In today’s episode, Justin Torres sits down with Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts and David Perez DeHoyos, Library Coordination Manager at Freedom Reads. Torres reads from his novel Blackouts which was shortlisted for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize, the first major US literary prize awarded exclusively by incarcerated judges. Blackouts captures an ongoing conversation between Juan Gay and the narrator, Nene, exploring the suppression of queer history through this dialogue and blackout poems, created by redacting the two volumes of Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. This is a conversation about re-humanizing in the face of the dehumanization that occurs in places like prison. Torres delves into how life informed his writing and how writing has informed his life, and with characteristic poignancy, he considers the intersection of reading and freedom.
In today’s episode, Justin Torres sits down with Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts and David Perez DeHoyos, Library Coordination Manager at Freedom Reads. Torres reads from his novel Blackouts which was shortlisted for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize, the first major US literary prize awarded exclusively by incarcerated judges. Blackouts captures an ongoing conversation between Juan Gay and the narrator, Nene, exploring the suppression of queer history through this dialogue and blackout poems, created by redacting the two volumes of Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. This is a conversation about re-humanizing in the face of the dehumanization that occurs in places like prison. Torres delves into how life informed his writing and how writing has informed his life, and with characteristic poignancy, he considers the intersection of reading and freedom.
Justin Torres is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree and the author of two novels, We the Animals and Blackouts. We the Animals won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and was adapted into a feature film. Blackouts won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Southern California Book Award. Justin was a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, and has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at UCLA.
Dwayne (0:00): You’re listening to The Freedom Takes, a podcast from national non-profit Freedom Reads. This season, we’ll hear from the four shortlisted authors for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize, the first major US literary prize awarded exclusively by incarcerated readers.
[intro music]
Dwayne (0:27): I am your host, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Founder & CEO of Freedom Reads.
David (0:32): And I am your co-host, David Perez DeHoyos, Library Coordinator at Freedom Reads.
Dwayne (0:37): Our guest today is Justin Torres, author of Blackouts. The novel captures an ongoing conversation between Juan Gay and the narrator, Nene. This book is a intimate exploration of the way we come to know each other. It is essentially two people in a room, when telling each other the stories of their lives, learn something about what it means to be alive in the world. This is part queer history, part dialogue, part exploration of how we become by redacting a book that betrays who we are.
David (1:13): Thank you so much for coming on with the both of us and being in conversation. I'm super excited myself. And nervous. I'm going to try to keep that inside of me. Justin is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree and the author of two novels, We the Animals and Blackouts. We the Animals won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. It was adapted into a feature film, which I loved as well. Blackouts won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and the National Book Credit Circle Award, the Lambda Literary Award and the Southern California Book Award. Justin was a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow–um, I still don't know what that is, so maybe we'll talk about that in the future–and has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and the New York Public Library's Coleman Center. And he is currently an associate professor of English at UCLA. All right, welcome Justin to The Freedom Takes.
Justin (2:07): Thanks for having me. Like I said, I’m really honored to be here. It’s, it’s, yeah, it’s great. And to talk to Dwayne–
Dwayne (2:13): I would be remiss if I didn't tell folks. You know, one of the beautiful things about being a writer is sometimes your past comes back to you and your present. And me and Justin met years ago as waiters at this writing conference called the Bread Loaf writer’s conference. I’m gonna ask you to read from Blackouts, but I just want to tell you this is probably the most beautiful book that I have ever held in my hands.
David: Mhm.
Dwayne: It is. I mean, look, nobody uses, like, brown ink in books and and I think that is one of the things that, like, literally set it off conceptually, was to say that the sort of intentionality in every element was, frankly, beautiful.
And you know what's dope though, is Blackouts is one of four finalists for the Inside Literary Prize. Now this is the first major US literary prize awarded exclusively by incarcerated readers. We launched this joint–Freedom Reads launched the Inside Literary Prize last year–in collaboration with the National Book Foundation and the Center for Justice Innovation, and with the support from literary podcaster Lori Feathers. This year, 300 folks inside, inside prisons across six states and territories will choose the winner of the prize. Now, you wondering, see how you wondering, like, why you say territories? Because we going to Puerto Rico.
David: We sure are.
Dwayne: Now, some of us know that Puerto Rico is like a state, but, you know, they say that officially, we got to say territories, but we going to Puerto Rico, and it's dope, because what that means is, you know, at Freedom Reads, we go where they put people in prison, y'all. We go to remind people in prison that they are part of the world. And recognizing that we know that those folks are going to be talking about your book, they're going to be voting and discussing it, and they're going to choose who the winner is. But y'all are already all winners, and what we want you to do for them–because unfortunately, you in prison, it’s like you live in a silo, and you get to read books, but you don't get to hear authors come to you for all kinds of reasons–we wanted you to take a minute to read to folks so that they can hear your voice, so they can understand how you would tell the story that you’ve written.
