewed over 300 women for her study and celebration of queer women. Without academic, medical credentials Gay couldn’t find a publisher, so by happenstance became linked to a group including Henry looking for material on queer lives but for vastly different purposes.
Torres’s narrative takes the form of an ongoing conversation between two men, one young and nameless, the other Juan who’s aging and on the verge of death. Juan’s mix of death-bed confession and intimate web of memories is intermingled with references to literature to art and poetry. But Juan’s also someone who spent part of his childhood with Jan Gay and her then-lover, artist and children’s book illustrator Zhenya Gay (Eleanor Byrnes). Jan and Zhenya’s experiences act as a way of thinking through queer pasts, devastating losses and fragile gains. The young man known only as “Nene” and Juan are alone together in a dilapidated room in a boarding-house known as the Palace – the reason for the name is revealed in the course of time. Nene cares for Juan and they share the most intimate details of their lives.

This is a tender, complex, beautifully-written piece interwoven with ideas taken from literature and psychology, Torres’s take on the repressive cultural and social sciences that repressed and sought to destroy successions of queer lives echoes ideas that trace back to theorists like Foucault. But Torres’s story’s never overly dense or daunting, instead it’s fluid, moving and sometimes visceral, with a fable-like quality. Torres’s prose is juxtaposed with images - including elements of Zhenya Gay’s artwork - and a series of outtakes from Henry’s study but each page under erasure. An erasure which is also an act of radical restoration and reclamation, lines and words blacked out which shift and refuse Henry’s intended meanings, teasing out the desires and underlying thoughts of the queer men and women subjected to his damning analysis. Torres’s approach also highlights the experiences of his characters both men with Puerto Rican heritage living in America, people who’ve also been subjected to damaging stereotypes, their histories and heritage distorted and othered. Intense, rich, and memorable.

Scattered words, scattered memories, blank spaces.

Torres keeps company with Juan and his Nene. He stretches time, eking out the moments Juan has left whilst journeying back in time and visiting memories.

Through the fragments he left not blacked out he offers another narrative for the homosexual experience. By the blacking out he removes a lot of the negative narrative but is left only with a few words, fragments that are left after the erasure and the deterioration of memory.

His choice to use different media did not work well for me here. I read this on my kindle and so lost a lot because I could not see the blacked out photos well enough not to bring me out of the experience. I think that a large hardback would give the best experience since a paperback would struggle with it's small format.

*Deep breath* Was this fact? Was it fiction? Was it history, a dream or neither?! What I do know is Blackouts was a fascinating, deeply imaginative book, though one that was sometimes a bit of a slog to work through. It’s deeply enigmatic on purpose, and the experience won’t be for everyone. Justin Torres brings queer history to life through deliberate gaps, helped along by the lyrical erasure poetry dotted through the novel’s pages.

Blackouts combines a narrative with partially blacked-out pages from a 1941 study on homosexuality, as well as other snippets and images. The main plot unfolds as an extended conversation between two Puerto Rican men, one nearing the end of his life, in an ambiguous institution called the Palace. Where the Palace is, if anywhere at all, I’m still not sure (to me, it felt like a space between life and death). The two men share stories that move across time, perspective, and genre, weaving in real historical figures, literary references, even a screenplay. What results is a kind of archive, closer to the complexity of truth than a neat picture. While I totally “get” Torres’s intentions here, and really admire them, as a reading experience I sometimes found the book so disjointed as to be a bit removed, and the dialogue occasionally felt over-written and unrealistic. Many of my favourite moments were the simplest, storytelling-wise.

Blackouts goes beyond just retelling queer history through the lives of two characters. It challenges what we might want as a conventional narrative by embracing imperfections and endings – it feels faithful to real memory, and real oral storytelling. I’ve found this book very hard to ‘rate’ because it defies easy categorization, much like the personal history it embodies. I think it’s an important work, if not always the most satisfying. I really did admire it, despite feeling a little unmoored. 3.75 stars, rounded up!

Thanks so much to Granta and NetGalley for the review copy.

This is the first novel of Torres’ that I have read, and it is safe to say that I am now a big fan. ‘Blackouts’ explores themes such as race, gender, sexuality and medicine and the way they are portrayed separately but also work together was so beautifully done. The writing was poetic and made me want more by the end, at times I forgot I was reading fiction as the characters, history and the involvement of medicine and politics became so real and engaging. I would advise to buy this in a physical copy to fully get the benefits of the non-textual elements of the book (photos, drawings and blacked out passages from the book ‘Sex Variants’). All of these were relevant and added to the story, it was these elements that added to the feeling that I was reading a non-fictional almost academic book but they were my favourite aspect.

A hazy, almost feverish novel which blends fiction, historical nonfiction, and poetry; this novel contains multitudes. The rich characterization Torres showed in his first novel has been elevated, set against a backdrop of suppression and pathologization of desire which makes for a perfect read.

