Summary
In this section we are back to learning about Jan and Zhenya. By conducting research, Juan was able to find the women's birth names and information about their early lives. The two women met in 1927, the year that Juan was born. They dated briefly and then married, and both took on their chosen last name of Gay. They traveled around the Caribbean and Central America, co-writing their first children's book. Zhenya's illustrations were brilliant and, they understood, the reason why the books were published. Jan helped write the stories, and young Juan served as their model. The women loved imagining alternate lives for him, "an ethereal boy who had been briefly, affectingly, their own" (187).
As a child, Juan went north with the Gays from San Juan to New York. He was going to stay with an aunt and uncle living in New York until the rest of family arrived; he assumed that the Gays paid for his passage in exchange for the modeling, and in any case he loved them so much that he was exciting to sail the ocean with them. For decades, Zhenya drew Juan into her books. It is Juan's turn to recount a film to nene; he calls it "The Opening of a Door," after a book that Jan was reading during their sea voyage. His film, he tells nene, is an attempt to compose Jan's life into something organized, to find a conceit that could hold it all together.
The film opens in a Brooklyn hospital in 1930. Jan is talking to a doctor whose interest is in "gathering evidence on the gynecology of homosexuality" (194). He believes that he will be able to prove a physiological difference in homosexual women and ultimately contribute to developing theories of the causes of homosexuality. He talks for a while about how he would need to collect a lot more evidence, and speaks about his interests which Jan can see, quite obviously, are based much more on eugenics than in activism. He tries to prove his progressive nature to her by talking about the risk he has taken advocating for birth control, and Jan, unimpressed, says that her interest in women's sexual lives has nothing to do with reproduction.
Dr. Dickinson is intent to make clear to Jan that 1) he admires several lesbian women and 2) he believes that homosexuality is an affliction that he, as a doctor of women's health, is responsible for advancing science in the direction of a cure. Even though Jan disagrees with him, she is pleased to find, at his core, not pity for lesbians but curiosity. He is also still quite ambitious, even though he is older, which Jan takes as a sign of his wanting to firm up his legacy. Believing these to be positive things, she leaves Dickinson her only copy of her research manuscript for him to read.
The film cuts to a montage of Dickinson's life. Every scene begins with the turning of a doorknob, and viewers do not know what room the door will open onto until we are in it. Dickinson opens the same door to the exam room over and over again, with changing patients, medical evolution, and a change in Dickinson's manner of examination. Certain things would trouble a modern viewer, Juan said, but could be understood within the framework of outdated gender roles and medical ethics. There are also, however, scenes that reveal Dickinson hiding cameras in the exam room and stimulating women to "understand their reactions" (199).
Juan says that Jan could not have known at that early meeting how her work – the three hundred interviews she did across Europe and New York – would be erased and overshadowed first by Dickinson's story and then by the story of Dr. Henry. She knew that it could not be published without the cover of a male medical doctor, which Juan says is the great paradox, as she had no patriarch in her story. She was totally self-made, abandoned by her gynecologist father when she was a toddler so he could administer care to those who could not afford it, living his life as the radical, famed "hobo doctor." He was the great love of the revolutionary Emma Goldman, who was Jan's sexual awakening. She resented her father for walking out on her and her mother, and only knew about what he was doing from newspaper clippings.
Jan faced many trials and tribulations trying to get her book published. She worked alongside Dickinson and Henry for a while, as well as Thomas Painter, and was excited about documenting lesbian lives. Dickinson ultimately calls her work folk wisdom, and is not at all interested in putting his name on her book, though he is interested in her access to queer circles, her knowledge of the "deviant underground" (202). He would like to find a way to work together and suggests they initiate the process that will form the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants. Jan's role will be administrative, primarily focused on recruitment. It will eventually break her, Juan says, but at the moment Dickinson extends the offer, she feels like she has finally caught a break.
Analysis
The interruptions to the "main story," the story of Jan, underscore the fact that there is no main story to this novel, or to the project started by Juan and finished by nene. The stories of their lives are just as important as the stories of Jan's life; as vital as it is to uncover the story of Jan and her work, it is equally essential to document the lives of nene and Juan, to not lose them to the annals of history. Juan embarks on what is essentially a biography of Jan; in doing so, Torres demonstrates another hybridity possible to the novel form.
Juan's film, "The Opening of a Door," uses the title as a structural conceit, circling back to opening doors across time periods and characters and settings. It is a clear, communicable visual detail, as well as being a common idiomatic expression. Jan is, quite literally, desperately hoping to find an open door, someone to green light her book. The figure of the door is a threshold, connecting two spaces to one other, opening from one location onto the next. The door itself is a kind of liminal or non-space – not quite in the new one, and not quite in the old one. And in fact all of the scenes Juan describes are ones of uncertainty, of some kind of hope for direction or clarity.
There is a shocking naïveté to Jan's behavior when she entrusts her research to Dr. Dickinson. Until this point it seemed Jan was nothing short of highly discerning and diligent, that she would be endlessly suspicious of men in power. The simplicity of Juan's explanation – that she felt she had a decent read on Dickinson, and she was really in a desperate spot – seems almost perfunctory. On further reading, it seems that the novel is not interested in that kind of question of motivation which so often powers literary fiction; it is instead interested in how to tell a story, and it has chosen to let the characters not explain themselves too deeply. The result is that Jan may seem naive in that scene, but she also seems human, more human than a fictional character can typically be.
Jan's story is particular to her, but the story of bigoted people co-opting good faith ideas for their own harmful plans is common throughout history, especially in the histories of certain social movements. The story shows how vital intentions are: Jan's intentions were to shed light on marginalized voices so that people might feel less alone, and the same study in the hands of people with bad intentions becomes a battleground for eugenics. The story is both a cautionary tale and a correction of the record. It warns of Jan's mistakes and it saves her from her fate, recasting her in the glow she deserves.
Jan is portrayed as a feminist icon throughout the novel, and her story is one of countless stories of women who were not taken seriously for their expertise. The kind of work Jan was doing was anthropological, but no one gave that any credit. Hard sciences based in fact, like medicine and psychology, were considered much more worthwhile pursuits. But those kinds of facts they were after, we come to see in the novel, did not exist; the project was a human one, not a scientific one, but that was too feminine to be taken seriously. In a way, the final object of the novel follows in the footsteps of Jan's anecdotal research, pulling together people's stories not to prove a theory, but to demonstrate something about human nature.