READING (4:12)
“In Juan’s room, in the Palace, the ancient cast-iron radiator was fitted over the top with a metal covering, making a small shelf where, at some point when he was more mobile, Juan had placed the two volumes of Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. No other books stood on the shelf, only those two upright volumes, identical in form, cloth hardbacks with embossed gold titling whose thick black parallel spines reminded me of twin towers. Inside, the pages were yellowed and ready to crumble. The first volume was called simply MEN and the second WOMEN, though the stories within complicated the ease of that binary.
MEN and WOMEN were further subdivided into three categories: Bisexual Cases, Homosexual Cases, and Narcissistic Cases.
How to describe the shock of opening that first book, MEN? I opened the book carelessly, not realizing the glue along the spine had deteriorated, and the pages spilled out helter-skelter across the floor, many of them nearly covered in black marker. At first glance, the blackouts seemed like the scribblings of a demented mind, and then I thought maybe they were redactions made by some state functionary, until I noticed the precision and painstaking effort, the obsessive care, went beyond mere censorship. All that vanished text. Not a pleasant surprise, but a deep surprise, an intrigue. I told Juan, the erasures were a provocation, but the word echoed a false note.”
Dwayne (5:47): When I got to this page, one of the things I thought was devastating is this line, “Until I noticed the precision and painstaking effort. The obsessive care went beyond mere censorship.” And I wonder, what does it mean to go beyond mere censorship? And when we look at, you know, the particular text that we're talking about, um, as a writer, did you– What led you to create that? Because it seems like this, this idea here, this redacting of Sex Variants, is at your hand. So how do you choose to do this thing that you do with “Stud” and push it beyond mere censorship?
Justin (6:26): Yeah, I mean, that's such a brilliant question, because it's exactly at the heart of the entire book, the entire project of what I was trying to do, and get at, is kind of answer that question like: why, why and in what ways sometimes is blacking out or erasure a kind of constructive act? How is it not–not about restriction or censoring, or why might somebody want to engage in that kind of redaction? You know what I have to say as an aside, what was wild was like you and I like we've known each other a very long time. I hadn't talked to you in years, and right before this book came out, I was listening to NPR, and I hear your voice, and I was like, that's Dwayne. Like I just instantly–and then you're talking about this book Redaction. And I mean, this must have been a couple months before my book was going to come out, and I just could not believe it, like I didn't, I didn't, I hadn't, you know, I live in LA now, so I hadn't seen the kind of art project that the book came out of. I didn't know anything about it. It was just a wild, wild coincidence.
Dwayne (7:38): You also did the thing I did, though, because one of the decisions was like, how do you make it painstaking? Because the first run I was using just the way that you use a computer and you black lines out. And I was like, nah, that ain't what's happening. And I had to go back and physically do it and actually get visceral with it and understand it, literally. I mean, maybe that's why this is my first question. Because I really was trying to get at this, like, how do you reveal by getting rid of what was superfluous? And sometimes what is superfluous is, is racist, is denigrating, is excessive, you know? So that's why I really wanted to ask you that, because I look at these and I'm like, “Oh man.” And I was honored to know that we was riffing on the same thing. Because I'm, seriously man, I feel like we are part of the same community.
Justin (8:19): You know, I found this book, this book, Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. And it was, I was working in a bookstore, and it was this kind of sexology that I'd heard of, about this kind of, from the 1930s these doctors looking at queer people, looking at homosexuals, and trying to figure out what's wrong with them and how can it be cured. And I knew that these kinds of things existed, but I'd never actually seen one firsthand. And so reading all these people coming forward, telling their most personal, intimate details about their lives and their families and their sex habits and and then reading the doctor's reaction to them, you know? And they–it was a time when eugenics was a big thing, so they were like, measuring their bodies, measuring their genitals, and all of this is in there. And there's this kind of pseudo-Freudian language of like, emasculating mothers and dadada and that there's this kind of eugenicist thinking. It all gets combined to kind of look for and find and ultimately root out the cause of homosexuality.
And so it was strange to read. It was compelling, like, I mean, it was absolutely, it was, like, fascinating and titillating in many ways. And then also it was, like, repulsive, like all of this just bunk theory that was so offensive. And so I started just kind of blacking out the stuff I didn't like. That was my first thing. And it was not very artful. It wasn't very painstaking. It was just like, what is here if I get rid of all this stuff? And then I started to think about this kind of, the history of erasure poetry and kind of blacking things out with intention and how and, like, exactly like you said. How can I get this to reveal something and also say something different than it was ever meant to say?
Dwayne (10:13): Now you got to give us– Now you got to give us “Stud.” And so now, because, you know, funny, it's so well written that I believed that, you know, the book fell out of somebody's hands, already blacked out. It's like, “Yo, who did this?”
Justin (10:24): Yeah, no, I… When I wrote this book, I had this intention. I swore I was never going to reveal whether I did the blackouts or whether I found the book that way. And like, literally, the first interview was, like, “These blackouts are so good–did you?” “I did it!”
Dwayne (10:46): [Laughs] You’re like, “I’m a poet, too, y’all! I did all of ‘em.”
Justin (10:50): I needed all the credit, but my intention was for it to be ambiguous. I wanted, I wanted the readers to, like, not know who had done this and whether, and kind of blur this boundary between fact and fiction. But it didn't last very long.
