Queer Life
The novel's overarching interest is in queer life and relationships, including the experience of queerness, its evolution and its documentation. The primary text from which it draws was a book of accounts from queer subjects conducted by a queer researcher, subsequently co-opted by a committee with very different aims than Jan Gay. As Juan tells nene the story of Jan – the story of her life as a queer woman, and as a queer researcher – it is interspersed with the stories of Juan and nene's own lives as queer men.
Erasure
The blackout poems explicitly deal with the concept of erasure, and not just in a negative sense: while the original Sex Variants text actively erased elements of the subjects' lives to build the coherent argument they were after, the blackout poems reclaim erasure as a liberatory tool. By altering the original text, which appropriated the lives of the queer people who participated in what they thought to be a good faith study, the emergent text becomes a far more honest and particular rendering of the people's lives. Furthermore, we see erasure as a tool for freedom in the life of Jan Gay, who omitted certain things about her life, who erased and changed, as well as in Juan's stories and the stories of many of the figures he describes to nene. In every case erasure is being reclaimed as a tool for personal agency.
Obliteration
The term "blackout" takes on many different meanings throughout the novel. One valence of the word is as a proxy for obliteration, or a destruction of the self. In the most literal, physical sense, there is the bodily blackout: nene's episodes when he briefly loses consciousness, Juan's dream reveries as he nears death, and the sensation they both have when it is the middle of the night and they cannot make each other out in the dark, cannot be certain they are really awake or alive. Toward the end of the novel, when nene is recalling a dream sequence with his father where they are on the ocean floor, he describes the dream's ending in an even more explicit way: "From the ocean floor, I look up to see great flashbulbs of lightning – a distant underwater storm moving closer. I try to surface, but I'm gone. Gone, gone, gone" (273). More than death, the dream speaks to a destruction of the self that recurs throughout the novel.
Storytelling
The novel is as interested in the art of storytelling as it is in telling the specific story of Jan Gay or Juan and nene. The book is a more experimental work, including photographs, poems, and other artworks alongside the fragments that make up the story of the novel. It moves between timelines, often flashing back or skipping or forward, and it uses various modes of storytelling, including segments written in the form of a film, or in the pure dialogue of theater. Nene is always admonishing Juan for his muddled, protracted way of telling stories, the way he jumps around in time and omits things ad-hoc, and it seems to be a nod to what Torres is doing at the authorial level: challenging our sense of what a story looks like and how it can be told.
Nostalgia
The stories that Juan and nene are sharing with each other are often steeped in a romance for the past; for Juan, especially, at the end of his life, there is a kind of longing lurking around the edges of his past life, even if the events are not always positive. But Juan is weary of nostalgia's romance, which he sees as a delusion. He questions, "Who is it that likens nostalgia to returning to a familiar street only to find the geography has been tampered with? Half-real, half a rearrangement of the sleeping mind...Something like that. When I first read that line, it struck me as a warning – not to get lost back there, in the misremembered past, that half-dreamt barrio you can't recall how to escape" (109). The message of this quote echoes throughout the novel as Juan and nene try to navigate the past without falling back into it.
Ephemerality and Concreteness
Torres sets up a binary between ephemerality and concreteness, adding to each category as the book goes on. Juan and nene have opposing impulses: Juan desires and revels in that which is ephemeral, and nene longs for that which is concrete. Juan sees the shifting prisms of truth tied up in stories as signs of memory's ephemerality, whereas nene seeks out that which can be confirmed, provided in stories of the past. Even something like a book can take on either valence: a book is at once an object, a concrete thing, and equally a composition that can be altered, destroyed, re-imagined, like the blackout poems from Sex Variants. At the end of Juan's life, when he is lucid after a longer slip into unconsciousness, nene says he wants him back "for good": "'Perish the thought, nene,'" he replies. '"Just passing through'" (279).
Seeing the Past
The project Juan is working on and wants nene to attend to after his death is all about confronting the past, really stopping and evaluating one's memories. nene struggles with this; he says he finds it difficult to see. Juan alters the way he tells his stories, using the language of film and photography and theater to attempt to communicate the past to nene in terms that will resonate with him. At the end of the novel, in what Torres calls the "blinkered endnotes" (283), nene calls it his "glancing" impressions. He still cannot look as Juan would like, but he is trying not to look away so quickly.
