Blackouts by Justin Torres Summary, Characters and Themes
Blackouts is a novel by Justin Torres, first published in 2023. The novel explores the themes of queer identity, the erasure of LGBTQ+ history, and the institutional violence faced by LGBTQ+ individuals. Through the intertwining lives of its two main characters—Nene and Juan—the novel blurs the lines between memory, history, and fiction, highlighting how marginalized stories are often fragmented or forgotten.
At the heart of the narrative is a sense of preservation, not just of people and relationships, but of historical truths. Torres crafts a moving, complex story about love, memory, and the power of storytelling.
Summary
Blackouts opens with an unnamed narrator, called Nene, who visits an ailing friend named Juan Gay at a place referred to as “the Palace.” The two met a decade ago when they were both confined to a psychiatric institution.
The first part of the novel oscillates between the present, where Nene and Juan reminisce, and Nene’s own memories of their shared past.
Nene moves into Juan’s room without telling anyone, where he finds a vast collection of papers on Jan Gay, a historical figure who was a lesbian sexologist in the 1940s and Juan’s adoptive mother. Juan also possesses a heavily redacted copy of Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, a scientific study on sexuality.
Nene, intrigued, tries to uncover Juan’s personal history, but Juan often redirects the conversation to Nene’s own story, forcing him to reflect on their time in the psychiatric hospital.
Nene grows more distracted by the past, even as he focuses on Juan’s health and has an anonymous sexual encounter. This leads him to recount his family’s background to Juan.
In the second section, Juan delves into the history of the Sex Variants study, tracing its significance to the broader LGBTQ+ community. He talks about his childhood with Jan and her partner, Zhenya, who briefly took him in as their foster child.
Zhenya even used him as a model for her illustrations in children’s books. Their conversations often veer into discussions of queer history, with Juan quoting from various literary and cinematic sources.
As he sleeps through much of the day, Nene continues to read Sex Variants, while awaiting their night-time conversations. They bond over stories, including one in which Nene shares a vivid tale about his past life as a sex worker, underscoring the way reality and imagination blur in the stories they tell.
In the third part, Juan reveals his diagnosis of “Puerto Rican Syndrome,” a culturally specific condition known as ataques de nervios that had plagued his family for years. He reflects on how this diagnosis eventually led to his hospitalization in adolescence.
Juan and Nene continue sharing memories, including a childhood story involving a crucifix that Nene associates with his emerging queer identity. They read through one of Zhenya’s books, which Juan frames as an allegory for the pre-Stonewall gay experience.
As the novel progresses, parts four and five take on a more cinematic structure. Nene tells a story in which a younger man, Sal (a stand-in for Nene), and an older man, Norwood, have an affair.
Flashbacks to Sal’s group of queer friends, “the girls,” are woven into this narrative.
Juan, meanwhile, imagines his own “film,” detailing vignettes about Jan Gay and other researchers involved in the Sex Variants project.
As his illness worsens, Juan asks Nene to recount the story of his breakup with his ex-boyfriend Liam, starting from the end and moving backward, revealing how secrecy and sex work led to the relationship’s downfall.
In the final part, Juan’s health deteriorates rapidly. He experiences hallucinations and confusion as death looms closer. Nene remains by his side until the end, choosing to close the novel on a tender, affectionate memory of their embrace.
Characters
Nene (Unnamed Narrator)
Nene, the protagonist and unnamed narrator of Blackouts, serves as the central character through whose lens the story unfolds. His nickname, “Nene” (a Spanish term of endearment meaning “baby” or “child”), reflects his vulnerable and tender nature, especially in his relationship with Juan.
Nene is a deeply introspective character, whose thoughts and memories often drift between the present and the past. His emotional complexity is reflected in the way he navigates his traumatic past, his suppressed desires, and his relationship with his dying friend, Juan.
Nene’s reticence in sharing his own story mirrors the broader theme of the silencing of LGBTQ+ voices throughout history. His relationship with Juan, formed during their mutual confinement in a psychiatric hospital, offers insight into the institutionalized violence against LGBTQ+ people.
Nene’s involvement in sex work and his failed relationship with his ex-boyfriend Liam further highlight the tension between personal choices, societal pressures, and queer identity. Throughout the novel, Nene serves as both a caretaker and a student of Juan, learning about queer history through Juan’s ephemera and his storytelling.
As he contemplates his relationship with history, memory, and imagination, Nene becomes a vessel for unfinished stories, including that of Jan Gay. His journey culminates in both a profound loss with Juan’s death and a personal catharsis, reflecting the novel’s exploration of remembrance, grief, and survival.
