Blackouts

by Justin Torres

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.