Blackouts: A Novel

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.