Blackouts

Out in the desert at a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul he once knew: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, and guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along—built around a book, Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, and its devastating history. The book collects early twentieth-century accounts from queer subjects recorded by a researcher, Jan Gay; her name was later buried and the voices she preserved were filtered and muted. In Juan’s tattered volumes nearly every page has been redacted with black marker. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount moments of joy and oblivion, resurrecting loves, lives, mothers, fathers, and minor heroes. In telling their own stories alongside the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time and confront the gaps and erasures of history.