Disrupting the archive: Jan Gay’s maricomio in Blackouts (2024) by Justin Torres.

Abstract

This paper explores Blackouts (2023) by Justin Torres as a novel that reimagines how queer history can be remembered, shared, and preserved. At its center is the recovery of Jan Gay—a lesbian writer and researcher whose work was erased by mid-20th-century medical institutions. Through a mix of fiction, personal memory, historical documents, and visual materials, Torres creates a fragmented, non-linear narrative that challenges conventional storytelling and gives space to voices that have long been silenced. A key focus of the analysis is how Blackouts rewrites the legacy of Sex Variants (1941), a study based on interviews Gay conducted but published without her name and through a pathologizing framework. In Torres’s novel, excerpts from the original text are redacted, rearranged, and reframed poetically, reclaiming them from the clinical language that once distorted them. This paper reads Blackouts through the lens of Vila and Sáez’s (2019b) concept of the maricomio, using it to examine the historical silencing of queer lives and the forms of exclusion embedded in dominant archival structures. Through the relationship between its two main characters—Juan and Nene—Blackouts blurs the lines between autobiography and fiction, history and imagination, grief and desire. While the novel offers a strong critique of the medicalization of queerness and puertorriqueñidad, it also reveals certain limits: notably, the absence of trans voices, despite acknowledging the instability of gender categories. Even so, Blackouts opens up powerful possibilities for how queer memory can be revisited—not as a fixed record, but as something emotional, messy, and alive.