Clips
Review: High-Risk Homosexual by Edgar Gomez for Lambda Literary
Publishers tend to market gay memoirs as campy, joyful, and frivolous or serious, profound, and brooding. High-Risk Homosexual, the debut memoir by the talented Edgar Gomez, manages to fall into both categories—a funny beach read with piercing cuts into lived reality, all conveyed in a wry yet generous tone.
The voice and structure of High-Risk Homosexual make each chapter a propulsive delight. Gomez could write beautifully about a toothpick, but the 29-year-old has gathered a roster of peculiar stories: pressured by an uncle at 13 to prove his machismo by having sex with a “girl-woman”; an unexpectedly sweet coming-out story; skirmishes with a bouncer that barely conceal the aftermaths of a national catastrophe. Many of the subjects—sexual disillusionment, complications with coming out, relations across race and class—are common terrain, but Gomez primes the meaning in fleeting intimacy so well that the result is a compelling page-turner.
Raised in Orlando by a Nicaraguan mother and a Puerto Rican father, Gomez first went to Pulse as a quiet 18-year-old Latino still figuring out his queerness. “When I made it to Pulse,” he writes, “I finally understood what it meant to have my life belong to me.” Gomez has his first legal drink at Pulse and his fair share of make-out sessions. Understandably, June 12, 2016, haunts him. His analysis of the Pulse massacre is keen, questioning the limits of public mourning and the representation of minorities as victims or perpetrators, and delineating the psychological impact of Pulse. The night after the shooting, he leaves an angry voicemail for his brother; while his brother doesn’t explicitly know he’s gay, Gomez had still wanted him to check in. “I love you. Once would have been enough. I am a love camel. I would have made that last.”
This is the more elegiac side of High-Risk Homosexual that’s resonant of Paul Monette or Richard Blanco. Elsewhere, Gomez has the droll observations of David Sedaris or Michael Arceneaux. Here’s how Gomez describes a PrEP intake process: “‘Do you prefer to give or receive,’ [the doctor] asked during my last visit, as if the question weren’t about anal but my philosophy on Christmas.” Noting that the good doc wears Toms, Gomez opines, “She cared about orphans. She probably was a normal amount of homophobic. Fifteen percent. She’d cry if one of her kids came out to her, but in her room.”
While the memoir isn’t billed as a manual to gay life, it is full of hard-won insights into the heart, Latinx identity, and contemporary queer life. Here is Gomez discussing poppers: “One sniff from the tiny vial labeled ‘nail polish remover,’ and your body felt as if you were sinking into a cloud of silk.” Drag: “All the things that made people ignore him as a boy were what made him a beautiful woman. Drag was like magic. It made problems disappear.” His love for Valentina before Drag Race fame: “[Her] over-the-top mixture of anguish and sexiness. It’s peak drag: painful, messy, a constant negotiation between holding and spilling out.” Hookups with strangers: “It felt good to kill someone, a stranger who didn’t matter to me.” Then years later and seemingly more experienced at college: “In my room, I asked him his last name, his favorite book. Details I needed to convince myself he wasn’t a stranger I met on a website where people sold used car parts.”
High-Risk Homosexual continually interrogates the boundary between self-definition and socially or legally imposed definitions. Gomez inherits cultural scripts—embody machismo, don’t be malcriado—as well as the government-assigned names—boy in the hospital, and later in his mid-20s after seeking PrEP, a high-risk homosexual. To what degree he meets, rejects, or complicates these assigned names creates an engrossing memoir.
One striking aspect of High-Risk Homosexual is Gomez’s consideration of Omar Mateen, the Pulse shooter. Always inquisitive and skeptical toward government documentation, Gomez critiques the mass media interest in a fifth-grade report that purportedly established Mateen’s inherent criminality because of his callousness on 9/11. “I’m curious,” Gomez writes, “Knowing the way minorities are dehumanized in this country, what it means for an elementary school student to lack remorse. What would have been an appropriate response to terrorism for a child who must have understood that the images flashing onscreen would ruin the lives of so many in his community?”
