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 - and 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.