Anyway, okay, Stud, so this is a kind of longer blackout poem. And I guess I can say this before. I'll say this before I read it. This particular, this particular passage, the man who comes in and he's really, kind of looking for a cure. He's really, like, he doesn't want to be gay anymore. He’s just broken up with his lover. He's just finding it hard to live in this world with so much stigma and he's in a really delicate and fragile place. And he talks about his sister and how she's like, totally cool with…he introduced her to queer underground world, and she became a lesbian, and she's totally cool with it, and she's happy and she's just like, doesn't care what the world thinks. But he's crushed, and he wants to be cured of this. And he speaks about this quite eloquently, and then the doctor summarizes what he's just heard. And so this part that's being blacked out is the doctor's summary. And the doctor kind of ends by just saying, he'll probably kill himself, but he's probably too much of a coward, and it's so dismissive. And so, and I was just like, it really, yeah, it was just really hard to read. And so with this one, my intention was to make an ode. So I focused on every use of the word “to” in this passage. And so this is meant to read as an ode.
READING (12:38)
And it begins:
“STUD
Comment:
to Sal, to be the 12th and last child of these parents, to start off life with poor health and poor eyesight. To these disabilities, to happen to him, to the age of seven when he became aware of a desire to press his face against the buttocks of a man, HOMO, to nestling, to be held in the lap of a man, to kiss him and be petted by him. to press his face against the buttocks of men. to have been associated with his male teachers. to the penis. to observe the penis. to masturbation and passive sodomy. to engage in oral caresses of the penis of his brother in law, to experience, to kiss the penis. to act like a man, to get an erection, to penetrate, to complete the act, to be satisfied. to satisfy them, to discuss his sexual problems with the Lesbian, to make the brother happy. to sacrifice himself, to embrace him, to lie on top of him, to merge with him, to be like a woman. to use his mouth to accomplish this, to satisfy his sexual desires. DIES, to go on. to be relieved of all sex feelings. to do anything, to be a crash.”
David (14:04): It’s funny that Dwayne chose this page because it makes me think about a question that I had. So, I read Blackouts first, and then I read We the Animals after.
Justin: Really?
David: Then I read Blackouts for a second time. So it's funny, because at the end of We the Animals, the youngest of the three brothers ends up at a mental–what we think, the mental institution that he describes as a zoo, he talks about how, like, everyone is like a different animal. And it's funny because in Blackouts, you talk about the watering hole, and how, like, everyone is at the watering hole, like the giraffe, the hippopotamus, and like the little boy walking around, kind of. So with that it, I mean, it just made me think about We the Animals and like the youngest of the three brothers in that book, basically.
Justin (14:45): Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, I know that's, that's, that's–it's so interesting. So many people have read We the Animals first and then Blackouts and like, it must be, they're such different books, it has to be interesting to go back and read it.
David (14:58): It felt like a sequel. That's what I'm like. I know it isn't. But it felt like that, because it was almost like the book starts off with them at the institution, Juan and Nene, so I'm almost like, “Oh my God, did he just wake up and this was like, five to seven years later, and he’s still there and his family just left him there?”
Justin (15:13): That's like 100% my intention. Not a sequel in the kind of straightforward way, but in the, I don't know, kind of like the multiverse or whatever like, it is the same, like you can easily read this–We the Animals is the backstory of this narrator. You don't have to, like, I think the books can kind of exist in different worlds, but also you could, and definitely, that's my intention, is to kind of link the two. I mean, obviously, like when I was, when I was a teenager, I was institutionalized against my will. And I think it's, it's an experience that informed We the Animals massively, trying to kind of think about what led up to that moment, both within my own family and in society at large. Like, what are, kind of, the structural things that are, that have to be in place in order for, like, this kind of thing to happen? And then I think with Blackouts, it was like, it was the opposite. I was like, what are the kind of long effects of that experience? And how is it–how is it related to other issues in the world? And, you know, and when I was there, I think, that kind of, to your question, one of the things that shocked me was how instantly, I passed through these doors, and instantly, it was this dehumanizing experience, right? It was like, instantly, like, suddenly, people just suddenly didn't see me as a rational person, you know? And it was like, “I'm still like the person I was yesterday or two days ago,” right? But, but, there's something about what happens in that kind of institutional space that it's just like, No, you're… There are the nurses and the doctors, and there are the people who visit and come and go, and then there's you and the patients. And you're a different kind of breed.
Dwayne (17:07): This is prison. I mean, literally, this is prison and so, you know, when I was really thinking about the book and thinking about how some of my homies have responded to the book, what I found, like, deeply fascinating and maybe troubling in some ways, is that–the dude gets put into the institution, an adult institution, because he's mature. But he is a teenager, right? And I went to prison as a child, and what messes with me is, you know, I don't–and I'm not enlightening on shit like that, and I think I've worked really hard, you know, you know, not to be homophobic and all of that shit, right? And I recognize all of the challenges–because I grew up in the 90s, yo, it was a deeply homophobic culture and community back then, right? And so I get the challenges that–in prison it’s the most welcoming place for homophobia, and the most welcoming place for homosexuality. It is like, literally–
David (17:56): Literally, literally both. Yeah, I can attest to both.
