Keep Going

In Conversation with Edgar Gomez

Billy Lezra

Edgar Gomez (all pronouns) is a Florida-born writer with roots in Nicaragua and Puerto Rico. A graduate of University of California, Riverside’s MFA program, his words have appeared in The LA Times, Poets & Writers, Lithub, The Rumpus, and beyond. His debut memoir, High-Risk Homosexual, was called a “breath of fresh air” by The New York Times; named a Best Book of 2022 by Publisher’s Weekly, Buzzfeed, and Electric Literature; and received a 2023 American Book Award, a Stonewall Israel-Fishman Nonfiction Book Honor Award, and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir. Gomez’s second book, a darkly-comic memoir about growing up poor in early 2000’s Florida titled Alligator Tears, will be out in 2025 from Crown. His work has been supported by The New York Foundation for the Arts and the Black Mountain Institute. He lives between New York and Puerto Rico. Find him across social media @OtroEdgarGomez.

You just turned in your second book, Alligator Tears, to your editor. How are you feeling?

I am feeling really relieved to be done and ready to turn my brain off and just chill. It’s been a really intense past couple of months. In Alligator Tears, I write about what it was like to publish my first book, High-Risk Homosexual, and how intense the months leading up to publication were, and how I basically became a hermit and didn’t see anybody other than my coworkers for almost a year. I kind of neglected all my friendships and I felt guilty because I didn’t feel like I was meaningfully contributing to my community. Returning to that really intense pace these last couple of months was strange, because I had the knowledge of, like: “Wait, you can’t repeat the same mistake. You can’t just go off the radar and not call your mom for months and not contribute.” But now that I’m done, I feel like I can focus on the other things that are equally important to me. I don’t want to just dedicate my whole life to writing; I also want to be a human being out in the world.

How did you interrupt the impulse to be a hermit during this very intensive phase of finalizing your book?

I was single when I wrote the majority of my first book, and now I have a boyfriend, so I can’t just go in the other room and disappear for months. He kind of tethers me to reality, and says: “No, we have to go out and do things, it’s your friend’s birthday, the downstairs neighbor needs a favor.” Stuff like that. And I am also more self-aware. Now I can be like: “Okay, you put in eight hours of writing today, maybe go do something else.” Being able to more clearly envision the end has helped me, because I’m like: “Okay, you might be a hermit right now, but in two weeks you’re going to be able to be out in the world more, so you can start making those plans now.”

Yes, you can plan for two weeks from now when you can be more of a person.

I know, it’s annoying. Do you ever feel that way? Like, guilty?

For me the writing brain is its own entity and just wants to be left alone. You know?

Yeah, I get it. I become a monster–not like these straight white men who go crazy, but I feel that energy inside of me. Like, when I focus, nobody better talk to me, nobody look at me. I think it’s also because I have undiagnosed minor OCD. I used to have it pretty intensely when I was younger, but over time, I think I’ve managed to channel it into my writing. I’m such a perfectionist when I’m writing, but also, I like to have a very controlled environment. When anything interrupts that controlled environment, I feel very distracted, and then I can’t think of anything else. Like: “Oh, there’s a door open over there,” or “I know there’s dishes in the sink,” or anything like that.

I hadn’t planned to ask you this question, but you’re speaking to something I think about constantly. I have a hard time separating my impulse to be controlling in my work from being controlling in my daily life. In the writing realm, being controlling can make a lot of sense–tinkering with each comma, worrying over each verb. But if I take that controlling mind and I speak to my partner from that place, my marriage would crumble, you know? So how do you negotiate and distinguish this impulse to control in the writing realm from your daily realm?

I would say that my brain compartmentalizes the act of writing. As you said, as a writer, I am all up in each sentence, like: “Oh my god, I don’t like that this word ends in ing. I have to spend two hours figuring out a better word. I have to move that comma.” But when I’m not writing, I am a completely different person. I’m a total double Pisces. I go with the flow. The breeze takes me. I think I channel all my controlling energy into my writing. And it does create this weird problem, though, because people know me as such a loosey-goosey person, I think they might think I am also unserious when I am writing. But writing is just a whole different world. It is so, so hard and takes so much effort and concentration and research and self-awareness. I don’t think people always understand how hard it is to really do the thing.

