It is morning in Manhattan, and the 43-year-old novelist Justin Torres is lying in bed, head propped up on one hand. He uprooted to the west coast of America a decade ago to teach English at UCLA, but was out late last night partying with friends from his old New York days. “I’m not even dressed yet,” he says in a sleepy croak.
The sight of Torres video-calling amid rumpled pillows feels apt given that his new book, Blackouts, is narrated from a clammy bed. The novel leads the reader through the hidden backwaters of queer history: in its hunt for buried cultural treasure, sex marks the spot. Torres has been surprised on his book tour to see it stocked in airport shops (“There are so many penises in it!”) and was not anticipating its release into today’s book-banning world. “That wasn’t on my radar at all,” he says. “I was thinking more about this kind of self-censorship that I wanted to resist. There’s an impulse for queer art to present itself as respectable and de-sexed, and I don’t want to be part of that.”
In the novel (fictional) queer elder Juan Gay is confined to his death bed in a remote desert sanctuary, where he is nursed by a nameless twenty-something narrator. Juan bequeaths to the younger man his papers about the (real) lesbian writer and sexual scientist Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking interviews with queer people in the 1920s and 30s formed the basis of the 1941 two-volume report Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. Blackouts represents a reclamation of her work, which was given scant credit by the report’s author, George W Henry. It also contains splinters of biography, some of it real – including Gay’s connections to Andy Warhol and the anarchist Emma Goldman – and some fabricated. Torres interlaces Gay’s life with the memories and fantasies that Juan and the narrator exchange.
This patchwork narrative is starkly dissimilar from Torres’s autobiographical 2011 debut, We the Animals, which concerned the feral upbringing of three boys born to a white mother and Puerto Rican father in upstate New York. (It was adapted into an ethereal 2018 film.) That first novel, though fragmented, had a rhapsodic energy coursing through it whereas Blackouts is continually being interrupted by archive photographs, illustrations from children’s books and assorted ephemera.
“When you’re researching, you’re trying to fill in the gaps in the archive,” says Torres. “There’s this impossibility of making a clear narrative when it comes to histories that have been suppressed. It’s fascinating but it can also be frustrating. I wanted to capture that in the reading experience.” Frustration, he points out, has its own kick. “It’s kind of kinky, right?”
The book’s most striking feature is the inclusion of pages from the Sex Variants report, which Torres has mischievously redacted, transforming them into erasure poems. Select words and phrases are left untouched to create new meanings; language that was formerly judgmental has been rehabilitated, even sexed-up. The black bars concealing lines of text suggest a peep show or the venetian blinds in a film noir.
“I felt I could return some sexiness to the text itself,” Torres explains. “The people who spoke to Jan Gay volunteered all this information about their sex lives, then it got reinterpreted and overlaid with the pathological language of the time; it was turned into evidence of disease. So it was exciting to make it lyrical again.”
There’s no avoiding the fact, though, that it has been a long time coming. “My second book was due many, many years ago,” he winces. What happened? “I didn’t feel commensurate to the attention I received after We the Animals. I got asked a lot about queer literature and Latinx literature, which are both passions of mine, but I felt I needed to read more. I wanted to stretch to become a different kind of writer.” Different how? “As a person, I’ve always had a dark, dark sense of humour. But I was so sad and earnest on the page.”
He traced the problem back to immature ideas about how a writer should sound: he was adopting his novelist voice, the way other people put on a telephone voice. As Blackouts developed, the book absorbed material from his unfinished second novel, Yesterday Is Here, a tale of two hustlers in different eras, and the character of Juan evolved into a device by which Torres could critique his younger, greener self. As the narrator spins tales of carnal adventure, Juan chips in to question, say, the dubious use of flashback or voiceover. “That’s me teasing,” Torres smiles. “If there’s not humour in some way, I don’t know that I’d want to do it any more.”
Another lesson he learned from We the Animals was how to deal with intimate autobiographical material in the public arena. “I was so broke and lost when I wrote my first book,” he sighs. “The publicity people were, like, ‘This seems as if it has lots of overlap within your life. Are you OK to talk about that?’ I said, ‘Sure!’ It didn’t occur to me that this would be the primary focus of every conversation about the book.”
That debut ends with a fictionalised version of a traumatic incident: his parents’ discovery, when he was 17, of his private journal, which catalogued his fantasies and desires. (He has called it “the baby steps of a fiction writer”.) Torres had long known he was queer. Though he struggled with his sexuality in his teens, his future was far from hopeless: he had won a fellowship to NYU. He has conceded, though, that anyone who came across his journal back then “would think this was a troubled mind. And that’s exactly what happened.” His estranged father, a macho cop, dragged him to a psychiatric hospital, which is where he learned that the journal had been pored over by his entire family. “If you’re going to have a meltdown, if you’re going to throw furniture around the room, if you’re going to cry and really let yourself go … don’t do it in the evaluation ward of a psychiatric hospital,” he said in 2012.
He wasn’t suicidal when he was committed, but that changed once he got out. He took an overdose and ended up in a coma, a sequence of events that he has now bestowed on the narrator of Blackouts, who even voices some of the lines Torres has used in interviews – such as how he felt weirdly proud to be placed on an adult ward because he was “too mature for juvey”.
With Blackouts, he has protected himself a little better. “I knew there would be this confusion between my own biography and the narrator’s, so I decided to play with the ambiguity.” Both have a compulsion to misplace their possessions. “It’s incredible how good I am at losing things,” he says. “It’s as if I rehearse these fundamental moments in my life where something hugely important was taken from me, and I’m recreating that all the time to master my own response.”
He lost a chunk of Yesterday Is Here by leaving his laptop on a train. An earlier and more traumatic loss clearly haunts these subsequent ones. When I ask what happened to those feverish scribblings that were discovered by his parents, he turns the question over in his head for a few seconds. “I don’t know,” he says eventually. “It was such a dramatic rupture between me and my family; it’s a kind of scar, that sense of betrayal. I have a lovely relationship with my mother now but there’s something there that can’t be healed. Early on, I asked for the journal to be returned to me and it wasn’t. And the fight around that was so immense that I let it go.”
Earlier, when we were discussing the subject of queer archives, Torres confessed that he has no intention of leaving his own papers behind. “It’s probably why I delete everything all the time,” he says now. “Because I’ve seen what happens if you don’t. That journal was an archive of my interiority that I left, and which was found.” He glances away, the morning light striking the side of his face. “If I delete it, then nobody can use it against me.”
• Blackouts is published by Granta. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
