Much of Blackouts consists of a conversation between two gay men as one of them lays dying at a rundown hotel somewhere in the American Southwest. They swap stories about their lives and about the creation of the (real-life) landmark study from the 1950s Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. The study began as a collection of personal stories from gay individuals which were distorted into moralistic medical generalizations, and the men try to recover the original history.
The title Blackouts refers to the way in which gay history and gay identity are filtered through omissions and distortions. The book introduced me to the genre of erasure poetry, in which a poet creates new poetry by erasing words from a preexisting text. Was the new poem immanent in the original?
I was impressed by Torres' innovative approach to the subject and the mysterious Inland Empire vibe he achieves. However, I was mostly unmoved, probably because the characters' concerns are remote from my own.
I loved this tender vignette which captures something essential about interpersonal communication:
The father pulls the child through the crowd; the state fair. ... The child squeezes his father's hand a little tighter, and the father automatically turns back and looks down, as if the child had tapped him on the shoulder, or as if the father were a puppet and the box pulled his string. For some reason, the discovery of this form of silent communication between himself and his father delights him, and so he begins playing a little experiment, every now and then giving a little squeeze, as if he were startled and in search of comfort, and sure enough, each time the father turns his face, looks down at the boy with slight concern, until finally he snaps, What is it? What's the problem? What's wrong with you? The child has no answer. The child realizes then that the father has all along been desperately looking for something, or someone. We are lost, the boy realizes.
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