Other chapters of High-Risk Homosexual argue that without his queerness that questioned machismo, without solid friends and a POC counselor to ensure some fairness, Gomez would have gone through a penal system that offered no second chances. One powerful paragraph about Mateen reads:
“It could have stopped when he was fired from the prison. It could have been stopped had he not been hired at G4S and granted a permit to carry a weapon. It could have been stopped when he was placed on the FBI terrorism watch list. It could have been stopped by his father. It could have been stopped at the gun store. It could have been stopped if at any point in his childhood he saw Pulse as a place that would have taken him in, like it did me, like it did so many of us.”
This is not a defense of Mateen, but rather a powerful call for accountability within a society that is quick to categorize and demean certain groups while claiming innocence from enabling such violence.
The battle between social scripts and subjective truths is a familiar story, but when told in such an honest and perceptive light, it remains a profound one. High-Risk Homosexual makes a convincing case that no matter what society makes of you—criminal, reject, a high-risk homosexual—a life of one’s own making is worth every risk.
Personal Essay: “How Books Shaped My Life as a Gay Escort” for Prism & Pen
In the 2012-2013 academic year, I probably made more money than any of my friends who had majored in English literature. I moved to New York City at 22 and applied to over 300 jobs. With no connections and gargantuan naïveté, the best I could do was a series of demeaning retail jobs in asbestos-lathered basements.
After a month, I had $48 in my bank account. I dreaded having to return to my home state of Alaska as a failure. I had done everything a good student was supposed to do to find decent work after graduation, but as I was quickly learning, merit had little to do with job placement. When someone approached me about an escorting gig, I was desperate and, even more so, curious.
I became a big reader in middle school, and the habit had positioned me to always root for the underdog, which included the figure of “the prostitute.” When I finished undergraduate studies, I could think critically about human suffering, especially its causes and obfuscations. I knew how to analyze situations through the lens of Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Michael Warner.
In the hundreds of works of literature I encountered, I started to wonder why ‘whores’ rarely narrated their own stories. It always seemed like someone else was speaking for them: in Evelina, the protagonist freaks out that prostitutes can afford finer clothes now and she may be confused with one; in 100 Days of Solitude, the only access we have to the interiority of a 15-year-old prostitute is through the eyes of Colonel Aureliano Buendía. The figure of the whore is used to prove a point about the cruelty of inequality (Les Miserables) and to exemplify the inevitable route to redemption (Moll Flanders).
The whore was rarely the author of his own story, rarely an end rather than a means.
For me, sex work became a way to prove a point: if society wasn’t going to give me a decent job with access to healthcare, I would find my own way, even if that required climbing what the sociologist James O’Kane called “the crooked ladder.”
I also wanted to act on my belief that consensual sex work between adults should be, much like homosexuality, decriminalized. Finally, I wanted to be one of those whores who would (one day) become their own author.
Working through Hourboy and Rentboy opened doors to different classes I normally would never have access to. I met provosts and presidents, B-list celebrities and national journalists. I flew to Palm Springs and received oceanfront massages in Oahu. One client gave me books every time we met. Through him, I encountered Javier Marías, Rita Dove, Anthony Marra.
Most importantly, I had my time back to read and write. In one day I could make as much as I had made in one month. On a whim, I dropped $300 in Boston’s Oscar Wilde Bookshop. I negotiated a steep discount with one regular if he bought me a BILLY Bookcase from IKEA and drove it up to my apartment in Upper Manhattan. While my friends spent their days as receptionists and mail boys, I re-read The Color Purple and A Visit from the Goon Squad.
I became familiar with the less glamorous parts of escorting, too: the retired custodian who saved up for one special night a year with a “treat”; the depressed Broadway composer who layered his townhouse with pee pads for his poodles; the recently divorced man blaring Fox News in the background who didn’t want to pay up. I became my own marketer, agent, accountant, security, and quality assurance team. I learned that sex work is, indeed, work.
Before 2012/13, I had caught glimpses of gay male sex work in Memoirs of a Geisha and My Private Idaho, but now, I looked for work that better reflected my experience. John Rechy’s novel City of Night described a world of hustling that no longer existed in the digital age, same for the only memoir on gay male sex work I could find, Assuming the Position by Rick Whittaker. Chicken by David Henry Sterry remains one of the best memoirs on sex work I’ve read, but Sterry only worked with women.
The more readily available accounts of sex work were always heterosexual and tended to be glib (The Happy Hooker, Secret Diary of a Call Girl) or painfully moralistic (Paid For). These accounts were written for mainstream audiences, and to deflect the opprobrium on sex work, their authors had to pick a side on the pro/con ban and stick with it. They did not make room for the nuance I regularly encountered.
