It is morning in Manhattan, and the 43-year-old novelist Justin Torres is lying in bed, head propped up on one hand. He uprooted to the west coast of America a decade ago to teach English at UCLA, but was out late last night partying with friends from his old New York days. “I’m not even dressed yet,” he says in a sleepy croak.
The sight of Torres video-calling amid rumpled pillows feels apt given that his new book, Blackouts, is narrated from a clammy bed. The novel leads the reader through the hidden backwaters of queer history: in its hunt for buried cultural treasure, sex marks the spot. Torres has been surprised on his book tour to see it stocked in airport shops (“There are so many penises in it!”) and was not anticipating its release into today’s book-banning world. “That wasn’t on my radar at all,” he says. “I was thinking more about this kind of self-censorship that I wanted to resist. There’s an impulse for queer art to present itself as respectable and de-sexed, and I don’t want to be part of that.”