Juan Gay
Juan is Nene’s close friend and a significant figure in the novel. Having met Nene in a psychiatric hospital, Juan’s life is marked by his commitment to telling the silenced stories of LGBTQ+ individuals, especially those of his adoptive mother, Jan Gay.
Juan is a character who functions as both a storyteller and a keeper of history. His fragile health and impending death cast a melancholic tone over his interactions with Nene, but his sharp intellect and passion for queer history offer a counterbalance to his physical frailty.
Juan’s personal history is intertwined with his obsession with the Sex Variants study, a pioneering research project on homosexuality in which Jan Gay was involved. Juan’s insistence that Nene help “finish” Jan Gay’s work speaks to his own sense of duty to preserve LGBTQ+ history and fight against the erasure of queer identities.
His connection to Jan Gay is further complicated by the fact that she and her wife, Zhenya, adopted Juan when he was a child, making him both a part of her legacy and a reminder of the personal cost of the historical struggles for LGBTQ+ rights. Juan’s intellectualism, combined with his vulnerability, creates a dynamic where he often deflects attention from his own experiences by drawing Nene into discussions of literature, history, and art.
His death at the novel’s conclusion is a pivotal moment that shifts the narrative from a reflection on the past to Nene’s reckoning with the future, as he takes on the role of preserving queer history.
Jan Gay
Jan Gay is a key figure in the novel, though she never appears directly. A real-life lesbian sexologist from the 1940s, she was a trailblazer in the study of queer identities, particularly through her work on the Sex Variants study.
In the context of Blackouts, Jan represents the forgotten or redacted aspects of LGBTQ+ history. Her life’s work becomes a central focus for both Juan and Nene.
Jan’s legacy, filtered through Juan’s perspective, symbolizes the ongoing struggle to recognize and document queer lives in a society that often seeks to suppress or erase them. Her research and personal life intersect in complex ways, as she and her wife, Zhenya, adopt Juan as a child.
This relationship becomes symbolic of how personal and political lives converge in the queer community. Jan’s influence looms large throughout the novel, not just as a historical figure but as an emotional and intellectual anchor for Juan.
The novel suggests that Jan Gay’s legacy is incomplete, and it becomes the responsibility of the living—namely, Nene—to continue her work of illuminating queer experiences and histories.
Zhenya Gay
Zhenya, Jan Gay’s wife, plays a more peripheral but still important role in the narrative. An artist who used Juan as a model for her children’s book illustrations, Zhenya is both a maternal figure and a symbol of queer family structures.
Her presence in Juan’s memories of childhood offers a glimpse into the lives of LGBTQ+ individuals in the pre-Stonewall era. During this time, queer identity was often expressed through subversive or hidden means.
Zhenya’s work as a children’s book illustrator, and Juan’s role as her model, subtly hints at the ways in which queer people have always been present in cultural narratives, even if unrecognized or misunderstood. Zhenya’s relationship with Juan also exemplifies the novel’s exploration of chosen family.
In many ways, the novel illustrates how queer people often create alternative kinship structures in response to the alienation from their biological families or society at large.
Liam
Liam, Nene’s ex-boyfriend, is a figure whose presence looms over Nene’s past and influences his current emotional state. Their relationship, which ends due to Nene’s secretive involvement in sex work, reflects the tensions between personal authenticity and the need to survive in a world hostile to LGBTQ+ individuals.
Liam’s character serves as a contrast to Juan, who represents the intellectual and historical aspects of Nene’s life, while Liam embodies a more intimate, personal relationship. The breakup between Nene and Liam is recounted in reverse chronology, adding to the sense of loss and disconnection that permeates the novel.
Liam’s character highlights the struggles Nene faces in balancing his personal desires with societal pressures. The shame that often accompanies queer identity, particularly in relation to sex work, is also central to Liam and Nene’s relationship.
Norwood and Sal
In Part 4 of the novel, Nene tells a story about two characters, Norwood and Sal, who serve as fictional stand-ins for Nene and an older man. Their relationship, framed as a film within the story, reflects the power dynamics between older and younger queer men, as well as the ways in which Nene processes his own experiences.
Norwood, the older man, represents stability and authority, while Sal is a young, uncertain figure who mirrors Nene’s vulnerability. The interplay between truth and fiction in their story reflects the novel’s broader exploration of how queer narratives are constructed, reshaped, and often suppressed.
Their story allows Nene to explore the complexities of desire, memory, and power. This story parallels his relationship with Juan and his reflections on his own past.