But some queer works did. There’s a sugar-mommy situation in Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown, and I recognized the sort of mentorship I at times experienced with my clients who gave me job advice and feedback on essays. I saw my relations in the Manhattan grit of Mary Gaitskill’s short stories where menace and kindness are always mixed. In life and in literature, I learned that queer experiences are constantly engendering new forms of love, or as Adrienne Rich observed in Necessities of Life — “lust too is a jewel.”
Ultimately, my time as an escort was empowering, but it was also brutal on my self-esteem. I stopped (mostly) by the end of August 2013. In the following years, I looked to literature and film to understand what had happened. “Tangerine” (2015) captured the joy, humor, and betrayals of sex work. Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You (2016) perfectly articulated the emotional landscape between clients and escorts.
I found more and more works that dared to ask about the complexities of queer life, how sex work intersected with consent, aging, love, abuse, obligation, sacrifice: The Romanian by Bruce Benderson; “Mysterious Skins” by Gregg Araki; Moonstone by Sjón. These works helped me understand my own experience as an escort, as well as the many distinct experiences of sex workers at large.
In my world, sex and literature are inextricably linked. When I learned about one form, I learned about the other.
My favorite example is when a client took me to The Algonquin Hotel on Thanksgiving. We ordered drinks at the Blue Bar. I asked why he chose this place. He replied that my profile said something about wanting to be a writer. He asked if I had heard of The Algonquin Round Table. I shook my head.
He told me about Dorothy Parker sitting at this very table spinning out witticisms. Someone once challenged her to use ‘horticulture’ in a sentence. Her reply was one of his favorites and, in time, became one of mine, too: “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”
Appreciation: On Audre Lorde for Transformative Learning in the Humanities for Transformative Learning in the Humanities
I learned of Audre Lorde as a bookish kid in Alaska. I cannot overestimate the difference between her world and mine. I had never been to the East Coast and thought Harlem was pronounced with a definite article before it. She would bristle at my militaristic and Christian fundamentalist upbringing, where a pastor each Sunday unfurled a detailed map of hell (at least the colors were stunning — now I wonder where he found that red glitter to outline the flames of hell — Michaels?). White supremacy was so absolute in my world that my mother’s lineage, Chicana and Black, was subsumed to the point that I was unquestionably and categorically white.
Lucky for me (but unfortunate for the pastor) I was also gay, so a sense of difference followed me from my earliest memories. The poem that opened me to Lorde was “School Note” from The Black Unicorn (1978), which I passed in an anthology at 18. There are certain poems that find you — less acts of discovery than of recognition:
For the embattled
there is no place
that cannot be
home
nor is
The form struck me: this elegant balance within imbalance; the crest of the m in home and the trough of nor. Lorde’s poetry reflects her conviction of what humanity can be; her speeches and essays are also indicative of why Lorde is a great artist: she uses her power to fight the strictures of race, class, religion, gender; she connects with people she seemingly has nothing in common with. “I am a warrior,” Lorde wrote, “and poetry is my weapon.”
In the essay “Man Child” from the 1984 collection Sister Outsider, Lorde reflects on raising a 14-year-old son, Jonathan, who was barred from a feminist conference. Lorde ponders over the many shifting situations that she as a feminist, lesbian, mother, and “warrior poet” must navigate, particularly the use of anger and love. She thinks about the future of her children: “If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive.” It’s in this always-changing landscape that Lorde quotes ‘School Note.’ Here is the final stanza:
My children play with skulls
and remember
for the embattled
there is no place
that cannot be
home
nor is.
Now as I teach writing at Lehman College, far from my origins of white supremacy, this poem still shocks me. Lorde’s vision was for a radical reality of empowerment, not a glib multiculturalism, but a praise – informed by recognition – of difference. Lorde writes toward the end of “Man Child”: “And Frances and I, as grown women and lesbians coming more and more into our power, need to relearn the experience that difference does not have to be threatening.”
