Traversing deleted texts, fragmented memories, and punctured histories
Rebuilding a path in the dark

Open any page and you'll find an endless stream of sketches of lives rising from the past, each one a single testimony of what the character has overcome or failed to overcome.
― Page 117

The original title, "blackouts," has several meanings in the novel, including blackouts, temporary memory loss, and erasing writing in black.
When we open a book, the first thing we see are pages marked with black marker.
At the heart of this deleted text is the existential study Sexual Variants and the forgotten name behind it, Jan Gay.
In the 1930s, sociologist Jan Gay, a queer researcher and lesbian herself, collected testimonies from over 300 homosexuals about their lives and desires.
Due to institutional limitations that only allowed publication under the name of a prominent male physician, Gay relinquished his research to others. He believed he was finally bringing it to light, but in reality, at that moment, the testimonies were shrouded in darkness. Jane Gay's name was erased, queer testimonies were filled with pathological diagnoses, and desire was translated into disability.
Those who came to testify are left with blurred nude photos.
The novel begins its story right at that erased spot.
This novel captivatingly occupies the void created by darkness, holes, and blackouts, sensually reconstructing stories through the cracks of suppressed history through fiction.
The unique format, intertwining numerous images, case studies, film scripts and flashbacks, instantly draws the reader in, while the words cut unsteadily between the deleted texts come back to life with a poetic and dissonant tone, along with a sense of unfamiliarity.
The novel vividly portrays the vitality of things that can only be revealed and approached in such darkness.

Our stories survive in silence, seclusion, omission, and void.
How to "Reread" in Queer Sense

But promise me, yes yes.
To twist, lie, fabricate and craft something inert.
I promise, Juan.
― Page 147

In a small room in the Palace, a desert ruin and a home for wanderers, the nameless narrator, with nowhere to go, takes care of the dying old man, Juan Gay.
Juan hands over the blackened pages of his study, Sexual Variants, to the narrator, nicknamed "Nene."
While Juan awaits death, two queers from different generations begin to connect their lives, loves, memories, and stories, moving back and forth between countless texts and images over this darkened history.
They exchange fragmented memories, such as the vicious jokes about the "corrective" words they exchanged while incarcerated in a mental hospital, Juan's childhood days with Jan Gay, and Nene's brazen seduction of men as a child sex worker.
Nene questions her own existence and desires, and Juan continues his testimony by revealing a broader queer history—a history of Puerto Rican race and immigration, pathologization and discrimination.
Meanwhile, their conversations are filled with trivial and sensual things.
The nursery rhyme that lingers in my head, my father's shining necklace, the image of a policeman who seems to be taking me somewhere other than here, a barking dog wearing an expensive jacket, the beautifully whispered lines of a fairy tale that struck me as 〈queer〉 in the most uncanny way… … .
Like pages from "Sexual Mutants" with parts blown away, they gently weave fragmented and disjointed stories together in the darkness.


This novel, which frequently blacks out and then begins anew in a completely different place, makes us look again at the complexly intertwined places of desire and memory.
The stories of Juan and Nene are fictional.
These “twisting and fabricating lies” set in motion the past that seems fixed, the history that has been forced into silence, and the things that have been erased and omitted.
The dissonant words that arise and clash between memory, desire, and identity are themselves a record of restoration that “sings all the time, and therefore can burn all the time.”
So, a new path to places that seemed inaccessible, including the missing history of Jane Gay, a way to reread history and the past in a queer sense, “getting lost by the erased and the suppressed.
It shows us how to “become sometimes possessed, sometimes enriched.”

To sing all the time, to burn all the time
We must not stop talking

Let me tell you something you must not forget.
There is no need to completely clear up any ambiguities.
― Pages 274-275

Torres comments on "The Dark Side":
〈As with the history of the gay community, what I find most uncomfortable about queer history is that it is full of pathological explanations.
There is also the difficulty of encountering so many things in history—all these ephemeral artifacts, photographs, letters, things that we don't quite know how to interpret or put into context.
(……) But I wanted to keep the readers in a state of ambiguity, without trying to make everything clear.
I also wanted to ignite curiosity about the narrative potential of the past.
“So that you can feel deeply immersed in the way the past speaks to the present,” says translator Song Seom-byeol.
This book is about how to tell a history that has been silenced, and how to listen to the stories told in small voices.
I have always kept in mind that our real stories survive in silence, seclusion, omission, footnotes, and blank spaces, and that we must never stop speaking to rescue them from the darkness.
The history of queerness is a history of recovery and restoration, and we share that tender mystery with one another.〉 In this way, 『Blackouts』 makes us reimagine stories from dark, swept-away places and swept-away traces.
And so it offers us a new way of looking at a world full of ghostly shadows and flashes of truth, between the past we inherit and the past we create, a way to be fulfilled while still being lost in ambiguity.


A word from the translator

"The Dark War" is a book about how to tell a history that has been silenced, and how to listen to the stories told in small voices.
I have always kept in mind that our real stories survive in silence, seclusion, omission, footnotes, and blank spaces, and that we must never stop speaking to rescue them from the darkness.
Queer history is a history of recovery and restoration, and we share that tender mystery with one another.
I hope readers will listen too.
I wish we could lie side by side in the darkness and listen until the end.