Tracing the history of queer sociology can hold surprises like those novelist Justin Torres found in the San Francisco bookstore where he worked. According to what he says in this interview in the New York Times, Torres, while sorting through a box of used books that someone had donated, came across a strange medical manual published in 1941 titled ‘Sex Variants’. The study caught his attention for two things: the year of publication, seven years before the famous Kinsey Report, and the name of one of the signatories, Jan Gay.
Behind that name is the researcher Helen Reitman, daughter of the anarchist doctor Ben Reitman (author of ‘Boxcar Bertha’ and famous for dedicating his life to helping beggars and prostitutes and for being the partner of Emma Goldman, “the most dangerous woman.” of America”) and disciple of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld at the Berlin Sexual Research Institute (looted by the Nazis as fuel for their bonfires). Helen changed her name in 1927, possibly as a nod to connoisseurs (she was a lesbian and the term “gay” was beginning to be used in the LGBT+ sphere).
Jan Gay was a pioneer in the introduction of nudism in the United States (in 1932 she published the book of photographs ‘On Going Naked’ and wrote the script for the documentary ‘This Naked Age’) and in the investigation of queer sexuality, with the difficulties that that topic entailed. Gay had to publish ‘Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns’ under the protection of a “respectable” psychiatrist, who also did not hesitate to manipulate the study for pathologizing purposes.
‘Blackouts’, awarded the National Book Award, is the result of Justin Torres’ research and his imagination. As for the first, the novel includes parts of the manual, with fragments crossed out, and profuse photographic documentation that serves as a complement and poetic counterpoint to the narrative. Regarding the second, the author plays to imagine that the owner of that essay that ended up in his bookstore was an elderly homosexual, a man that Torres has turned into Juan Gay, one of the two protagonists of his novel. The other is the narrator, a young man who accompanies the dying Juan on his deathbed.
With ‘Pedro Páramo’ (1955) and ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ (1976) as its main references, ‘Blackouts’ is articulated through the nocturnal conversations that these two characters have in the asylum room where the old man is dying. From these dialogues, impregnated with irony, melancholy and sexual tension, the three stories are constructed that are summarized as follows by the narrator: “(1) my stories of prostitution, told in pieces, in the dark, for your amusement; (2) the story of ‘Sexual Deviations’ itself, the story of Jan Gay, which would be told after Juan’s death; (3) the final story, that of Juan.”
Three intertwined stories that compose a fascinating and ambitious mosaic, of great richness and narrative beauty, where fiction is mixed with the essay, the narrative with the metatextual and the experimental with the classic, not always harmoniously. A journey to the dark, forgotten and “blackout” origins of queer history (the author plays with the polysemy of the word “blackout”) through the memories of two men and their beautiful friendship.
