Blackouts

Blackouts’s gay Puerto Rican narrator is known as “Nene,” a Spanish nickname akin to “baby.” Nene spends the novel tending to Juan Gay, an elderly friend whom he knew for 18 days at a psychiatric hospital. While Nene was nominally committed for chronic “blackouts”—dissociative episodes where he loses track of time, one of which led him to run his sink to the point of flooding his landlady’s apartment—the novel implies the true rationale behind this commitment to a psychiatric hospital was medical racism and pathologizing queerness.

Nene’s history is vague, but he characterizes himself as a “chronic loser.” Though he recounts various episodes from his life as he sits with a dying Juan, these stories are mediated through memory, innuendo, and implication. Furthermore, he sometimes presents himself through analogues—including the character Sal, and by extension, his use of the name “Salvatore” in Part 5 (which may connect to Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns participant Salvatore N.)—the former of whom appears in his “film” (“STARVE A RAT”) in Part 4. In the decade since Nene and Juan met, Nene worked as a sex worker, which led to the end of his one long-term relationship with Liam. He is estranged from what remains of his family, as his late father was abusive to him, his brother, and their mother.

Nene fills the role of student in the novel. He listens to Juan’s stories, which focus on queer history, and follows Juan’s directions to structure his own storytelling. As the novel concludes, he adopts Juan’s role of teacher. While Juan is dying, Nene pushes him to tell his remaining stories without missing any details; then, after Juan dies, Nene becomes the guardian of various queer histories, recalling their positive memories and chronicling the novel’s bibliography—“Blinkered Endnotes.”