Dwayne (18:01): What struck me is–one of my homies was– Is Nene a name?
David: Nene.
Justin (18:06): Yeah, it’s like, a term of endearment. It’s like, very–
David: Papi, Mami…
Dwayne (18:10): But that's what I thought, though. And I was thinking about, “I am invisible only because you refuse to see me.” And I was thinking about this notion of like, you know, what does it mean actually be named, even when you could, when you name the term of endearment? What does it mean when, like, your name gets actually erased? What does it mean when you can't place your own name? When we were at Bread Loaf, I used to put, like, Speed Racer on my name. I would never put my name on my nametag. I'd put, like, Yogi Bear, Speed Racer. Like, I never told people who I was, because I was like, “Yo, y'all got me serving folks. I won't even mind, but, like, this is my act of protest.” But I realized sometimes the inability to say your name is not an act, it’s a means and a mechanism by which you get oppressed. I've read that connecting to–you know, I was, I was in the book completely, but I saw myself reflected. And what does it mean when you trying to claim my identity for yourself? And so much of prison is finding somebody who gives a fuck about you, and a person who gives a fuck about you is often framed, can be misframed, as lover, whatever. But often this is just like familial relationships that you build in prison as you try to find a way to survive. And so what's interesting is I found a deep connection to these two people trying to work out a life within some really constrained circumstances.
I read it way more quickly than I thought I would. You know, I mean, that joint was a page turner in a way, like, that was wild to me. And actually, I don't even, you know, somebody hit me last night. I'm doing my reading. I said, “Let me read this sex poem to y'all.” I read the joint. Somebody said, “I ain't, there ain't no sex in that joint.” I said “I got one better,” right? But what was wild is, I read it, and I thought, “This wasn't like raunchy in any kind of way,” right? And that's the other thing that hit me with it, right? I thought that it was just the chronicling of the ways in which we try to find space to be seen and touched by another, and even the moments of passing intimacy didn't feel the way it gets characterized. You know, I ain't had– I mean, it was beautifully done because it made me reflect on on my own insecurity by imagining that like the thing that motivates Nene to walk into the room with the brother, yeah, and exchange quick blow jobs and a quick piece of intimacy was anything other than wanting to be held by another human being, you know. And I love how you reframed and gave me a different lens. Not, not–I'm not a fool, but you literally gave me a different lens and a different insight into, like, a human experience that literally, I hadn't had, and, you know, I had once in my life. And if somebody would have characterized this woman that I had this relationship with as salacious, I’d have been like, “You lost your fucking mind,” and I'd have been like, “Yo, she gave me such generosity. in these, like, you know, quiet moments that we had that was completely unexpected.” And that's what I was reading in his books. I really appreciated that just on the human level.
Justin (21:15): I mean, there's so much, there's so much in what you said that's like, whatever, like reverberating. I mean, one of the things that–one of the uber texts for this book, one of the, like, even biggest inspirations for me in this book is another book called Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig. And that book is about two men in a prison cell, and one of them has been imprisoned for being a kind of Marxist revolutionary, and the other one–it's in Argentina during the dictatorship–and the other has been imprisoned for, like, corrupting a minor, but basically for being a homosexual. And they just talk in the book. And that's–I had been writing, I had been writing Blackouts, I had been thinking about intimacy, I'd been thinking about different forms of intimacy, and the kind of erotic charge between, even between Juan and Nene, right? Like they meet and, like there's this huge age gap between them. And it's not like they're, like, boning or anything, you know, but like they are, it's still there, right? And, and it's not salacious, it's just something that happens sometimes, right? Like, sometimes there is this kind of, you know, erotic dimension to friendships that doesn't need to be enacted on. It doesn't–people don't have to have sex, but like, it's there, and it's what drives things a little bit and it makes things a little bit more interesting, and it makes you go deeper, quicker, and etcetera. And so I was thinking about that, and in Kiss of the Spider Woman–it’s an incredible book–and they do, in the end, kind of, they're polar opposites, right, like, Valentin, the kind of revolutionary, is homophobic. I mean, he's a product of his time, right? He's a masculine man. And Molina is incredibly effeminate and and apolitical and, and they both kind of talk to each other across this space of being total opposites and Molina gets politicized and Valentin, I think, gets, I don't know, tenderized, I guess, like, he gets made softer and more open. I don't know, I was thinking a lot about that coming into this, coming to this conversation in particular. I was like, oh, yeah, Kiss of the Spider Woman, like, this is one of the most important books I've ever read.
Dwayne (23:47): You know, it was the conveyance of intimacy between two people. And when you've been in a cell with somebody, a lot of that was, like, literally being in a cell with somebody, you know, and also the care that the young cat had for the older cat. Because I got a line in my solo show when I was like, you know, I'm like, I put lotion on this dude's back, right? And I remember the first time I said that line I was in a prison, and I fucking went off because somebody started laughing. I was like, “This shit is not fucking funny. I put lotion on his back because he was in his 60s, and he had arthritis, and he couldn't stretch and do it, and I'll be goddamned if I'm gonna be ashamed of doing it.”