There is so much to discuss in Sister Outsider: from Lorde’s dissection of “horizontal hostility” in “Eye to Eye” to her vision of poetry in “Uses of the Erotic.” This February, my classes have read “Learning from the 60s.” Speaking in February of 1982 on the legacy of Malcolm X, Lorde examines the liberation movements of the 1960s, praising their radical vision while critiquing their limited views of who counted as “us.” Her assessment is passionate but undogmatic, fair but firm, steadfast in an assault on false hierarchies. Near the end, she writes:
Can any of us here still afford to believe that efforts to reclaim the future can be private or individual? Can any one here still afford to believe that the pursuit of liberation can be the sole and particular province of any one particular race, or sex, or age, or religion, or sexuality, or class?
Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other’s difference with respect.
Community Reporting: New York’s Most Popular Writing Method You’ve Never Heard Of for The Red Hook Star-Revue
Even if you have zero interest in writing, you’ve probably seen a cab-yellow newsstand of catalogs for Gotham Writers Workshop, or the lime green advertisements for Sackett Street Writers Workshop. Since 2002, Sackett Street has worked with over 3,500 writers, and Gotham Writers (founded in 1993) currently averages 2,800 New Yorkers a year with their in-person classes. But trumping both of these two well-known programs is the less publicly glitzy group, New York Writers Coalition (NYWC). Founded in 2002, NYWC has worked with over 15,000 writers.
Their high numbers are due to the fact that they’re public and don’t charge for classes. If you’ve seen creative writing workshop notices at a Brooklyn Public Library, there’s a good chance it was arranged by NYWC. While Gotham and Sackett focus on literary writing (notice the stress on ‘workshop’ in their name), NY Writers Coalition is community-driven (the root word of ‘coalition’ is ‘coalesce’). They work to include veterans, seniors, at-risk youth, and people living with disabilities. In fact, their story began at a homeless shelter.
Shortly after graduate school at City College, Aaron Zimmerman, the founder of NYWC, was invited to run a poetry workshop at The Prince George Hotel, a homeless shelter in NoMad. He had just completed training at Amherst Writers & Artists, a group that emphasizes the value of positive comments in writing groups. He applied what he learned from AWA to the workshop; the results were inspiring.
“There were fantastic writers,” Zimmerman said. “Those beginnings were really eye-opening for me to work with people who came from different backgrounds. It shattered all the stereotypes out there.”
He returned to The Prince George to lead workshops in fiction and organize readings. Once he realized he could help low-income people and those living with HIV through writing workshops, Zimmerman was set on creating New York Writers Coalition.
As NYWC grew, Zimmerman focused on maintaining the connection between the arts and social justice. “How can we use the power of writing to change conceptions, bring people together, provide space? That’s why the focus is on people from groups that historically aren’t heard from enough.”
NY Writers Coalition is all about removing class and racial barriers to writing. Zimmerman said that when they first started, that philosophy seemed like a radical idea. “But now we know how we thrive when we hear from more people.” He noted that writing classes continue to be expensive. “They do tend to serve the privileged–educationally, economically. A lot of barriers get in the way of people and over time, some think they just can’t do it.”
Since 2005, NYWC has hosted a free, six-week creative writing camp for teens in Fort Greene. They also run a small publishing press. Their first chapbook was from a Prince George Hotel writer who passed from AIDS. Since then, they’ve published over 45 books by their participants. This past January, they published Can You Feel the Free in Me, a collection of poems by women at their Rikers Island writing group.
NYWC doesn’t officially sponsor any method, but it’s hard to ignore the influence of Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA). Founded by Pat and Peter Schneider, the AWA method posits that the space where something is written is more important than instructions on how to write. According to their website, their philosophy “ is a simple one: every person is a writer, and every writer deserves a safe environment in which to experiment, learn, and develop craft.”
A typical workshop looks like this: writers sit in a circle and go over the ground rules–only positive criticism, everything is to be treated as fiction, and the purpose of the group is to be supportive. The instructor gives a prompt, ranging from quotes to touch this lemon slice and write what memories come to you. After writing for 15-20 minutes, the group stops. The instructor asks who wants to share (AWA is unique among writing methods in that the instructor participates too). The group listens to what was written. Considering that the piece is brand new, all comments gravitate toward the positive elements. If time permits, there’s a round two.
It’s not for everyone. Writing with others can feel uncomfortable when performing a traditionally solitary activity. More professional writers still gravitate toward Sackett and Gotham. But for the majority of people who want to dabble in writing, who fear having their work shared, who have a distress they want to explore, want to connect with a community, or recover from a sour MFA experience, this kinder, gentler method can be a literal life-saver.
