Thomas Painter: The Disinherited Recruiter in Blackouts
Overview
Thomas Painter appears only through the historical narratives that Juan weaves for the narrator in Justin Torres’s Blackouts. The novel’s ending makes clear that the Thom we encounter is a fictionalized figure, distinct from the real‑life amateur researcher who participated in the Sex Variants study under the pseudonym Will G. In Juan’s telling, Thom is a disinherited wealthy man who used his resources to recruit hustlers for Dr. George Henry’s study and later assisted Alfred Kinsey. He embodies a paradox: a figure of privilege who nonetheless operated in the shadowy, often criminalized subcultures of queer New York. His story, as filtered through Juan’s memory and the narrator’s imagination, serves as a lens for the novel’s central themes of erasure and recovery of queer history.
Plot Role
In the chapter outline, Thomas Painter is introduced in Chapter 2 (“The Variants”) as part of Juan’s origin story for the Sex Variants study. He is presented alongside Jan Gay, the ambitious interviewer who originally collected the testimonies, and Dr. George Henry, the psychiatrist who medicalized them. Where Jan provided the human stories, Thom brought bodies—specifically, the male hustlers who became the study’s subjects. His role is that of a broker between the street and the clinic. The narrator learns about Thom only through Juan’s disjointed recollections and the blacked‑out pages of the Sex Variants volumes. The novel does not give Thom an independent scene; he exists entirely as a story within a story, a ghost that Juan summons to illustrate how knowledge about queer lives was produced through complicity and exploitation.
Motivations and Traits
Juan implies that Thom’s motivation was partly economic—his disinheritance left him needing money—but also driven by a desire for connection and power. By recruiting hustlers, Thom gained access to a world that fascinated him and simultaneously secured a place within an emerging scientific enterprise. The novel’s postface states that the real Painter’s archive is housed at the Kinsey Institute, suggesting a genuine investment in research. But the fictional Thom is more ambiguous: he is neither a heroic rescuer of hidden histories nor a purely exploitative figure. The narrator, channeling Juan, characterizes him as someone who “moved between” worlds, never fully belonging to either the wealthy class he lost or the marginalized men he recruited. His actions—photographing a hustler with a parachuting‑regiment tattoo (as indicated in the endnotes of Chapter 7)—reveal a documentary impulse tinged with voyeurism. He both preserves and objectifies the lives he records.
Chronological Arc
Because Thom appears only in Juan’s fragments, his chronological arc must be pieced together. According to the chapter outline, he was born into wealth, later disinherited, and then turned to the underground economy of queer New York. He participated in the Sex Variants study both as a subject (under the pseudonym Will G) and as a recruiter. After the study’s publication in 1941, he reportedly worked with Alfred Kinsey at Indiana University. Juan’s narrative suggests that Thom eventually faded into obscurity or died without the recognition that Kinsey or Jan Gay achieved. The novel’s blinkered endnotes confirm that many figures from the study have been lost to history. Thom’s arc mirrors the fate of the thousands of unnamed queer people whose testimonies were redacted, stolen, or simply forgotten. He is a reminder that even the architects of preservation can themselves be erased.
Relationships
Thom’s most significant relationship is with the men he recruited. The photograph described in Chapter 7 implies a transactional intimacy: he captured their naked bodies for the record, but he also witnessed their vulnerability. The novel does not depict a reciprocal bond. Instead, the hustlers appear as anonymous types, their individual stories subsumed into the study’s clinical format. Thom’s relationship with Jan Gay is not detailed, but the parallel between them is clear: both were amateur researchers who handed their work over to doctors who then pathologized it. The postface notes that the real Painter “was, like Jan, an important recruiter.” In the novel, Juan contrasts Jan’s holistic, empathetic approach with Thom’s more detached role as a collector of bodies. The narrator never meets Thom; he is only a voice in Juan’s stories, which themselves are filtered through the narrator’s unreliability. This layered mediation highlights how queer lineage is always at risk of being distorted or lost.
Key Decisions and Consequences
Thom’s central decision—to become a recruiter—had both immediate and long‑term consequences. In the short term, it gave him a purpose and possibly a modest income. However, by funneling hustlers into a psychiatric study, he participated in a system that labeled homosexuality a disorder. The Sex Variants study’s published volumes, with their emphasis on pathology, contributed to the very medical stigma that later justified conversion therapy and institutionalization. The themes of institutional violence and pathologization in Blackouts are directly connected to Thom’s actions. Yet the novel also suggests that without recruiters like Thom, those queer lives would have left no trace at all. The blacked‑out pages in the Sex Variants books represent both erasure and possibility—the stories are still there, if only we learn to read through the redactions. Thom’s choice to collaborate with the medical establishment ensured that some evidence survived, but at the cost of having those lives defined by the very institutions that sought to cure them.
Theme and Symbol Connections
Thom functions as a symbol of the novel’s preoccupation with the ethics of historical recovery. He is neither purely a hero nor a villain, but a morally complex intermediary. The disinheritance that defined his social position mirrors the broader disinheritance of queer people from their own histories. The tattooed hustler he photographed—bearing a parachuting regiment insignia (see Chapter 7 endnotes)—becomes an emblem of those who fall through the cracks of official records, caught between the sky and the ground. Thom’s archive, housed at the Kinsey Institute, is a repository of such lives, but the novel questions whether any archive can truly preserve the dignity of its subjects. The recurrence of storytelling as survival in the novel underscores Thom’s role: he told the doctors about the hustlers, but only Juan and the narrator can reclaim those stories for themselves. In this sense, Thom is a necessary but insufficient ancestor—one who passed on fragments that must be imaginatively reassembled.
Questions and Answers
1. Is the Thomas Painter in Blackouts the same as the historical figure? No. The novel’s postface explicitly states that “the Thom in this book is a fiction.” The real Thomas Painter was a participant and recruiter for the Sex Variants study, but Juan’s version is a character shaped by memory, omission, and invention. The narrator does not claim historical accuracy; he alloys fact with imagination, as Juan taught him.
2. Why does Juan tell the narrator about Thom? Juan uses Thom as a case study in how queer history is built on collaboration with oppressive institutions. He shows the narrator that even well‑meaning participants like Thom were complicit in the pathologization of homosexuality. The story becomes a warning and an example of the memory ambiguity and unreliable past that defines the entire novel.
3. What did Thom actually do for the Sex Variants study? According to Juan’s account, Thom recruited male hustlers to be interviewed and examined by Dr. George Henry’s team. He also participated as a subject himself under the pseudonym Will G. Later, he worked with Alfred Kinsey, continuing his role as a collector of sexual histories. The exact nature of his work with Kinsey is left vague in the novel, but it implies ongoing collaboration in the field of sex research.
4. How does Thom connect to the theme of queer kinship? Thom’s relationship to the hustlers he recruited is ambiguous—transactional yet intimate. The novel suggests that even flawed, utilitarian interactions can create queer kinship and community. Thom and the hustlers shared a bond formed by necessity and survival, a makeshift family within the shadows of the medical gaze. Juan’s decision to include Thom in his storytelling affirms that these bonds matter, even when they are not loving.
5. What does Thom’s disinheritance mean in the novel’s context? Disinheritance represents the cutting off of queer people from lineage, property, and belonging. Thom’s fall from wealth mirrors the exile that many queer individuals experienced from their families. In the novel, this loss opens the door to a chosen life but also forces Thom into a role as a go‑between in the sex‑research economy. His disinheritance is both personal tragedy and a condition of possibility for his involvement in the study. It also resonates with the novel’s larger theme of losing and salvaging history.