Characters Blackouts Justin Torres

Jan Gay (Helen Reitman): The Erased Architect of Queer History

Overview

Jan Gay—born Helen Reitman in 1902—is a real historical figure fictionalized in Justin Torres’s novel Blackouts. She was a queer researcher who conducted hundreds of interviews with homosexual subjects in the early twentieth century, co‑founded a nudist colony, and saw her work co‑opted and pathologized by the medical establishment. In the novel, she becomes the ghostly center of the narrator’s quest to recover a lost queer history. The story of Blackouts turns on Juan’s desire to remember and re‑imagine Jan’s life before it is blacked out forever.

Plot Role in the Novel

Jan appears indirectly, mostly through Juan’s experimental “film” El Caldero and his recollections. Her research formed the basis of the 1941 Sex Variants study, but her name was reduced to a single acknowledgment “for services rendered.” Juan, who knew her as a child when she lived with Zhenya Gay, pieces together her story from microfiche, newspaper clippings, and her own unpublished manuscript. The narrator inherits this project after Juan’s death, making Jan the symbolic origin of the novel’s central mystery: how queer lives are recorded, erased, and re‑animated through storytelling.

Motivations and Traits Shown Through Actions

Jan is driven by a relentless curiosity and a need to document lived queer experience. She travelled to Europe to study with Magnus Hirschfeld, adopted the name Jan (then a male name) to signal her gender non‑conformity, and founded a nudist colony—acts that show a refusal to hide. Yet she is also damaged: her mother’s instability and her father Ben Reitman’s abandonment—he was a famous “hobo doctor” tarred and sodomized by a mob—leave her with a volatile mix of rage and resilience. She drinks heavily, dances alone, and cannot maintain friendships. Her determination to counter the doctors’ pathologizing of the Sex Variants testimonies reveals a fierce protective instinct. Still, she hands her only copy of her manuscript to Dr. Dickinson, a decision that costs her control over the narrative.

Chronological Arc

  • Childhood (1902–1920s): Born Helen Reitman in the Midwest. A piano wire snaps near her eye; she grasps that her mother’s nerves are “wound too tightly.” Her father’s absence and her grandmother’s stoicism shape her. She reads the Bible’s Book of Ruth as a lesbian text and joins a Women’s Rifle Club.
  • Young adulthood: She changes her name to Jan Gay and meets Eleanor Byrnes (future Zhenya Gay). They “marry” privately and travel the Caribbean, cowriting children’s books. Jan begins interviewing lesbian women, amassing over three hundred sexual histories.
  • The Sex Variants study (1930s–1941): Jan meets Dr. Robert Latou Dickinson, then Dr. George Henry. She hands over her manuscript; the committee publishes Sex Variants under Henry’s name, framing homosexuality as pathology. Jan’s nudist colony and her book On Going Naked flourish.
  • Later life (1940s–1950s): Jan lives in a Chelsea loft with dancer Franziska Boas, Andy Warhol as a roommate. She drinks to excess, rages, and tries to write a counternarrative. The novel implies she dies isolated, her work incomplete.
  • Posthumous legacy: Juan’s film and the narrator’s manuscript attempt to restore Jan’s role. The ending of Blackouts leaves her story deliberately unresolved.

Relationships

  • Zhenya Gay (Eleanor Byrnes): Her first partner and co‑creator. They adopt the surname Gay and raise Juan as a child model. Their collaboration ends when Zhenya leaves.
  • Franziska Boas: Later lover, a dancer who owns the loft. Jan lives with her but the relationship is strained by Jan’s drinking.
  • Ben Reitman: Her father, a charismatic hobo doctor and former lover of Emma Goldman. Jan both idolizes and resents him; his tarring-and‑feathering becomes a parable of queer persecution.
  • Dr. Robert Latou Dickinson: The well‑meaning but ambivalent physician who takes Jan’s research and hands it to Henry. He represents the institutional co‑optation of queer knowledge.
  • Juan: As a child, Juan models for Zhenya’s illustrations and is cared for by the couple. As an adult, he becomes Jan’s archivist, blurring fact with imaginative reconstruction.
  • Thomas Painter and Edna Thomas: Fellow researchers and variants; their stories thread through Jan’s.

Key Decisions and Consequences

  1. Handing over the manuscript to Dickinson: Jan believes his curiosity will allow her work to reach a wider audience. Instead, the committee publishes a pathologizing study that erases her authorship. This decision fuels her later bitterness.
  2. Choosing to drink and isolate: She pushes away friends and lovers, losing her chance to publish a counternarrative while alive. Her legacy depends on Juan’s (and the narrator’s) salvage.
  3. Refusing to stop documenting: Even in decline, she jots down recollections and attempts to compose a response to the Sex Variants book. This persistence ensures that fragments survive.

Theme and Symbol Connections

  • Erasure and Recovery of Queer History: Jan’s blacked‑out story exemplifies the official erasure of queer lives. The narrator recovers her through imaginative reconstruction, acknowledging that “not all ambiguities need be resolved.”
  • Storytelling as Survival: Juan’s film, the narrator’s manuscript, and Jan’s own notes are acts of defiance. The novel suggests storytelling is the only way to resist institutional pathologization.
  • Institutional Violence and Pathologization: Dickinson and Henry turn Jan’s intimate interviews into a medical tract. This mirrors the DSM’s history and the creation of “Puerto Rican Syndrome.”
  • Memory, Ambiguity, and the Unreliable Past: Juan’s film blends documentary and fantasy. Jan herself becomes a symbol of the past that can only be glimpsed in fragments.
  • Queer Kinship and Community: Jan’s network—variants, lovers, artists—forms a chosen family that the novel celebrates even as it shows its fragility.

5 Book‑Specific Questions and Answers

  1. Why does Juan call his film El Caldero?
    The title references the earthen pot in which a witch lights her fire—an image from Rimbaud’s “After the Flood.” Juan uses it to evoke the alchemical, unpredictable process of recovering Jan’s story.

  2. What does Jan’s father’s tarring‑and‑feathering mean to her?
    She discovers a newspaper clipping after her grandmother’s death. The mob’s “fiendish gross barbaric acts” (sodomy, burning with cigars) mirror the violence faced by queer people. It both horrifies her and makes her determined to decode sexual codes.

  3. Why does the novel say Ruth and Naomi are lovers?
    Juan explains that the Hebrew word for “cleave” is the same as in Adam and Eve, and that Jan recognized the story as lesbian desire before she was twenty. This interpretation frames Jan’s lifelong project of reading queerly.

  4. How does Jan react when Dickinson asks her to leave her manuscript?
    She hands it over with difficulty, saying “My only copy, Doctor.” She focuses on his wry smile and thinks “Maybe, maybe,” showing her hope that curiosity will prevail—a hope that later proves naive.

  5. What is the “backward glance” that Juan refers to?
    Juan compares Jan’s story to Lot’s wife, who looked back at Sodom despite knowing she would turn to salt. For Jan, looking backward (into memory, loss, and trauma) is both dangerous and necessary; it leads to the blackouts that define her life and her narrative.