But the reality is that I thought what that was capturing. You said he became tenderized. You know, I think the thing that prison does is argue that you cannot love anybody else. And if you can't love anybody else, you radically cannot love yourself. But what happens in prison is when you begin to care for people; the care that you have for people stretches beyond the bounds of all of the stereotypes and the prejudices that you bring into that room. And by making this book really this conversation between these two guys, it revealed that, because everybody else became a part of that subtext, interesting parts of that subtext, but they became a part of the subtext where these two people were figuring out what it meant, both to be alive and, radically, what it meant to die, which is like… How do you, how do you write a book about what it means to die? You know when, when we all get obsessed with living, and you realize that we don't notice… And that's why the dude was the kind of hero is that, like, “I'm going to notice you as you tumble, you know? I mean, yeah, and I care enough about you that I'm climbing through a window to do this kind of act of noticing.” David. Yo, what. I know you love this joint because you was like, “Yo, I gotta get on this pod.”
David (25:30): I sure do. Me blushing, I’m like–
Dwayne (25:33): What did you think when you read this joint? I know you’ve been Inside, and I know you talk about having been Inside, but I wonder: am I just missing a point and connecting it to prison? Maybe it’s just me being, like, voyeuristic and shit, right? Did you really–
David (25:44): No. I was going to jump in after that. Because when I think about the book, one, you tip your hat off to queer culture. I mean, I noticed that from the second version of the book that we got with the zines in the back of all the vocabulary.
Dwayne (25:54): He was, like, so pressed about that, he was like, “Yo, did you see the zine?”
David (25:57): I was, like, cause I’m always about, like, kind of just culture and how it’s developed and how it’s different, like. Connecticut gay culture is different from New York gay culture. But also that brings up and highlights culture in prison and how that looks like. I was an openly gay man in prison. Obviously, was it scary? Hell yeah, it was. At first, it sucked. It was awful, was a super isolating experience, trying to be super masculine, trying to be someone that I wasn't. However, after being an openly gay man, I feel like it challenged people to suddenly be like, “Wow, we can actually be friends with gay people.” And that's why Nene’s story stuck out because I feel like people, when we talk about, let's just say, the queer body, we talk about like our desires, we talk about like our sex, like, our sex, basically. We're not talking about just how we love or how we care for people, what our community looks like. It's almost always boiled down to our sex. And kind of like, being in prison and being able to show people a different side of what being queer looks like. It's cool. And now being on the outside and working with people that I went to prison with, and now my bestest friend ever is actually Mike, and he works here at Freedom Reads, so it's really cool, kind of like a full circle moment of changing what people think of queer lives. And in a sense, like, even the work that we do, we're changing how people think about people in prison. Because when Dwayne talks about, like, being in a cell with one other person, especially when you have, like, when you like them as a person, it it becomes very intimate in a way that's not sexual, but in a way that's like we're talking about really, really deep stuff, like how it kind of exactly it mirrors the conversation of Juan and Nene. Like, “Tell me something about your mother, make it terrible.” Like, “I want to know exactly why you are the way that you are.” We're going to be spending so much time in the cell together, and people don't pay attention to that. That every prison has a different culture. Some prisons could be really homophobic, but that can change. There's definitely some shoutouts to make to Mims and some people in E dorm, in the prison that I did time at, Cybulski, because they were incredibly open and accepting of me. So, yeah, if you're listening to this podcast, give a gay brother, give a gay sister a chance, right?
Justin (28:03): Yeah. I mean, that's so, I mean, yeah, I don't know. I just, I love hearing that. And I think that your point about intimacy is such a good one. I mean I was in a couple mental hospitals for a couple months. Like, it's not, I was, you know–it's nothing compared to being in prison for extended time. But even in that short amount of time, I think that one of the things that happened, that I noticed immediately, was how careful the patients were with each other, right? That it was like it was, there's so much pressure. We had so much time together, so much time, because there's nowhere, you're just… There's nowhere to go, and there's a way in which this intimacy developed very, very quickly and Juan is based on somebody that I met at in that time, and it's kind of an amalgamation of lots of people that I've known in my life who, who've been older, who’ve taken interest in me, who've said, “Maybe you should read a book, maybe you should think about the ways in which your experience is connected to larger issues.” And other people have thought about these things, and you're not the first person, and maybe you should connect yourself to literature in the wider world, but also, like, we're careful and intimate and slow. And said, “Yeah, tell me something about your mother. I want…make it terrible.” I want, like, I want the good stuff. I want the dirt. Like, let like, we're here, and let's make and let's find a way to kind of pass this time in a way that's incredibly, incredibly intimate.
