Book Club Guide

Blackouts

by Justin Torres · 2023 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Queer history erased and recovered — the real 1941 study reimagined
Two men, a desert hotel, and the stories that pass between generations
Form as argument — fiction, history and image combined

About this book

A young man visits a dying mentor, Juan Gay, in a strange desert hotel, and the two trade stories — including the suppressed history of a real 1941 study of queer life that Juan has spent years annotating and erasing. Torres's National Book Award-winning novel is formally experimental, blending fiction, history and visual material into a meditation on queer erasure and recovery.

Published in 2023, Blackouts won the National Book Award for Fiction. Torres drew on the real 1941 study Sex Variants by George Henry, which interviewed queer New Yorkers and has been read by later scholars as both harmful and an inadvertent archive of queer life.

Discussion questions

The novel centres on a real historical document — Sex Variants, a 1941 study of queer life — which Juan has annotated and partially erased. How does Torres use this real material — and what does the erasure (visible in the book's design) achieve?
The relationship between the unnamed narrator and the dying Juan is the novel's emotional centre. How does Torres develop this intergenerational queer relationship — what is being transmitted, and what is being lost?
The novel includes images, blacked-out text and other visual elements. What does this formal experimentation achieve — and how does it relate to the novel's themes of erasure and recovery?
Blackouts is concerned with how queer history gets told, mistold, and recovered. How does Torres balance the historical material with the intimate present-tense relationship?
Blackouts won the National Book Award. What does its formal ambition achieve — and how does it extend the concerns of Torres's earlier novel We the Animals?