Juan Gay lies dying in a room in The Palace: a monumental, fading institution in the desert. There, a young man cares for him, someone whom Juan met only once, but who has haunted the edges of his life ever since. As the end approaches, the two trade stories, resurrecting lost loves, mothers and fathers & their lives are woven, ineluctably, into a broader story of sexuality, pathology and oppression. And, through their conversations, another story is told: that of the radical queer anthropologist Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was co-opted, and stifled, by the committee she served. Blending fact with fiction, and drawing on oral histories and historical records, screenplay, testimony and image, Blackouts is a haunting, dreamlike rumination on memory and erasure, on the ways in which stories sustain histories.
