Blackouts

A heavily redacted page from Sex Variants with the header “CASE STUDIES” is a first-person report from a lesbian woman who discusses her relationship with motherhood, fear, and insomnia.

Juan confesses to lying about the Sodom story: Abraham convinces God that he needs 10 righteous Sodomites, not 40. Juan and Nene joke about finding a good partner, playfully inverting the use of anti-gay slurs.

Juan sleeps restlessly. Sound does not disturb him, so Nene sings to distract himself. During the day, he reads Sex Variants, uncertain what he is supposed to be learning. At night, he and Juan talk. Juan asks for confirmation whether or not either of them is alive.

One evening, Nene observes and recounts an outside scene to Juan. The bodega worker appears, wearing a mantilla, in a crowd dressed for a funeral. She repeats “Flores para los muertos”—a Spanish phrase that translates to “flowers for the dead”—encouraged by the crowd to speak louder and louder (94).

A photograph shows a woman wearing a black mantilla and dress, holding a bouquet of flowers. It is labeled with the name of the photographer, Carl Van Vechten, a white American writer who promoted Black artists during the Harlem Renaissance.

Nene is horrified by the “funeral,” but Juan recognizes “Flores para los muertos” from Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and insists the group must be rehearsing. He urges Nene to abandon the scene and listen to his story.

Juan recounts years spent reading stories and poetry before the library and bookstore in the Palace’s “ghost town” closed. He references a short story (“Interiors” from Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins, posthumously published in 2016) about a beautiful, long-suffering woman, explaining how “old-school sissies” would imitate famous women. The heroine reads compulsively, finding solace only once she begins reading memoirs, comforted by the idea that everyone experiences solitude. Nene praises Juan’s ability to memorize passages, then compares the heroine burning down her house to his flood. Juan chides him for centering himself in his own story.

Juan found Sex Variants in a box of free items in the Palace lobby. He identifies with the stories while simultaneously feeling “lifted […] out of himself” (99). He asks if Nene noticed a chill when he arrived at the Palace, but Nene counters that it is summer and therefore warm.

 A heavily redacted page from Sex Variants with the header “CASE STUDIES” contains a first-person narration of the solace found through religion.

The “funeral” actors assemble outside and Juan notes that in the film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire, the figure of the “Mexican woman” was played by a Black lesbian woman named Edna Thomas. She was known to Jan and Zhenya, as well as a participant in Sex Variants.

A photograph shows a large group of actors in costumes (dresses and skirts for women, suits and tall hats for men) onstage. One actor stands on an elevated platform, wearing a dress as she emerges from a castle.

A tired Juan asks Nene to tell a humorous story of a sexual escapade.

A photograph shows a naked, tattooed man looking off to one side.

Nene recalls placing an advertisement on a classifieds website offering assistance with chores or errands, filing it under the page for men seeking men. He exchanges messages with a man in his fifties, whose attitude he likens to the television show Mad Men, which Juan has never heard of. Nene agrees to care for “Mad Man’s” dog, with the men agreeing to sex being implied. The dog is always crated and poorly trained, but silent, having been bred to be unable to bark. Nene first pities the dog for her confinement, but this sympathy vanishes when Mad Man asks him to purchase a leather jacket for the dog which costs more than Nene’s rent.

Nene searches for another job, finding solace in a community of queer friends who experience financial precariousness but still support one another.

Though Nene knows the dog is likely dead in the present, he fantasizes about her angrily barking. Juan cautions against over-ascribing truth to nostalgia, and Nene counters that he did as Juan asked in making him laugh.

A brief section contains three lines from Robert Browning’s poem “The Ring and the Book” (1868), asking about the relationship between goodness and truth.

Juan recounts the plot of the poem: In 1860, Browning purchases a book, which inspires obsession over a trial from the 1690s wherein a noble husband of a 13-year-old girl killed the girl’s “lover”—a priest—and her family. Juan frames this information as unimportant to his and Nene’s completion of Jan’s work—rather, it offers commentary on composition itself.

Three lines from “The Ring and the Book” compare combining truth and imagination to the work of a goldsmith.

Nene assesses there are three stories that Juan wishes to “alloy.” These stories are Nene’s journey to the Palace, the story of Jan Gay and the Sex Variants study, and Juan’s own story.