Justin Torres, the 'queer' writer who has conquered the literary summit of the United States with a book inspired by 'Pedro Páramo'

The National Book Award-winning novel was born in a box full of books. Justin Torres, the author of Blackouts, was working at Modern Times, a defunct San Francisco bookstore, when he had to download a donation. “It looked like they were the books of someone who had recently died. Almost all of them were novels, but among these there was a strange sexology book, a medical text that simply blew my mind,” says Torres, who will read a fragment of his work this Thursday at a free event at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. That document was Sex Variantsa study published in 1941 where researchers George Henry and Jan Gay published one of the first treatises on identity queer in the United States and several years before the famous reports by Alfred Kinsey came to light.

The discovery made Torres, a writer queer 44-year-old born in New York, will wonder about the curious reader, who had among his properties this research on 40 men and 40 women that began in 1935 and that had to be searched, since it was barely available to members of the medical community. “It was fascinating to come across this and meet people who willingly exposed everything about themselves, their sex lives, their bodies. His desire was to change the narrative around what queer, although some of them did want to be cured,” says Torres. Sex Variants It was empirical proof of the clinical history and criminalization to which part of the LGTBIQ community has been subjected.

This is how Juan, one of the characters in blackouts, which will be published in Spain by Random House in September. He is an old man withering away inside a residence in an unnamed desert city. His life takes place between memories, which are brought to the present by an anonymous narrator who has shown up at the scene to try to question Juan about the two mysterious volumes that rest on an old radiator. There are two volumes of Sex Variants which have many parts censored with black crossouts, which gives the book one of the meanings of its title.

Torres' prose is charged with erotic energy and permanent sexual tension. This is a stance on the peaceful times that exist, where sexual joy is a repressed pleasure. “I would like to see more depictions of sex, and especially that sex that is not safe or that needs a seal of approval from the censors of correctness, whether they come from the left or the right. I hope the next generation realizes how strange these times have been and brings back free love,” laughs the author, who is not afraid of controversy.

The work has been awarded in the United States at a particularly conservative time. Although Torres has always moved through the liberal poles of the country, the American media is full of news about censorship of literary works and authorities trying to regulate the bodies of women and trans people. Torres received the award from her in a ceremony that had a great political moment. The winners read a joint message about the War between Israel and Hamas, which has left thousands of innocent victims inside the Gaza Strip. “It seemed like a very balanced message to me. If I had said anything on my part, I think I would have focused much more on the disparity of violence and focused on the long Israeli occupation. “I would have said something much more controversial,” she says.

The National Book Award jury has highlighted the “aesthetic complexity, multiplicity and beauty” of the images created by Torres. The author crafts a story that corrects the erasure that people queer suffered for decades. Not only does he do it through the character of Juan, but also through the American Jan Gay, one of the authors of the treatise and a disciple of the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, a center that developed knowledge until the Nazis looted the place and burned the books. “The investigation began entirely thanks to Jan Gay and her activism to try to replicate what she learned from Hirschfeld, about liberation sexology and changing the negative attitudes of society, but a committee took everything from her and put themselves in her place.” against. “She hated the final result despite having been a central part,” says Torres through the Zoom chat.

Blackouts It is Torres' second book and comes 12 years after We animals (2011). Her literary debut, a novel based on her childhood memories and her parents' toxic relationship, was well received by critics. It also had a film adaptation premiered at the Sundance festival. It also meant a break with a past full of economic burdens and menial jobs. It was the beginning of her tours through the United States writers' circuit, where she was presented as one of the most interesting new Latin voices publishing in Granta, The New Yorker, Harper's, among other magazines. Jobs in bookstores are over. Torres moved on to the world of academia, where he became a fellow at Stanford and Harvard universities. Today he is an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The long period between books allowed him to prepare for what was to be a long-awaited second novel. “I think I took a lot of time to develop a writing style and my literary references. I needed to expand,” says Torres. Among the debts settled in Blackouts There are the influences that have helped him explore his path as a writer. His characters quote Rimbaud, Pedro Paramo, to Jean Genet to Tennesee Williams, Anna Freud and Oscar Wilde.

The judge It has been recognized the enormous influence it has had on the novel The kiss of spider women, the 1976 classic by Argentine Manuel Puig, where a militant against the dictatorship and a homosexual talk at length inside a cell. Torres also recognizes the great debt he owes to Juan Rulfo's most famous book. “One of the reasons why Pedro Paramo It has stayed with me for so long because of its way of narrating through a polyphonic vignette. History is voices that are constantly being drowned out and I think that puts a huge emphasis on community. Although he tries to tell the story of his father, he ends up telling one that affected many others,” says Torres.

In his search for style, Torres redoubles his commitment to telling a story in fragments. The vignettes allowed readers to peer into their childhood in a poetic way in We animals. Now they allow you to collapse time. “You are not reading to find out what happens later, but what is happening now. It is a very different relationship with time, since on many occasions the past, present and future are layered within a vignette,” indicates the author. From here other meanings of the book emerge: the memories that appear in memory after a time in the dark. “You have a moment that leads you to another, but they are not associated in time or chronology, but it is the next one that jumps and comes to the surface,” adds the author. The memories that have emerged in the two created characters have a dialogue against oblivion.