David (29:32): It's weird because now I'm seeing the parallels. Like, I think about, like, in prison, different terminologies–like OG or hot pot and stuff, but kind of like, just like the roles of how, like the mentors inside of a housing unit or something like that. But then, like in queer culture, we have house mothers, drag mothers, like the different families we make. Who do we break bread with when we're inside in prison? Like, who are we cooking with? But also, who are we–who's raising us? Like, if our parents kick us out, who's raising us in the community? Are we doing ballrooms? Are we working as go-go boys inside of bars, or are we just lost, basically, so it's funny, yeah, all boils down to kind of, like, the development of community.
Justin (30:09): It's fascinating being an educator like I, you know, I'm a professor, and I teach classes on queer literature, I teach classes on Latino literature, whatever. And it's, there's this strange self-policing that I have to do where, I mean, it's like, you can't say certain things. There were, there were things that, if I could just speak in plain language and just say how things really are to my students, they would understand so much quicker the queer culture that I'm trying to describe. But I can't. I have to, because, because the words would be too offensive, because it would be misunderstood where I was coming from. So I have to, like, repackage everything in a way that is more accessible or palatable or centering, kind of the way in which a straight person who maybe doesn't know much about queer culture would be thinking about this and kind of slowly bring them into this world. And I think with this book, I was just like, uhhh, I’m not gonna do that.
David (31:11): It sounds like you did that, though, like, I'm literally thinking about the way that you just described that. It sounds like you were Juan, because as Juan told his story in this book, he's telling it slow. He's feeding it to Nene as slow as possible, introducing him to the cultures. And it's true, there's no way that you would know anything if it wasn't for the oral history part of the book, of like, “Here, let me sit down and show you what my community looked like as I grew up,” and how those people have lost, whether it be to–especially in that time period–whether it be to like AIDS or HIV pandemic, where we lost so many of our brothers and sisters, but it also ties into, like, the oral history of the Puerto Rican history. You talk about, like, the riddles of, “What do the dead eat? Nothing.” And you're just like, damn, that's, that's really, really deep, and you do the same thing inside of We the Animals. That kind of, like, showing people different parts of Puerto Rican culture and as well as queer culture, and understanding that, like, there's a deeper history in that. Like, if you didn't know that the indigenous Taínos did that, like, did the oral histories, and they did ceremonies for that, or even that, the people that they brought, the enslaved people that they brought from Africa and brought to the Caribbean, they did the same thing to preserve their oral history. So it's almost like a tip off to those cultures and as well as, like, let's keep this. So you're saying you didn't do it, but you did do that in the book. You're heard it here, folks. That's it.
Justin (32:32): I mean, that's, so, yeah, that's, I mean, it's brilliant. You have a kind of brilliant literary critique of both of those books in there. And I think that I love it. I love it. I'm glad to hear it. I think that there's a distinction that–between–We the Animals, I feel like, it is much more accessible, though, right? Like, there is like, I think I was, I wanted We the Animals to be accessible. Like I wrote that book I was young, and I had, I was a huge reader. I read all kinds of things, you know, but I, but I really wanted to kind of write something that felt immediate and that felt like it was, I don't know that, like anybody could kind of pick it up and get to the end of it, and would want to get to the end of it. And I think 12 years later, with Blackouts, I was kind of like, it's funny that you said that it was a page-turner. Because I was like, I want to write the most put-downable book ever. I want to write a book that invites you to just kind of think for a while, like, read a little bit, sit down, think and do some investigating, and maybe, if you don't, if you're unclear about something and something's not making sense, like you could just kind of sit with it for a while, or you think about something else. Like, I didn't. I was thinking, I guess I was just thinking less about accessibility with Blackouts.
Dwayne (33:49): And I wouldn't say accessible, though. You know, interesting, like, for instance, when I say page-turner, I almost mean that you have passages that delight in different ways. Imma point to two–this is just a beautiful description of what it means to be a poet. Say, “Juan found himself,” and you don't use the word poet here, but it says, “Juan found himself incapable of joining parties, but appreciated Colón’s approach to dismantling racism and capitalism, which was through story, humor, and humanism; through writing. He wrote in vignettes, each a slice of life—the evocation of a single moment—and in this way, avoided the error of dogma and grand narratives. Each vignette, Juan said, was a kind of meditation, offering new ways of seeing and relating.” And so I felt like, what happened is, you know, it was just these jewels, right? And for that one, I was like, that is the perfect definition of why I am incapable of writing a novel. And I'm just going to tell you what I wrote in here, because I thought this part broke me down, right? “It was one of my finer moments when I discovered that no human life escapes the tribulation of solitude, she says. Other souls had suffered such extremes of separation and abandon, and in their wit and irony and quaint homiletic posturing I momentarily lifted myself out of myself and onto a plane of spiritual lamentation. And I knew then, what I’d been searching for; I wanted to feel that. Outside myself. Lifted.”And I wrote a note to myself, so that I’d remember what I felt like, like reading this page. And I was like, you know, this book has passages like this that somehow leave me both weeping and laughing at the same time. And I just wanted to say, thanks.
