‘Blackouts’ by Justin Torres    (2023) – 297 pages

‘Blackouts’ is a brave work of art.

For the two main protagonists in this novel, the old man Juan Gay and the nameless young man narrator, their homosexuality is a given. They both have been put in jail for it. They have been sent to the loony bin for it. In fact they met in the loony bin where both of them had been locked up due to their homosexuality. Juan had befriended the younger scared teenager there. Now, ten years later, Juan Gay has gotten old and is dying, and our young man who Juan just calls “Nene” (baby) is there to provide Juan some company during his last days. There are hints that the events in the novel take place in the early 2000s. Both men are Puerto Rican.

Juan shows his young friend a two-volume book that Juan has carried around with him for many years, ‘Sexual Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns’. This is an actual real book published in 1941 that still exists. In the 1930s, during a short time frame when homosexuality was more accepted, an outgoing lesbian woman named Jan Gay (real name Helen Reitman) got permission to interview eighty of her gay friends, 40 men and 40 women, and write down those interviews. The interviews would show the basic day-to-day humanness of these people. However after she had completed this work, one of her bosses took her only copy and blacked out huge sections of it, because he insisted that homosexuality be still treated as a disease. Hence the title of this novel is ‘Blackouts’. Throughout the novel ‘Blackouts’ real pages from ‘Sexual Variants’ are reproduced with most of the verbiage blacked out. This was a lost opportunity for the public to better understand and accept homosexuality.

When Juan Gay was still a small boy, he was adopted for a time by Jan Gay and her gay friend illustrator Zhenya, and he was used as a model for the books they wrote for small children. (This part of the story is fiction.)

Most of ‘Blackouts’ is about these two men telling each other stories from their lives to entertain each other. Both know that Juan is dying, but the younger guy will need to get on with the rest of his life afterwards.

Justin Torres got the inspiration for ‘Blackouts’ from the novel ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ by Manuel Puig and the movie from 1985 which was made from that novel. What was unusual about ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ was that, despite its gay theme, it became widely popular with a general audience and won many awards. I suppose another example of a gay-themed work finding general acceptance is ‘Brokeback Mountain’.

I have read and really liked Justin Torres’ widely praised previous novel ‘We the Animals’. I expect that ‘Blackouts’ will also find acceptance and praise from a wide general audience.

Grade:   A-