This ties into a question I had about craft. One of the elements I loved in your stories in High-Risk Homosexual is the presence of echoing images: how a detail in the beginning of a chapter will resurface in the end in a wonderfully unexpected way. How did you go about crafting that?

First of all, thank you for noticing. It gets to a point where the edits I make are really just for me, because nobody’s going to notice an image that is similar but a little bit different unless you are really honing in on each line, which I do not expect people to do. So really, all the little tinkering is how I make it fun for myself. With High-Risk Homosexual, I initially envisioned the book as a collection of essays. Because I had that structure in mind, I was thinking of each chapter as being very episodic in nature–almost like a capsule that is closed off from the rest. I wanted each chapter to feel like it was telling a complete story, which informed how I wrote the endings–calling back an image from earlier on in the chapter creates this feeling of completeness. Maybe the original goal I had at the beginning of the chapter wasn’t accomplished, but a reader can see how much growth has or has not happened since the first image was originally presented on the page. That’s why I really like to call back images within each chapter, but also within the book as a whole. In the final chapter I call back images from the first chapter, to create resolution.

I noticed how the book opened with a dedication: “To my mother and for my brother.” And then the book closed with the words “keep going.” I thought those two sentiments created an interesting conversation with one another.

Yeah, that was very intentional in a corny way. The first word in the book is “mama” and it’s also the last word of the first chapter. I was thinking a lot about my mom throughout the book and throughout my second book as well, which has even more to do with her. One of the things I was trying to get at with that final “keep going” is that not all of the problems I’ve established in the book are magically solved. One of the problems was the complicated relationship I had with both my mom and my brother, at the time. I wanted the ending to feel open-ended because in a lot of books I’ve read, in a lot of TV shows I’ve watched, mostly when I was younger, it felt like only two types of family relationships were represented. Either the family of the queer person was radically accepting, or, on the other end of the spectrum, it was just tragic. A lot of my queer friends and I are in this more ambiguous space where the relationships with our families aren’t either/or. It’s not like they’re cutting us off or we’re cutting them off, but it’s not like they are radically accepting. So I wanted a more nuanced representation where sometimes it’s a struggle and sometimes it’s amazing, because that’s my reality and the reality of many people I know. 

One of the things I loved about the final story in High-Risk Homosexual is the disillusionment the narrator expresses when he arrives in San Francisco: how this arrival is supposed to feel like a haven but it is not experienced that way. Have you found a physical or ideological space that feels like home?

San Francisco was not it for me, but I did go back last year and I loved it. I realized that the first time I went there was when I was really poor, so obviously I didn’t have the greatest time because I couldn’t afford to do much. Going back and having a little bit of a budget made the experience different. And also going back with my boyfriend, who had lived there and knew where to go–all of that made a difference. But afterward, I moved to New York, and after jumping around a couple of places, I ended up in Jackson Heights, Queens. And that place has turned out to be everything I wanted San Francisco to be. It’s just like queer Latinx people everywhere. The gay bars have names like El Trio and Hombres. There’s a street named after a trans activist, Lorena Borjas. There’s a lot of community activism that goes on with food pantries. I was part of the Mirror Beauty Co-op, which is a beauty certification program for trans Latinx women, mostly immigrants. And I’m just so happy that right after this book was published, I ended up there. In fact, that is where I had my book launch for High-Risk Homosexual. It was just like a little thing at a gay bar, and I was in a knockoff Versace dress. It was really fun. It felt like such a full circle moment where I was like: “Wow, this does feel like the end of the rainbow that you were looking for.”

In an interview you said: “I try to disconnect myself from my capitalistic impulses to mold my writing into what will sell and what will be most appealing to publishers.” How do you make that disconnection? 