So like saying it was a page-turner, it isn't exactly what I mean. But what I mean is that, like, I was able to escape. And I'm dealing with, you know, anybody goes to a book and then goes to the book with their problems. So, I didn't go to the book with the problems of Juan and Nene. I went to the book with, you know, Shahid’s problems of 2024, 2025, and still, you know, I found things within the book that kept talking to me, and they were talking to me in different ways, partly because I felt like I was eavesdropping on a conversation. And that conversation was inviting me to see myself within it.
But yo, it's so effortless that it almost feels that you didn't work at it, which I know is ridiculous to say, right? My question now is, what was the craft? You talked about one of the hallmark books that you read that was like a precursor in terms of how you thought about this. We've heard how you have this continuation, in a way, and riffing on themes. So I see that. But I wonder, if you talk to the writers in prison, if you talk to me and David about how you approach the craft of doing this– You talked about the craft of the Sex Variants but what about the craft of actually constructing this long conversation? What would you tell us that went into that that made it, um– I know it was difficult. It feels like it wasn't, but it had to be because, because I know people were like, “Yo, when Justin’s next book coming out?” Oh, man, I just saw him yesterday. I don't know.
Justin (36:49): Yeah, I'm slow. I'm so slow. And it was, I mean–I think effortlessness is the highest compliment, because there's so much effort, and if I was able to mask all of that, you know, stretching and bashing the head against the keyboard and all that frustration, and make it feel effortless, like that's the goal, and, yeah, and I appreciate that.
I mean, I think that on a craft level, one of the things, like, there's a line in the book, right, that it's like, if Juan, like, doesn't matter whether Juan is based on a real person or not, right? Like, if he didn't exist, I would have had to make him up. And I think that he comes–like, he comes as a character from a place of the questions of a lifetime that I've had, right? The ways in which I felt disconnected from, from Puerto Rican culture, from queer culture, the ways in which I was not taught queer history or Puerto Rican history, the ways in which I had all of these questions about the world and, and literature in general, even just wider literature. And I've had so many conversations with so many different people, and a lot of them have just been conversations with books, with authors, right, people that I've never met, that I've just read their work. There's an author, Jaime Manrique, who I love, who–I open the book with a quote from his poem. He's written, he's written novels, he's written memoir. I just think he's fantastic. I've never met him in my entire life, but like, this book is a conversation with him and his work. And so Juan becomes this kind of depository of all of these different, very different influences. Like the section you read is a quote from this woman, Kathleen Collins, who I love. She wrote a book called Whatever Happened to Interracial Love that I think is just fantastic. There's also a reference to Jesús Colón, who's a Puerto Rican writer who wrote these vignettes, and, like back in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. I mean, he was writing for–and just a fascinating, fascinating figure, somebody whose work I returned to again and again. And so in a way, it's like if you could ask every author you’ve ever read the kind of burning questions of your soul, what kind of response do you imagine you would get? You know, and that was–
Dwayne (39:17): I didn’t even realize you did that, though, because maybe my assumption was that every time I heard the name of an author, you made it up. Like, if I never heard of the person before, I was like, “Oh, this is great! This quote that you made up!” Which actually is really beautiful, because it reminds me that what you invite– And it's another passage in here that says, that's really dope. There is another passage in here that's really dope where you says, where you say–where you says, I like “where you says.” That is enallage, intentional use of incorrect English to make a point. Imma go head and stick with that. But there's a page, on 127 you say, “The point is that every culture has codified ways of expressing overwhelming emotion, panic attacks, nervous breakdowns, ataques de nervios, these are all related to one another.” And I just realized this book is also a kind of cultural history, like if these texts that you riff on and you reference are all real, I'm glad that we could say to readers right now that they should look at these books that are unfamiliar. The reason why they were unfamiliar with me is because they come from a culture that I'm not aware of, so I assumed they were your invention. So I am glad that you just made that note, because I think that's a part of the complexity too, to sort of in the same way that a producer or DJ is like, how do you elude, how do you riff? How do you make that a part of the whole? You've done an excellent job of that, because I swear I thought you made all of this up. I thought every voice was yours. I was like, “Wow, yo, you made up writers in his joint, everything.”
David (40:38): It wasn't…I knew from, like, sociology and understanding these, like the Charles Kinsey study and the sex variants study and stuff. But four, I want to say, like, three of the books that you reference in the back of Blackouts are actually in the Freedom Library. So shoutout to that, they're in there, but yeah, especially like for you to be shortlisted in the Inside Literary Prize. I just think about, like, someone reading this, like listening to this podcast right now. It's probably like a straight person who's listening to this, and it's like, holy shit, gay people might be cool. I feel like a lot of people are going to listen to this podcast and read the book and just something that's super necessary for people to read, and people are going to feel seen in this book. So just to ask you a question, what does it mean for Blackouts to be shortlisted for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize?
