Blackouts

by Justin Torres

Still, in moments, speaking with Juan there in the Palace, I’d be reminded of the false self, the pseudophilosophical self, or the naif, or simply remember, in a flash, a scene in a bar, or in bed with some man, and what a phony I’d been, or how afraid, or repulsed; how I grasped desperately for admiration, or pity, and lied to get it, and I’d burn all over again, with embarrassment, and find myself unable to go on.

“Darling, the only thing anyone should be embarrassed about is taking themselves too seriously.

They came to advocate, to inform, to protest the raids and roundups; they came out of curiosity; they came on a lark, for a bit of a hoot, and found themselves intrigued; they came as a favor; some arrived angry, righteous; others confused and suicidal; more than a few came with desperate hope for a cure. Those who stormed out often returned. They learned something of their own desire. They were asked to remember, and they remembered: a glimpse of the father in the shower; being discovered with the neighbor girl; an awful licking; the days before the advent of nylon, and how the silk hosiery rolled gently down to the ankle; they remembered children whose custody they’d lost; they remembered children they’d abandoned. And when they were asked to strip, they obliged, and their names were anonymized, and their faces blurred, until they were confined to the realm of the symbolic, naked and labeled: Narcissistic, Homosexual, Hoodlum—determined and erased.

Each vignette, Juan said, was a kind of meditation, offering new ways of seeing and relating.

“Youth with its enthusiasm saw to it that neither the fire nor the singing would die out. That’s Colón.

“It’s true, all erotic experience can be reduced to crudeness, nene. But does that mean it ought to be?”

“Do you know why we fetishize, nene? To survive our own ambivalence. Perhaps the chains, and especially the crucifix, became totems, able to absorb both hatred and desire. Perhaps in their glimmer and weight you saw a reflection of all that you wanted, and all that you feared.”

I can perceive us from the eyes of the round family in the neighboring booth;

Juan had pushed me to grasp two concepts: (1) the idea that stigmatized persons live in a literarily defined world; and (2) the value of getting lost, or absorbed—sometimes haunted, sometimes enriched—by what’s been said and written about you and your kind, and what’s been erased or suppressed.