The Blacked-Out Sex Variants Volumes: Erasure and Illumination in Blackouts

What Are the Blacked-Out Sex Variants Volumes?

In Justin Torres’s novel Blackouts, the two volumes of Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns (1941) are not ordinary books. The copies that Juan possesses have been deliberately defaced: every passage and photograph is covered in black ink, leaving only fragments visible. These volumes are the physical remains of a medical study that originally documented interviews with queer subjects in 1930s New York. The study began with Jan Gay’s interviews of over three hundred women, but the final publication, edited by Dr. George W. Henry, focused on pathology and erased identities. Juan’s blacked-out copies represent both the literal censorship of queer lives and the possibility of recovering what was hidden. He found them in a cardboard box left in the lobby of the Palace, labeled “I’M YOURS NOW,” and carried them to his room, where he read them obsessively.

Where the Volumes Appear in the Novel

The blacked-out books recur across several chapters. In Chapter 2, Juan recounts discovering them and describes his practice of flipping through at random to find “a sketch of a life, ever unfolding.” During Juan’s long daytime naps, the narrator reads the volumes, studying the erasures and wondering what to look for: “Solace? Strategy? Juan himself?” The books also surface in the endpapers and illustration credits, where images are “created from page vi of Sex Variant Women in Literature” and from multiple pages of Sex Variants itself. The novel’s own illustrations replicate the blacked-out aesthetic. In Chapter 8, the narrator explains that he taped photos from Juan’s belongings into his own manuscript, drawing directly from the volumes’ imagery. The books are thus not just a plot device but a formal principle: the novel itself becomes a kind of blacked-out volume, filled with partial testimonies and erased photographs.

How the Symbol’s Meaning Changes

The meaning of the blacked-out volumes shifts as the novel progresses. At first, they seem purely tragic—a monument to loss. Juan notes that Jan Gay’s original research manuscript was “deliberately trashed” by the committee, and nothing remains. The black ink becomes a metaphor for institutional erasure: the subjects’ faces were blurred, their names anonymized, and they were “confined to the realm of the symbolic, naked and labeled.” But Juan’s relationship to the volumes transforms this loss into an act of creative resistance. He says he prefers the blacked-out copies, because they contain “little poems of illumination” and offer “a counternarrative to whatever might have been Dr. Henry’s agenda.” The erasure itself becomes generative. By blacking out the medical framing, Juan and the narrator can focus on the surviving fragments of the subjects’ own voices. The volumes evolve from evidence of destruction into a catalyst for reconstruction, alloying fact with imagination.

Character and Theme Connections

Juan’s entire project of recovery centers on the blacked-out volumes. He extracts a promise from the narrator to tell the story after his death, and that story must be “bent, and lied, and invented” — the same process he applies to the volumes. The narrator’s own story parallels this: he is a survivor of institutional violence (a psychiatric hospitalization) and carries a gold cross that represents both his father’s gangster persona and his own survival. The volumes connect to multiple themes on the site: erasure and recovery of queer history, storytelling as survival, institutional violence and pathologization, memory ambiguity and the unreliable past, and queer kinship and community. Characters like Jan Gay, Thomas Painter, and Dr. George W. Henry are directly tied to the study’s production. The volumes also mirror the novel’s own method: the narrator admits that even real historical figures have been turned into fictional characters, filtered through Juan’s memories and his own.

Four Study Questions with Answers

1. Why does Juan say he prefers the blacked-out copies to an unexpurgated edition?
Juan explains that the blacked-out volumes contain “little poems of illumination” that form a counternarrative to the medical framework imposed by Dr. Henry. By reading through the erasures, he can focus on the subjects’ own voices, their vernacular, and their particular sorrows and hopes. The black ink becomes a filter that removes the pathological labeling and allows the testimonies to speak on their own terms.

2. How do the blacked-out volumes connect to the novel’s themes of memory and unreliability?
The volumes are incomplete and partially obscured, mirroring the narrator’s own unreliable recollection of Juan and the events at the Palace. The novel explicitly refuses to resolve ambiguities: the narrator says “not all ambiguities need be resolved.” Just as the black ink leaves gaps in the historical record, so does memory leave gaps in personal history. The volumes become a symbol of how queer past is known only through fragments, and how storytelling must fill those gaps with imagination rather than certainty.

3. In what way does the physical act of blacking out the text mirror the institutional violence of the study?
The black ink represents the committee’s deliberate erasure of individual identities and experiences. The study anonymized names, blurred faces, and categorized subjects as pathological types. Juan notes that the committee “didn’t want its findings to be tainted” by Jan Gay’s activist approach or Thomas Painter’s experiential documentation. The blacking out is a literal enactment of that censorship: covering over the lived reality of queer people to produce a medical narrative of deviance.

4. How does Juan use the volumes to teach the narrator about storytelling?
Juan insists that the narrator must “bend, and lie, and invent” when telling the story after his death — a principle he learned from the volumes. By reading the blacked-out testimonies, he saw how the subjects themselves “had been freer and more fluid when it came to sex acts, roles, identities.” The erasures taught him that truth is not a fixed fact but something that must be actively shaped. He compares this process to goldsmithing: the “pure hard metal of fact made malleable by the alloy of his imagination.”