The Gold Cross: Survival, Fetish, and Material History in Blackouts

What Is the Gold Cross?

The gold cross is a necklace inherited by the narrator from his father’s undercover gangster persona. In the novel, it appears as a physical object — a golden crucifix on a chain — that the narrator wears nearly constantly for a decade. The cross originates from his father’s stash of jewelry, worn only on rare occasions when he performed a “gangster” identity for work. After the narrator’s teenage suicide attempt and psychiatric hospitalization, the cross reappears in his bag of personal effects. He believes it was placed there by Juan, though the text leaves that ambiguous. The narrator adopts the cross as a permanent talisman, never removing it even to shower or during sex. The cross functions as both a material trace of personal history and a fetish object that absorbs desire and fear.

Where It Recurs in the Novel

The gold cross is primarily discussed in Chapter 3, titled “III. The Kinship.” This chapter contains the narrator’s extended explanation of the cross’s origin, his father’s performance of masculinity, and the object’s role in his survival. Key recurrences include:

• Origin story: The narrator describes hunting for his father’s jewelry as a child, never finding the lockbox that held the cross alongside a gun.
• The mugging: After being mugged in 1998, the narrator finds the cross in his bag — a “reverse mugging” he associates with Juan.
• Chronic losing: The narrator frames his attachment to the cross against his identity as a “chronic loser” who misplaces everything else. The cross is the one object he never loses.
• Loss of the cross: At the Palace, the narrator realizes the cross is missing for the first time in ten years. His fingers reach for it out of muscle memory.
• Juan’s interpretation: Juan calls the cross a “fetish object” and connects it to the narrator’s desires and fears.

The cross also echoes in other sections: the image of chains appears in the narrator’s sex work and in references to Lot’s wife looking back (Chapter 5). The blacked-out history of queer subjects in the Sex Variants study mirrors the cross as a material remnant of erased lives.

How Its Meaning Changes

The gold cross carries shifting significance as the narrative unfolds:

The cross evolves from an external marker of masculine power into an internalized mechanism for coping. It also comes to represent the materiality of queer history — something passed between men, carried forward despite erasure.

Character Connections

• The Narrator (nene): The cross is central to his story of survival. He is a self-described “chronic loser” who cannot hold onto objects or relationships. The cross is the one thing he kept for ten years, making it a symbol of his rare ability to attach. His fingers habitually reach for it; its loss disorients him. The narrator’s identity as a survivor of a suicide attempt, a sex worker, and a seeker of lost queer history all converge on this object.

• Juan Gay: Juan provides the language to understand the cross. He names it a “fetish object” and draws a direct line from the narrator’s childhood fascination with his father’s chains to the adult necklace. Juan connects the cross to the narrator’s ambivalent feelings about masculinity and desire. He also frames fetishism as a survival strategy: “To survive our own ambivalence.” Juan’s own history — as a model for Zhenya, as a survivor of psychiatric violence — resonates with the cross’s themes of material traces and recovery.

• Zhenya Gay (Eleanor Byrnes): While not directly linked to the cross, Zhenya’s art and her acceptance of Juan’s effeminacy create a counterpoint. The cross represents a fixed, hardened masculinity, while Zhenya’s drawings capture fluidity and vulnerability. The wicker chair she makes Juan sit in becomes another fetish object for the narrator, linking the two.

• The father: The cross originates with him but is never explicitly given to the narrator. The father’s undercover persona — embodying intimidation and charm — is what the narrator both longs for and fears. The cross becomes a way to carry that unresolved relationship.

Theme Connections

• Erasure and Recovery of Queer History: The cross is a physical remnant of a personal history that might otherwise be lost, much like the blacked-out pages of Sex Variants. The narrator’s refusal to lose the cross mirrors the novel’s project of rescuing queer lives from archival silence.

• Storytelling as Survival: Juan tells the narrator that fetishism helps survive ambivalence. The cross itself becomes a story — a way to narrate survival. The narrator’s ten-year attachment is itself a narrative of holding on.

• Institutional Violence and Pathologization: The narrator acquires the cross after a psychiatric hospitalization. The object is tied to his escape from the “nuthouse” and his refusal to be defined by diagnosis. It stands in contrast to the DSM’s pathologizing of homosexuality and “Puerto Rican Syndrome” that Juan describes.

• Memory, Ambiguity, and the Unreliable Past: The narrator cannot be sure Juan gave him the cross; the memory is contaminated by time and trauma. The cross’s origins — father or Juan — blur together, mirroring the novel’s overall uncertainty about what is real and what is invented.

• Queer Kinship and Community: The cross passes between men: from father to narrator, possibly from Juan to narrator. It is a material link in a chain of queer care, even when that care is imperfect or ambiguous.

Study Questions with Answers

Q1: Why does the narrator describe himself as a “chronic loser” in relation to the gold cross?
A: The narrator, citing an essay by Anna Freud that Juan recommended, defines a chronic loser as someone who habitually misplaces objects due to altered libidinal processes. He has lost passports, birth certificates, and countless other items. The gold cross is the sole exception — he held onto it for ten years without conscious effort. This contrast emphasizes that the cross is not just another possession but a fetish object that has absorbed his capacity for attachment. Losing it at the Palace forces him to confront both his dependence on the object and the fragility of all his attachments.

Q2: How does Juan’s analysis of the cross as a “fetish object” connect to the novel’s broader critique of institutional violence?
A: Juan explains that people fetishize objects “to survive our own ambivalence.” This insight directly parallels how the medical establishment pathologizes queer desire by categorizing it as deviancy. Just as the cross absorbs the narrator’s hatred and desire, psychiatric diagnoses like “Puerto Rican Syndrome” absorb social anxieties onto individual bodies. The cross, by remaining a private talisman, resists that institutional labeling. Juan’s own history of “ataques” and his life as a model for Zhenya also show alternative ways of surviving violence through transformation rather than fetish.

Q3: What is the significance of the cross appearing in the narrator’s bag after the mugging?
A: The narrator describes this as a “reverse mugging, a gifting.” He cannot explain how the cross got there, but he suspects Juan slipped it in. The timing — shortly after his hospitalization and suicide attempt — makes the cross a symbol of being “possessed and dispossessed at will, but never entirely alone.” The cross becomes proof of an unseen network of care. It also echoes the novel’s larger pattern: queer history survives through secret gifts, hidden exchanges, and material traces that outlast their carriers.

Q4: How does the gold cross relate to the novel’s use of blacked-out and redacted text?
A: The cross is a physical object that has been kept despite forces that try to erase it — the narrator’s own losing habits, the violence of the mugging, the passage of time. This parallels the blacked-out pages in the Sex Variants books that Juan collects. Where the blacked-out pages represent institutional erasure of queer lives, the cross represents a personal refusal to let go. Both are material witnesses: the cross worn on the body, the redacted text preserved in a box. The narrator’s loss of the cross at the Palace may indicate that even talismans fade, but the act of telling about them — in Juan’s room, in the book — makes them last longer than metal or fact.