Justin (41:18): Yeah, I mean, it's, it is surprising. You know, I think that I'm–
Dwayne (41:21): No yo, before you say that you know me and David bet on this, though. I be acting like it's my credit, but me and David schemed on the train. We was like, “Yo, I think it's gonna be a finalist, yo.” And we was like, “You know what, even if it's not, we putting 1000 copies in prisons no matter what.” But we had real faith. This wasn't our decision. This was people who were readers on the Inside, who was like, you know, a mixture of readers on the Inside and not who was like, “Yo, we rocking with this.” And even what we've gotten from people on the Inside has shown people like deeply engaging and deeply confronting their own prejudices. I mean, doing things that we want people to do with literature. And I want to make sure I say that to you, because I have found reading things that my friends have written about the book humbling, because it lets me know–you do 20 years of living, no matter where you do it at. If you're a decent human being, that 20 years of living is you trying to become, you know, better. So anyway, I'm sorry for cutting you off, but I wanted to know the process that got you here.
Justin (42:16): Yeah, no. I mean, I think that, yeah, I think it's, it's obviously a huge honor. And I think that one of the first things that happened when we talked, when you called me and and we talked about the potential of it, was it just made me think of my own blind spots. Like I wasn't thinking about, I wasn’t thinking about the fact that this book wouldn't make it Inside, right, that we'd have to publish an entirely new edition. Like it never, it just never occurred to me, because it's, this is, you know, like, not something that I'm thinking enough about. And it's, it was a fascinating experience to have to think about what needs to be censored and redacted and edited in a book that's about censorship and redaction. It was really like, wow. And you know, my editor was, as soon as I explained to her the problem, she was just like, whatever it takes, like, we'll make this edition happen. And like, you know how publishing is, like, they're so slow. Everything happens so slowly, and this needed to happen quite quickly. And, like, and she was just on it, because I think there are ways in which, like, we, I, you know, like, I wasn't thinking about that audience. I wasn't thinking about people Inside, you know, and as soon as this was brought to my attention. It's like, oh yeah, this is like, I want to do whatever I can to, like, make this happen and make this work, you know? And so I think it's the entire idea of the prize is a fantastic idea. Not just for the people who are getting to read these books and participate in the judging and, you know, like, not just for people Inside, but for everybody it’s touching outside, that’s getting to kind of reorient themselves and think and think again. It's so easy not to think about how many people are incarcerated in this country at all times, right? It's so easy to kind of go about your life and just… And so, I don't know, it's been, it's been a gift for me in that way. And like, yeah, re-shifting my focus.
Dwayne (44:16): We talk a lot about what it means to go back Inside. And I want to acknowledge, though–not that it's different for you, David, but I do think, I imagine–
David: It is different.
Dwayne: Right? And it'll be easy to be like, I'm not going back. And I think it's kind of humbling to like, watch how like, your presence literally shifts the kind of conversations we have internally, but it also shifts, I mean, it shifts the way I think about the work that we do. And it's not even that I wouldn't have been thinking about the Blackouts before, but I had a different kind of courage and a different kind of capacity, because you had said things and what you had written before, that made people who are friends of mine talk to me in a different way about what this work is. And so, you know, we ask what it means when we say, freedom begins with a book. And in some sense, I think we are enacting that on a regular basis by exposing people to books and exposing ourselves to the way that we change. But, we ask everybody at the end of the podcast, as we riff on this Frederick Douglass quote where he says, “When we learn to read, we become forever free.” And I guess, I just wonder, how do you think about the relationship between, like, reading and freedom?
Justin (45:27): Yeah, I mean, what– Again. I'm going back to this pivotal moment in my life, which is only a couple of months long, but when I was institutionalized as a teenager I had a high school English teacher, and she brought me books, and there were no books, there were no books in that place. There was a box of VHS videos, which, everyone of them had Whoopi Goldberg in it. I don’t know. But, but, but she brought me books. And she brought me books that like I, I mean, she brought me, Nietzsche, she brought me On The Road, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, like books that I necessarily wouldn't have chosen for myself in any way. And I spent so much time trying to, I mean, trying to understand the books in front of me. And it was true that, that it, that everything else melted away, you know, like I could be with those words and with that narrative and it, you know, and for moments, for long, long moments, everything else about my circumstances gone, and I was having this conversation with, like my soul was in conversation with another soul in a different time period, a different history, a different world. And that was, it did feel freeing, I think.
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Dwayne (46:52): This year, Freedom Reads brought the Inside Literary Prize to 15 prisons across the country, and discussed the shortlisted books with over 300 incarcerated readers, who are judging the Prize.
Raul (47:08): This dude has a pretty profound philosophical formation. He writes like the Beat Generation, like Jack Kerouac, William Bourghoughs, John Steinbeck, this the type of literature. This is a story that needs to be told, either you like it or not, either you’re homosexual or not. It needs to be told. These people– It's about visibility, the people that go through all this stuff. And the main character, who has no name–he’s nameless as part of that invisibility, you know, it's like a cloak.
Dwayne (47:41): That was [insert name], a 2025 Inside Literary Prize judge at Decatur Correctional Center in Illinois.
Thank you for joining us for The Freedom Takes. This season of The Freedom Takes was produced by Sasha Rotko, Tyler Sperrazza, and Madeline Sklar. You can learn more about Freedom Reads by visiting our website: freedomreads.org or following us on social media. You can support our work at freedomreads.org/donate.
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