Summary
Juan finally begins to tell nene about the project. In the 1930s, queer participants – "variants" as they are known in the study – were polled, photographed, and interviewed about their experiences with desire. Juan describes the pattern of many of them arriving to the interviews and leaving once they realized what they were being asked, many of them to return again. They were relentlessly categorized, studied, anonymized, yet in the process they "learned something of their own desire" (77). This research was published in the book called Sex Variants, authored by a man named George W. Henry who served as lead researcher, even though it was really the project of Jan Gay.
A wealthy man named Thomas Painter, also an amateur researcher, pushed the study even further; he was interested in people slightly outside the original parameters of the study, like straight hustlers. He was also interested in Puerto Rico, calling the 1950s his Puerto Rican years. nene is shocked to discover that Juan knew both Jan and Thomas – Jan briefly from his youth, when he was temporarily in the care of her partner Zhenya, and Thomas Painter later on in life. Juan did not make the connection between them until he was an adult.
Jan Gay, Juan tells nene, was born in the midwest in 1902. She was a naturalist lesbian and founded a nudist colony in upstate New York with her partner Zhenya, and authored several books about nudity. During a period of travels through Europe, Jan began conducting research on lesbian lives, interviewing people she met and collecting sexual histories. She wanted to publish her work but no publisher would take on such a risqué topic without the co-signature of a medical doctor, which is what eventually led to the creation of the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants. The committee took all of Jan's research and did not return it to her; they did not want to endorse Jan's activist approach to documenting the lives of lesbians, but instead had nefarious plans to pathologize queerness and find explanations for deviance.
Dr. Henry personally selected the variants that made it into the published book. Despite interviewing hundreds of people, only forty men and forty women were included. Juan draws a parallel between these forty men and forty women to Moses, the flood, and Sodom. nene asks if Juan has ever seen a copy of the book without the inked-out parts and Juan explains that he saw it once, special requested from a library, and that he could only read it while being supervised. He says that he prefers his copy, though, calling it a "counternarrative to whatever might have been Dr. Henry's agenda" (89).
Moving further back in time, Juan explains that he found the copy of Sex Variants in a cardboard box of unwanted belongings outside the Palace with a note that said "I"m yours now." Juan was immediately fascinated by the way their stories had been erased, their desires re-asserted, the use of language in the 1930s that showed the way the queer world existed before his own. Interspersed with information about the book, Juan recites epic poetry that messes with the narrative, and nene understands that he wants to suggest that stories do not have to be told in a certain way. The project, nene understands, is about "alloying" (113) the story of how nene got to the Palace, the story of Jan Gay and the sex variants, and the story of Juan's life.
Juan tells nene more about his life, about the seizures that he and his sisters had and his eventual diagnosis of "Puerto Rican Syndrome," which landed him in a psychiatric hospital. As a child Juan would have moments of very intense thought, where his mind would essentially drift off. It was in one such moment looking at the flowers at the market that the child Juan, lost, was found by Zhenya. A highly sensitive child herself, Zhenya thought Juan was crying because he was so moved by the beauty of the flowers. She was an illustrator and from then on he would visit her and Jan at their house and Zhenya would sketch him. Juan describes the warmth he felt from Jan and Zhenya at a time when everyone else he knew was explicitly turning on effeminate men.
Zhenya and Jan take young Juan into the rainforest and she paints scenes of him and all the animals. Over the years, Juan hunts down all of her books, clinging to them as proof of her existence, as proof that his memories of her are real. He recites one of the stories to nene, who wonders if Zhenya might have written the book for young Juan, or for the man she knew he would become. nene tells Juan more about his parents, that they eventually divorced and he did not speak to his father anymore, and that he was always trying to shake off his mother.
Analysis
Once we finally get to hear about the project, and the Sex Variants book, the pace of the novel picks up and propels the reader forward in a dramatic way. So much has been introduced in partial, fragmented mentions that the actual telling feels like a rising action leading to a climax in a traditionally plotted narrative. There is a similar shape of discovery that takes place among the actual participants of the study – for them, it is not clear what the committee is doing, and what they are providing them; eventually, many of them would have realized that the study was not conducted with the best intentions in mind. But there is a beauty to their participation nonetheless, which saves them from being outright victims: in a backwards way, they ended up learning more about their desires.
There is a nearly unbelievable amount of coincidence in Juan's life, so much that at times it feels like the information must be fabricated. That he meets Zhenya as a child, that she is the quasi-adoptive mother he refers to and longs for, but does not realize that Jan is Jan until much later – verges on being downright unbelievable. But Torres anticipates that skepticism throughout the novel by reminding us that the book is in fact a book being written, as opposed to something that is claiming to be a mimesis of actual events. It is a work of fiction, nene reminds us at the very end, and Juan may or may not be a real living and breathing person, but he certainly belongs in this story.
Furthermore, Juan finding the copy of Sex Variants in a box outside the Palace is a kind of of deus ex machina. One could see how the novel would take that incident as its inciting plot point: someone has found the book, and now they are going to read it, and think about it, and decide what to do with it. But Sex Variants is actually only one element of the project that Juan wishes for nene to undertake; it is the element of explicit research, but Juan wants nene to think about it in tandem with the story of his own life, and nene knows that Juan's life should be a part of it, too. In this way they are continuing the work that Jan set out to do documenting queer lives.
The entanglement of everyone's stories seems to be a key element of both the primary text (Sex Variants) and of nene's – or Torres' – project. If the committee's nefarious aims were to find patterns and locate something universal in order to prove there was a cause for the "perversion," the novel asserts something different: that the similarities in their lives is a strength, a sign not of their sameness but of their interconnectedness, that all of them – Juan, nene, Jan, and all the others – belong to a shared story bigger than any one of them as individuals.
Zhenya's book publishing represents another recurring motif in the novel about storytelling and the power of literature. As an adult wanting to locate Zhenya once more, to prove to himself that she was real and their relationship was real, Juan turns to hunting down her books. In the absence of her person, her books are the closest thing he has to her – time capsules of her perceptions, observations, of the places she was going and the things she was thinking about. Furthermore, since Juan was her muse for the illustrations, there is an added layer to the memories preserved. Not only do her books allow him access to her, but they also allow him access to her perception of him as a child.
