Blackouts

“‘My senescence,’ Juan called it. ‘An affront to youth and beauty.’

And though I knew he teased, I did feel repulsed, not by Juan himself, but by elderliness as an abstraction. I found it impossible to imagine my own adolescent body succumbing to old age, deteriorating. Back then, I had looked at Juan and thought, No way that body is my future.”

Though Nene’s fear of elderliness originates from a previous interaction with Juan when he himself was almost 18, his pride in his 27-year-old body suggests he still does not connect with future frailty. Nene considering Juan’s body as his own future body foreshadows later parallels between the two men—with the novel ultimately reversing their roles as student and teacher.

“Noncompliance is bad behavior.”

Nene and Juan quote the rules of the psychiatric hospital where they were both committed. The idea that “noncompliance” is bad alludes to the state-sponsored violence that overshadows the novel. Furthermore, because the men were partially committed to a psychiatric hospital due to their race and sexuality, the notion of “compliance” with societal expectations would require total erasure of self.

“I don’t think he expected me to understand directly, but rather wanted me to understand how little I knew about myself, that I was missing out on something grand: a subversive, variant culture; an inheritance.”

Nene’s assumption about Juan’s intent suggests he understands he himself is lacking in queer education, even before Juan begins teaching him history. The framing of the novel as not necessarily being “[understood] directly” offers the reader a metric for learning as well—with the novel’s many references encouraging outside research.

“Après moi, le déluge.”

This French phrase, which translates to “After me, the flood,” is originally attributed to French King Louis XIV—suggesting a nihilistic disregard for whatever occurs after one’s departure. This phrase was repeated in various texts, including D. H. Lawrence’s Pansies (1929), which was censored for its liberal acceptance of queer attachments. Juan’s quoting is thus a double reference, both to the queer history he works to build throughout the novel and his coming death—which he cares about, as evidenced by his work in transmitting history to Nene.

“If everything stayed the same, you wouldn’t have cause for your precious nostalgia, Nene.”

Over the course of the novel, Juan teaches Nene the value of change, even when painful. Here, he frames nostalgia as a beneficial, if bittersweet, effect of change. This paradigm frames Juan’s coming death as a necessary part of life, rather than purely tragedy.

“And when they were asked to strip, they obliged, and their names were anonymized, and their faces blurred, until they were conferred to the realm of the symbolic, naked and labeled: Narcissistic, Homosexual, Hoodlum—determined and erased.”

In this quote, which describes the participants in the Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns Variants study, the participants’ willingness to reveal themselves (at great risk, given the persecution of queer people) is met with violence from the researchers. The participants have their individuality erased, and their stories and bodies are used to further anti-gay agendas.

“Anyway, the point, I suppose, is that, for me, Sex Variants contains the testimonies of the righteous, forty men and forty women who might save us all from the hellfires; perverts, presented in all their glory.”

In this quote, Juan inverts a Christian viewpoint that asserts queerness is “sinful.” In invoking the biblical “forty and forty” paradigm, he presents the Sex Variants participants as holy, saved from potential hell rather than condemned to it. The invocation of “glory,” a term associated with godliness, frames “perverts” as positive rather than negative.

“‘Flores…’ she called. Flores para los muertos. She kept on repeating the sound, drawing out the o sound.”

A woman allegedly selling flowers outside of the Palace alludes to Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. In the play, a flower seller foreshadows protagonist Blanche’s commitment to a psychiatric hospital. As both Nene and Juan were committed to a psychiatric hospital, Nene fears the woman is an ill omen, but Juan dismisses her as an actor rehearsing A Streetcar Named Desire.

“I ought to have felt solidarity, stuck as we were at the bottom, Mad Man master to us both. Instead, I felt jealous of her tiny, perfect jacket.”

Nene addresses his jealousy toward his client Mad Man’s dog, who is neglected by her owner but offered expensive gifts. Rather than sympathizing with the caged animal, his resentment is analogous to the struggles found in many resistance movements, in which the subjugated are encouraged to fight one another instead of joining to fight oppressors.

“I had this megalomaniacal fantasy that the stories kept him alive and in the room with me, and so I tried never to reach the final sentence.”

Nene offers a perhaps unintentional allusion to One Thousand and One Nights, in which narrator Scheherazade leaves her tales on a cliffhanger each night to avoid being executed by a tyrant king. While Scheherazade is ultimately successful in making the king fall in love with her, Nene knows death will eventually part him and Juan, despite their platonic love for each other.

“I don’t believe it. How can you make a syndrome of a people?”

