Blackouts
The central motif of the book, blackouts are made literal throughout the novel with the inclusion of the inked-out primary texts, which remind us of the particular lives and experiences of the participants in the Sex Variants study. Throughout the novel, the blacked out source material sits beside the narrative between Juan and nene, coalescing into a polyphonous, multi-generational narrative that includes all of the people whose stories were co-opted for the study, and whose real stories are shared through the emerging form of the blackout poem. We also see blackouts at the narrative level, as Juan and nene's ongoing conversation only happens at night, in the pitch black of the Palace.
The Flood
The flood appears several times throughout the text, first as the event in the narrative that causes nene to leave the apartment and travel to the desert to find Juan. In the scene, nene falls asleep at his kitchen sink, causing his apartment and his landlady's unit below him to flood with water; in nene's life, it is a key inflection point that marks a transition from a kind of groggy indifference to a more awakened awareness. It provokes an allusion to the Biblical flood, in which God sees the way mankind has been acting and sends a great flood to cleanse them of their disobedience. Later on in the novel, when Juan reminds nene that he forgot about him for ten years, nene describes the return of Juan to his life as "rushing back" "like a flood."
The Book of Ruth
In the Hebrew Bible the Book of Ruth tells the story of Ruth and Naomi, who pledge themselves to each other after both of their husbands die. Feminist interpretations of the story have often read Ruth as a story about lesbianism, and Juan calls the story the first example of lesbian desire in literature, even pre-dating Sappho. To tell the story of young Jan, Jan before she was Jan, Juan tells nene that she carried around the torn pages of the Book of Ruth when she was still a teenager; she may not have had elders to look up to, or predecessors to follow, but she did have an origin story that felt true to her.
Liam's Scarf
Nene recalls a memory of Liam in which he puts on the ragged scarf he knit for himself: "I hand Liam his scarf, which he has knitted himself, poorly, and how proud he is of the garish colors and the holes and dropped stitches, the inelegance of it all, and how I watched him from the bed with a book many nights, knitting in the lamplight and playing records with our little fat, deaf cat on his lap, and how I had thought him beautiful, soft, cozy, and at the same time there was the dust and clutter and cat hair, and always the same records, broken in the same places, and how. I would ponder what made him so soft – fear – and what he was so afraid of – me." (241) For nene, the scarf – its softness, its ugliness – holds symbolic meaning for all of his conflicting thoughts about Liam. At once beautiful and pitiful, so soft so as to risk easy breakage. The object of the scarf makes concretes all that nene fears about his partner.
Books
Books themselves become a recurring motif in the novel. Juan repeatedly alludes to older texts or explicitly mentions other books, often reciting whole lines from literature to nene's astonishment. The recurrence of books in the texts builds into a key element of the narrative and ultimately the novel's themes: this is a book about certain characters, but it is also a book about literature itself, about the stories we inherit, and the stories we remember.