Difficult to know how to rate a book that I wish I'd read the "Sort of Postface" first then read the novel. I (sort of) want to re-read the book again immediately. If you are an inveterate Googler I'd suggest you read an excellent interview with Justin Torres in NPR before you start the book. It will make it much clearer and explain his process in bringing Jan Gay's name into the limelight.

Blackouts is a work of fiction but it is inhabited by various real people - Jan Gay (a pseudonym of Helen Reitman) being the main one. It is the story of a remarkable woman told by Juan Gay (a dying man) to an unnamed young man.

The lines between reality and fiction are completely blurred in this work. I reached the end and still wasn't sure whether Juan was real or not. The style of the novel is a mixture of conversation, pictures, cuttings etc and if you don't like experimental you may find it difficult but it is worth it. What you end up with is some information on Jan Gay and her work but also a very sensitively told story of a dying man.

I would recommend this novel to anyone interested in the subject of homosexual history or Jan Gay or anyone (like me) who enjoys a "different" type of novel - something that makes you think.

Thanks to Netgalley and Granta for the advance review copy.

Blackouts was unlike any other queer books I've read before. Torres has a hypnotic way of writing that draws you in to this world that much still seems hidden in the darkness of the room it is mainly set.

More books covering these experiences are needed, that highlight the true intersectionality of what it is, and has been, to be gay. Intergenerational stories, friendships and relationships need time dedicated to them like has been done in Blackouts.

Did I follow the book the entire way through? No completely, but it didn't stop my enjoyment and appreciation. The fact I read it on a beach hydrating myself with cocktails may be a contributing factor, but I say this book needs to be given the time and concentration to truly live in this world and connect with the characters.

It is full of brilliant lines though that had be chuckling:

“Lord, a good fag is hard to find.”
“Vulgarity, nene.”
“Sodom: A Disco Inferno.”

It will be a book I come back to for sure. Thanks to Netgalley for the advanced copy.

3.5⭐️
‘Remember this: not all ambiguities need to be resolved, nene.’

This is a beautiful book. This story feels like when you had sleepovers as a kid and you would become vulnerable in the dimmed light when you really should have gone to sleep 2 hours ago.

Stories going back and forth between two friends, both at different stages in their lives. The prose could be a little tricky to keep track of at points, but overall I felt it added to the relationship between characters.

A real gem of a story about queerness, class, and race, wrapping it all up in artistic bow.

This book is a wonderful mix of culture, love, stories, truth, lies, childhood, growth, and many other things. The writing is beautiful, the conversations are sharp, and it explores queer history and memory. It's a unique and exciting book that really caught my attention.

Blackouts is a novel exploring queer histories and memory, as two men—one older and dying, one younger—talk about not only their own lives, but also about a blacked-out book, Sex Variants, and Jan Gay, an anthropologist whose work didn't get the reception it should have. Combining short snippets of conversation telling non-linear stories with blackout pages of text and historical images, what unravels is less of a narrative and more of an experience, blurring fact and fiction and playing with the importance of ambiguity (something which the characters themselves remark on).

The conversation format works very effectively to get across this sense of back and forward and how things are passed on and passed down, and I found it easy to get into the style of the novel once I'd worked out what was going on (on that note, if reading digitally, it is best on a device with a large/decent enough screen to be able to appreciate the blackout pages). There are a lot of stories told at once, but also a lot of purposeful gaps, as the title might suggest, so though it's a book you could race through, it feels like one you should take more time with, to read what isn't there as well. This is a novel that sits well alongside older gay novels, whilst also doing something fresh and experimenting with fragments of the past.

This book stood out to me as really special and powerful. I'm not sure I can do it justice, it's best just to experience it since it defies clear summarisation.

Blackouts is a multilayered story which centres around two gay men, an older man, Juan, and the younger narrator, in a desert location called 'The Palace' at the end of Juan's life. The two exchange stories about their lives, and Juan wishes to pass on a project he's worked on which centres around a woman he knew, Jan Gay.

Jan was a Lesbian who gathered queer stories in the 1930s whose work was co-opted by the medical community. The book also features photographs and illustrations along with pages of blackout poetry created in the text published from Jan's work, which attepts to restore the humanity of the subjects profiled in this medical text.

This book explores the intersections of colonialism, racism, and homophobia. It asks whose stories get told, and who gets to do the telling. It examines the impacts of pathologising and medicalising the 'other'.

It doesn't stick to a clear linear plot but rather dips in and out of the characters histories, weaving in themes of love, queerness, mental illnes, religion, family, race, and power. Its not always clear what is 'true' but this ambiguity helps to communicate how stories survive despite oppression and erasure.

This is a really beautiful book and I really cannot recommend it enough.