Blackouts : A Novel

Published 01/08/2024 | Paperback / softback,
Description:

Juan Gay lies dying in a room in The Palace: a monumental, fading institution in the desert. There, a young man cares for him – someone whom Juan met only once, but who has haunted the edges of his life ever since. As the end approaches, the two trade stories – resurrecting lost loves, mothers and fathers – and their lives are woven, ineluctably, into a broader story of sexuality, pathology and oppression. And, through their conversations, another story is told: that of the radical queer anthropologist Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was co-opted, and stifled, by the committee she served.

Blending fact with fiction, and drawing on oral histories and historical records, screenplay, testimony and image, Blackouts is a haunting, dreamlike rumination on memory and erasure – on the ways in which stories sustain histories.