Nene’s disbelief in Juan’s description of “Puerto Rican Syndrome” presents him as naive. In questioning the syndrome, he ignores his own history as a gay Puerto Rican man committed to a psychiatric hospital for his sexuality. This quote illustrates the way that past violence can seem absurd by present standards, even when those who experienced this violence still live.

“Even in a breakdown, there are cultural codes, behaviors that render the breakdown legible, if not acceptable.”

Nene believes “cultural codes” can clarify mental health crises, which contradicts the supposedly objective tone of this section’s medical excerpts. In suggesting “legibility” is an important factor to understanding mental health, he shows similar understanding despite disbelieving the existence of “Puerto Rican Syndrome.”

“Explaining away the ‘bad father’ and redirecting us toward the ‘good enough father’ is so often one of a mother’s covert responsibilities.”

Despite their complicated histories with their mothers, both Nene and Juan recognize the gendered burden placed on women in parenting. The novel suggests this burden relates to the pressure put on gay men to identify with femininity—which opens them to violence even as it offers comfort.

“‘Do you know why we fetishize, nene? To survive our own ambivalence. Perhaps the chains, and especially the crucifix, became totems, able to absorb both hatred and desire. Perhaps in their glimmer and weight you saw a reflection of all that you wanted.”

Juan’s characterization of fetishization comes from psychoanalysis. He frames the intersection of hatred and desire as obsession, cast onto an object. While this framework offers a medical view of fetish, his assumption that Nene’s golden crucifix necklace represents various desires suggests it can also provide a solution to ambivalence.

“You really ought to know your fairy forefathers. Puig and Piñero and the rest. The plays, especially. What will you do when you bump into these eminent maricones in hell? How embarrassed you’ll be not to know.”

Juan elevates two words typically used as anti-gay slurs: Firstly, in combining “fairy” with “forefathers,” he frames the slur as positive, enduring. Secondly, calling these forefathers “maricones” honors the Spanish term analogous to “sissy.”

“The kid finishes the story, saying that what he really wanted was for those girls to protect him and he could not always trust them to do so—and sometimes maybe he hated them for that.”

Sal (Nene) resents his female friends for their failure to protect him, even though he recognizes they do not have the power to do so. The girls’ encouragement to protect oneself is rooted in a femininity to which Nene lacks access.

“His sense of Zhenya he gathered from studying the children’s books themselves for moments of autobiographical revelation captured in code in the words and drawings; little scenes of erotic discovery through which the queer child stumbles upon unbidden knowledge of the self.”

In searching for “autobiographical revelation” in Zhenya’s children’s books, Juan draws similarities between them. Like Zhenya, he authors his own form of history—an authorship predicated on the voices of queer foremothers.

“We know a certain historical tolerance must be made for the outdated genre roles and medical ethics, but when Dickinson hides a camera in a planter in his office and secretly photographs women in the process of being examined […] the mood darkens.”

Juan’s description of mood when documenting medical violence suggests a tension between ethics and history. The “we” who knows “tolerance must be made” for outdated practices privileges Dr. Robert Dickinson’s perspective—and by extension, that of heteronormative, patriarchal hegemony.

“For Jan, Grandmother is the idealized feminine archetype: tough and arid.”

Jan Gay’s perspective (as mediated through Juan) reimagines the idea of an “[ideal] feminine archetype.” The novel’s refusal to describe any alternate ideal promotes the power of Jan’s vision. However, the introductory phrase “for Jan” suggests an alternate exists and is perhaps culturally dominant.

“He knew firsthand the punitive treatment inflicted upon the destitute who sought shelter or care from the state.”

Juan discusses the life of anarchist Ben Reitman (Jan Gay’s father), presenting a grim picture of the “care” offered to those who need it most by the state. In saying Reitman “knew” this injustice, he presents the knowledge as fact—a fact that lasts from Reitman’s era, to Juan’s, to Nene’s.

“All endings are messy, nene.”

Juan’s comment both alludes to the decline of his body, which is increasingly failing him, and the end of the novel. He foreshadows loose ends, as they are inevitable when one seeks to create an ongoing, lasting history of a community.

“After they leave, only fragments, snippets, remain of what they’ve said, unattached to chronology; Juan suspects others have come and left no impression at all.”

Juan’s hallucinated visitors leave behind traces that he soon forgets. While some stories remain for generations, others are often incomplete or inevitably lost due to forced erasure.

“He mumbles something garbled, which would be unintelligible had we not grown so in tune; like a mother with her babbling toddler, I know just what he is attempting to say.”

Nene compares himself to a mother tending a child as he watches over a dying Juan. This framework reverses their roles as student and teacher, and provides a positive lens for the otherwise ambivalent connection between gay men and femininity (explored in Important Quotes #14 and #17).