Themes
The Fragmentation and Reclamation of LGBTQ+ Histories in the Shadow of Institutional Violence
One of the central themes in Blackouts is the fragmented nature of LGBTQ+ histories and the persistent effort to reclaim them from the violent suppression imposed by dominant institutions. The novel explores how historical records, like the redacted Sex Variants study, have obscured or erased the lived experiences of queer individuals, relegating their stories to the margins.
Juan’s task for Nene—to finish Jan Gay’s work—becomes symbolic of the broader struggle to piece together a fractured history that has been actively suppressed by psychiatric, medical, and legal institutions. This erasure is not just an academic loss; it is deeply personal, as Juan’s own history, intertwined with that of his adoptive mother, is emblematic of how queer lives have been treated as deviant, pathological, and thus subject to erasure.
The novel suggests that the reclamation of this history requires both meticulous archival work and the imaginative creation of new narratives. It blurs the lines between fact and fiction as a means of survival.
Queer Memory and the Distortion of Time Under Trauma
Blackouts intricately weaves queer memory and trauma, focusing on how trauma distorts time and shapes the way individuals recount their lives. Nene and Juan’s conversations move fluidly between past and present, with flashbacks that are neither linear nor complete, reflecting the fragmented and often elusive nature of memory under trauma.
The psychiatric hospital, where Nene and Juan first met, serves as a site of both personal and institutional violence, complicating their ability to narrate their pasts clearly. For Nene, recounting his memories of the hospital is fraught with distractions and digressions, underscoring how traumatic experiences can fracture and distort the continuity of one’s narrative self.
Juan’s insistence on recounting the history of Sex Variants—a study that pathologized queer identity—suggests that trauma is not only personal but also collective. It is passed down through generations of queer individuals subjected to medical and social scrutiny.
The novel engages with trauma as a force that disrupts the linear progression of time. It blends memory, history, and imagination in the process of storytelling.
The Intersection of Sexuality, Race, and Mental Health Within Colonialist Medical Paradigms
Torres’s novel also tackles the intersection of queer identity, race, and mental health through the lens of colonialist and medical violence. Juan’s diagnosis with “Puerto Rican Syndrome” ties his experiences of psychiatric institutionalization to both his queerness and his racial and cultural background.
The syndrome—likely a reference to the culturally specific condition known as ataques de nervios—becomes a symbol of how medical discourses historically pathologized racial and sexual minorities under colonialist frameworks. The psychiatric hospital becomes a microcosm of larger social forces that seek to control and contain individuals who deviate from normative constructs of race, gender, and sexuality.
Juan’s life is marked by the double burden of being both queer and Puerto Rican. His institutionalization reflects how these identities are policed through medical diagnoses that seek to regulate bodies that transgress racial and sexual boundaries.
The novel critiques these colonialist medical paradigms. It shows how they have functioned historically to legitimize institutional violence against marginalized communities.
Queer Desire and the Religious Symbolism of Shame and Redemption
In Blackouts, queer desire is constantly entangled with religious symbolism, particularly in Nene’s story about his early association between the crucifix and nascent queer desire. The crucifix, a symbol of suffering and redemption in Christian theology, becomes a metaphor for the shame and self-punishment that often accompanies the emergence of queer desire within a heteronormative, religious framework.
Nene’s complex relationship with religious symbols reflects the internalized shame that many queer individuals experience in a society that equates queerness with sin. However, the novel gestures toward redemption through the act of storytelling.
By reclaiming these symbols and integrating them into queer narratives, the characters attempt to transform the language of shame into one of empowerment and self-acceptance. Nene’s recounting of his family history and his embrace of desire in his anonymous sexual encounters illustrate the negotiation between religious shame and queer liberation.
The Aesthetic of Intertextuality and Multimodality as Queer Resistance
The novel’s use of intertextuality and multimodal storytelling—blending filmic elements, literary quotations, and historical references—serves as a form of queer resistance to linear, monolithic narratives. Juan and Nene’s conversations are filled with references to literature, film, and queer history, but these references are often fragmented or reimagined.
The use of films-within-the-story and the blending of imagined narratives with personal histories mirrors the fractured experience of queer life, where identity is constructed from a patchwork of influences, memories, and erased histories. By engaging with multiple modes of storytelling, the novel refuses to be confined by traditional boundaries of genre, narrative structure, or historical accuracy.
This aesthetic choice mirrors the broader theme of how queer individuals often construct their identities and histories from fragments. The novel insists on combining truth and imagination, making a powerful statement on the necessity of creating new, hybrid forms of narrative to capture the complexity of queer lives.
In this way, Blackouts not only narrates queer experience but also embodies it through its form. It offers a profound commentary on how narrative itself can be a site of resistance.