It’s very hard. I try to recognize the part of me that comes from a poverty mindset that is like: “Girl, you should sell out.” And by “sell out,” I mean: “You should write a story about straight people because that’s going to open up your audience and more people will buy your book.” Or: “Oh, you should take out some of the Spanish because that’s going to alienate readers and turn them away from your book.” It feels like I have this devil on my shoulder that is like: “Look, you are positioned in this place where if you want to sell out, maybe you could.” But then I have an angel on my other shoulder that’s like: “Girl, you are about to spend two years minimum, every other day, sitting in front of your computer writing this story. You should write about something that makes you happy, that you’re interested in, that you think will be useful to other people, that you’re going to enjoy doing.” It’s important to recognize how much labor and time it takes to write a story, no matter what story it is. Because if I choose the other path, I’m just going to be miserable the whole time and I’m going to have ethical dilemmas. I want to use my limited time doing things I love, that I think will make other people happy. And I think I can do that best when writing about my immediate community, which is queer Latinx people. 

Would you tell me about the title of your new book, Alligator Tears? 

It comes from the expression “crocodile tears,” and it’s a memoir set in Florida. So I was like: “Okay, let me just change it to the actual animal that it is in Florida, which are alligators.” Part of the reason I chose this title is because the book has to do with growing up poor in early 2000s Florida, and poverty can be a very heavy subject. One of my biggest concerns was writing a really depressing book and then asking my queer Latinx audience: “Hey, in the one or two free hours you have every day, will you read this depressing book?” That seemed really sad to me. And so I was like: “I have to make it worth their while.” People’s free time is their most valuable resource, so I want to make them have fun and laugh. The other reason I went with Alligator Tears is because it signaled at a lot of the things I want the book to do. Aside from it being set in Florida, the book does have sad moments. There will be tears, but it’s not going to be really depressing. And I think the idea of “crocodile tears” imperfectly signals at the fact that there’s going to be humor and campiness as well.

I looked up the definition of “lagrimas de cocodrilo,” crocodile tears, and was curious about the performative connotation of the expression.

I would say that definition is most apt in the early chapters. There’s a scene where I’m twelve years old, and my mom had just had a stroke. My brother and I started working at the flea market, selling things from around the house. And it was at the flea market,  at that age, that I realized that I could make more money from customers if I just played up being, like, a sad cute little kid. So that kind of plays into the crocodile tears, because I was making myself look like a little pobrecito. And in reality, I was a little pobrecito so it wasn’t necessarily a lie. But back then I also realized the performance of it all. In that same chapter, I write about how my mom had Bell’s palsy after she had her stroke. One of the symptoms was that she would just start crying at random. And it wasn’t necessarily because she was sad or anything; it was because she didn’t have full control of her tear glands. There was a performative element to that as well, because she would be like: “Oh, no, I’m not crying because I’m sad.”  Sometimes I think she was just trying to make us feel better. But all that is to say: I was thinking about the classic definition of “crocodile tears,” and its performative element. There are a lot of crying scenes throughout this book. And with each crying scene I try to ask myself: “What is this scene doing differently than the last? How am I crying in a new and unique way? Or: “How are these tears different from the tears in the chapter before?” So, there are performative tears, there are angry tears, there are devastated tears. And then towards the end of the book, there are happy tears.

During the Tin House Winter Workshop I had the privilege of hearing you read a poem about all the things you love about being gay. Would you say more about this poem, about what you love about being gay today?