Lynne Connor started the AWA-inspired group Lost Lit after her adoptive mother, who kept her breast cancer diagnosis a secret, passed. After an AWA workshop in San Francisco where the prompt was a cotton ball, she tapped into some startling thoughts about Asian-American identity. For Connor, the AWA method was more generative than a traditional MFA program. “I couldn’t survive the MFA without this method,” Connor said.
With everything in AWA considered fiction, Connor said this focused the conversation on craft and removed some of the unproductive comments she encountered in her nonfiction MFA courses.
The group’s name comes from her own experience: turning to literature when she felt lost. Since 2012, Lost Lit has held regular meetings of 10-12 people in a secluded loft area at Grumpy Bert Art Gallery (owned by her husband) in Boerum Hill.
With treating everything as fiction and the focus on positive comments, Connor rebuilt the confidence to share her work with others. With two small children, Connor finds that parents respond well to AWA: there’s no homework, and the only writing discussed in the class is generated in that class.
“Part of why I love this method is that I really see the change,” Connor said. “I can see the people who are petrified to read, then by the end of six or eight weeks – they’re reading and their voice has changed. You can see themselves feel good about themselves.”
Lost Lit is just one of several smaller writing groups around Brooklyn using the AWA method. At Red Hook’s Jalopy Theater, Leslie Fierro has been running Cast Off Writers for the past two years. Paul Rozario-Falcone manages Safe Space Stories in Carroll Gardens.
After a law degree and an editing career, Rozario-Falcone signed up for an AWA workshop through NY Writers Coalition about four years ago.
“I was so impressed how it jump starts your creative process,” he said. “The environment is so friendly and warm, really anyone can use this method.”
Eager to learn more, Rozario-Falcone (like Connor) attended an AWA “bootcamp” in Amherst. For a week, they took turns leading workshops and enacting specific participant personas. They would spot the group dynamic, such as the writer whose feedback was more self-involved than focused on the piece at hand. They also wrote based on dozens of prompts. “You’d be surprised at what we can create in the span of 20 minutes,” he said.
They learned that the space in which writing is discussed is just as important as how it is discussed. “This method fosters creation of a space that is safe for anybody. It’s nonjudgmental and allow your own voice to develop slowly. We learn by each other through positive feedback. The goal isn’t to say you don’t understand something, it’s to oo and awe.”
AWA workshops aren’t completely opposed to criticism. Each of these smaller groups offers manuscript critiques, which are held less frequently. Lost Lit offers a “Works in Progress” for people who want more direct feedback on a manuscript that’s ready for publication. “I don’t love doing those,” Connor admitted. “It’s hard with different people coming in various stages of completion. Some people are just not ready to take the critique that comes out.”
All three instructors see a wide range of professions represented in their classes. Fierro’s current participants include teachers, lawyers, advertisers, college students, and recent graduates. She often spreads the word through Parent ListServs, and she’s found that parents with young children get a lot out of AWA workshops. Fierro, who received her MFA in fiction from The New School, says Cast Off Writers offers opportunities for people who want to write but are wary of critique.
“When the group only comments on what’s strong or memorable, the rest of your writing will rise,” Fierro said. “Everybody can find a place for their voice.”
In a video celebrating NY Writers Coalition 15th anniversary, a string of participants talked about the personal change they experienced from these writing groups. They mentioned reduced pain and stress, a boost in confidence and self-esteem, a replacement for addictive behaviors, a connective path to other cultures, genders, situations, and religions. It has built self-respect and reduced depression.
All four of these instructors agreed that the relaxed environment inspires real-time improvement.
After 20 years of leading workshops, Zimmerman is still amazed by the change that occurs in just one hour. “Something magical happens. You can just see the power of receiving everyone’s feedback on that person: something melts, something transforms.”
When a writing group focuses on building trust, it allows a huge array of ages, races, and classes to participate. NYWC may not churn out the best writing in New York, but it does offer a sprawling network of opportunities for New Yorkers to feel some stability in their own lives and connection with their community.
“Our New Yorker stories have similar elements,” Zimmerman said, “and it’s a great thing to witness. If you can tell a story, you can write it down. That goes for everyone.”