Blackouts

Blackouts by Justin Torres begins with Juan Gay lying dying in a room in The Palace: a monumental, fading institution in the desert. There, a young man cares for him—a person whom Juan met only once, but who has haunted the edges of his life ever since.

As the end approaches, the two trade stories, resurrecting lost loves, mothers, and fathers, and their lives are woven, ineluctably, into a broader story of sexuality, pathology, and oppression. Through their conversations, another story is revealed—that of the radical queer anthropologist Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was co-opted and stifled by the committee she served.

Blending fact with fiction, and drawing on oral histories and historical records, screenplay, testimony, and image, Blackouts is a haunting, dreamlike rumination on memory and erasure—on the ways in which stories sustain histories.