“As I came of age,” writes Edgar Gomez in the introduction to High-Risk Homosexual, “I longed for a guide to teach me how to navigate being a queer Latinx man. Lacking one, I pieced together my own rules based on the scarce examples I found around me of people attempting to find a new path.” That search for a way to exist at the intersection of ethnic identity and sexuality — a fraught expedition filled with alarming discoveries and awkward encounters — is fiercely articulated in this excellent debut memoir.
A young person growing up in Orlando, the third largest metropolitan city in Florida, might come to expect the freedom to explore the city’s vast social and cultural offerings. But for a young Gomez, knowledge about and access to these spaces is curtailed by a number of factors. First, he is living in a conservative Latinx household. Of Nicaraguan and Puerto Rican descent, Gomez is constantly under scrutiny by an emotionally detached stepfather and a doting mother who doesn’t quite know how to help her effeminate son. She will agree to send him to Nicaragua, in an effort to toughen him up in the company of her masculine relatives, but she will also humor his guilty pleasure, watching romantic comedies next to him. During those viewings, Gomez states, “I wasn’t her disappointing son. She wasn’t my overwhelmed mother. We were girlfriends at the movies, losing ourselves for a few hours.”
Those moments of clemency, however, are few. Mostly, the young man polices his own behavior, even in school, where he becomes involved with a fellow student. Their relationship remains on the down low because “you can be gay without being gay was more than a theory; it was a rule.” At home, he recedes further into the closet, even after coming out to his mother: “I was so grateful, I got it in my head that I could repay her for her acceptance by proving that my being gay didn’t mean I was going to change. If she waited a little, I’d show her that I was practically still straight.” Maintaining the farce is untenable — so he sets out to look for outlets, which proves to be challenging given his second significant hurdle to freedom: lack of money.
A compelling insight into the lives of queer youth is revealed by the spaces that become enticing to them during the age of self-discovery. For a young man like Gomez who is seeking to escape his repressed situation, the nightclubs become beacons of agency and self-expression. Gomez finds community in clubs like the Pulse, where “for the first time, I didn’t fear being told I didn’t belong.” And as an ardent fan of RuPaul’s Drag Race, he finds kinship with drag performers, admiring the fearlessness of bringing out the femme within: “Drag was like magic. It made problems disappear.” Though Gomez is low on cash, he quickly learns that his youth makes him desirable, and he is able to charm his way to free drinks.
In the bathhouses, he marvels at the range of fetishes and sex scenes, and at the invitations to engage in fantasy. This world is so far removed from the one he feels trapped in that he even ponders the idea of moving in. At home, “the more we tried to keep things together, the harder it was to ignore that everything was falling apart. I was sick of pretending we weren’t poor, of pretending I was straight … If I could stay here forever, I would.”
Unfortunately, when Gomez enters college, the stigma of his poverty continues to stunt him. He takes a position at the student-run free food pantry to gain access to the donations, and as a TV production major, he explains away his low-budget projects by calling them “experimental.” And when he realizes that once he graduates and becomes a bona fide wage-earner, “my paychecks would go toward supporting my relatives,” he decides to surrender to “the inevitability that wealth would always be out of reach, then I could stop wasting time pursuing it and focus on what made me most immediately happy.” This short-term thinking, however, leads to further bad decisions, like taking on an apartment lease he can’t afford in order to move out of his childhood home and be able to date.
Without proper guidance or mentorship, Gomez stumbles through early adulthood, insecure about his sex life and becoming entangled with ill-fated hookups that leave him feeling unfulfilled and remorseful. He starts to neglect both his appearance and his living environment, at one time allowing a shattered mirror to remain shattered. “My reflection was broken up into jagged pieces, but there was enough of me to get a rough idea about what I looked like,” he states, which is the most apt description for how he was experiencing his fragmented life, moving between public heteronormativity and private queerness.
A reckoning and signs of maturity arise after the sobering reality of the Pulse nightclub shootings, the place where “I didn’t have to worry about being caught. Passing through its threshold, I shed any embarrassment I felt about being too girly, not liking the correct thing. There, we all liked the wrong thing.” Gomez finally sees a palpable merging between Latinx and queer spaces in the names of the victims — many so similar to his. His recognition that true dangers still threaten his joys and pleasures, even after achieving independence and self-realization, gives new meaning to the term “high-risk homosexual.”
Gomez sheds light on the obstacles working-class Latinx queers continue to face, at home and in social settings. Information, education, financial support, and social services — all of those resources that become lifelines at the most critical junctures — can be elusive, resulting in dire consequences. But Gomez also illustrates how, despite limited access to many of these privileges, a young queer Latinx can still thrive, as he did. A journey not without difficulties, but also not without saving grace.
[Published by Soft Skull Press on January 11, 2022, 304 pages, $16.95 paperback / $11.95 ebook]