I wrote that poem towards the beginning of the pandemic, during a very bleak time. Every day I would wake up to more awful news about anti-queer and anti-trans legislation. I started going to these pandemic protests, and after a long time of doing that, I felt like I was forgetting what I was fighting for. It was just like: fight, fight, fight; tragedy, tragedy, tragedy. I wanted to remind myself of all of the great things about being gay so I could envision what my life might look like after the fight. Because I don’t want my life to be defined by fighting; I want it to be defined by joy. So I literally crafted a list of things I love about being gay, and it really helped me. I could have kept writing a list endlessly because there are so many hyper-specific things I love about being gay. I had a revelation towards the end of writing my second book, which is: when I was younger I only saw queerness as consequences, such as: “you might get disowned, you might get gay bashed, you might not find a job because nobody is going to hire you.” And as an adult, looking back at my life, I realize that being gay is such a privilege. Being gay allowed me to step outside the path toward the culture of machismo, and forge my own path. Being gay allowed me to travel and explore the world with this feeling of safety in knowing that no matter where I ended up, there would probably be a community of queer people who would see me and offer me a couch to sleep on, or a meal. There’s a built-in community everywhere I go; I know I’m going to be taken care of, or at least that I’m not going to be alone. 

One of the themes I noticed in High-Risk Homosexual is the movement from silence to expression, from a sense of invisibility to visibility, and specifically the role imagination and representation play in that movement. Where and how did you learn to imagine? 

I would say two places. I learned to imagine from my mom, who taught me how to dream big, and would always riff with me. When I was younger, we would drive around the suburbs and look at all the nice houses, and she would be like: “One day I’m going to get one twice as big in Miami and you’re going to buy me a Jaguar.” She was always fantasizing out loud. And so that really taught me to imagine. That, and growing up poor. We didn’t have a lot of toys so my brother and I would just be outside playing. He always liked to make movie spoofs, so we would write scripts together and record them in the backyard. Poverty sometimes forces you to be creative and imaginative in the best of ways. And so I would say those are the two ways I learned how to imagine: from my mom and from growing up poor.

What brings you joy?

What brings me the most joy is when I can do something, no matter what it is, that makes somebody else feel happy or relieved. I think it’s partly selfish: I am a double Pisces and I absorb other people’s energy. So making people happy makes me happy. It isn’t true altruism. It’s just, like, me wanting to suck the joy out of everybody around me (laughs). That, and really good food, going to the beach, anytime I can just turn my brain off and lie down somewhere brings me joy. The writer part of me feels joy whenever I read something and I’m just like: “Damn, this is so good. That’s such a good simile. I’m so into this story.”

What brings you hope?

These questions are so good because they’re exactly the questions I was asking myself when writing Alligator Tears: “What brings me joy? What brings me hope?” I wrote the book during the pandemic when I was not feeling joyful or hopeful, so I was digging through my memories, being like: “Okay, you felt this way during other periods of your life and somehow you managed to be happy and to keep going.” And so I wanted to remind myself of those things so I could keep going during the pandemic. I started feeling very powerless–like there were so many problems that were so much bigger than me. And because I was isolated, I was like: “How am I going to be able to solve these problems? Like, I am just one person.” And then I started going to the pandemic protests for Black Lives Matter, for immigration issues, for queer social justice issues. And during these protests I realized that I’m not alone, that I don’t have to solve every single problem by myself. That, in fact, it’s kind of an egoistic thought to have. Nobody was asking me to solve every problem on my own. And when you go to protests you see how everybody has an individual role to play. There are people on bikes blocking out traffic, there are people handing out bottles of water. Being there reminded me that all I have to do is play one part or play my part. And that gives me a lot of hope. Being in community, reminding myself that I’m not alone, that there are people fighting for the world they want to live in, that gives me a lot of hope. 

How would you like to be remembered?

An iconic trans activist, Cecilia Gentili, recently passed away and had this massive funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Everybody who went was dressed to the nines, in their heels, their hair laid, with cute outfits. It was a celebration. People were dancing and remembering the true her and how she presented herself as a proud puta, la santa de las putas. And it wasn’t sanitized. I think one of the best things about Cecilia was how she encouraged people to be their authentic selves. I am inspired by anybody who has gone through some shit and made it to the other end, not just smiling and happy, but like, laughing. I can’t think of a better legacy. I want to be remembered as who I say I am, through my life’s work, establishing my autonomy through literature, telling people who I am in my books. 

I feel as if you embody that; the last words of your first book come to mind: “keep going.”

I hope so.