Allison Argueta Claros
Interview with Edgar Gomez
Edgar Gomez’s work complicates the queer bildungsroman. Rather than rendering a life as a narrowing towards coherence, Gomez positions class struggles, risk, and humiliation as formative forces— experiences that do not resolve neatly, but persist.
A queer NicaRican writer born and raised in Florida, Gomez is the author of the memoir High-Risk Homosexual, winner of the American Book Award, a Stonewall Israel-Fishman Nonfiction Book Honor Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. Their sophomore book, Alligator Tears, a darkly-comic memoir-in-essays, was released in February 2025 and has received warm reviews by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Salon. Gomez graduated from the University of California’s MFA program and has written for publications like The LA Times, Poets & Writers, Lithub, New York Magazine. He has received fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Black Mountain Institute.
WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW: You’ve mentioned that your endings often call back to an image earlier in the chapter to create a sense of completeness or change. In the drafting process, do you write towards meaning, or do you write scenes and discover the theme afterwards? What do you make of the writerly intuition to rebel against neat endings?
EDGAR GOMEZ: I usually start out by writing a bunch of scenes that feel natural to me, whether because I’m writing around a theme or because I’m telling a specific story and the memories are from a specific period of time, and once I’m done, it’s like I have all these puzzle pieces in front of me that I have to figure out how to put together. Once in a while I get lucky and the meaning is pretty clear right away, but it’s also more exciting, and I like the challenge when I have to really sit there and bite my nails and figure out what the vision is, as opposed to coming into a story with all the answers already.
I’m not mad at a neat, perfect ending, but they are so hard to pull off. Even if the problems of the main characters are resolved, they still have to go out and live in the world. I guess I just don’t see them as realistic, but if you’re writing something where realism doesn’t matter, then go off! In memoir, I feel like a happy ending can be a curse. It’s like how in the movies, when things are all going amazing for the characters, you know someone is about to die. A happy ending in memoir feels like setting yourself up.
WSR: What is your relationship to writing at the moment? You have mentioned that in the past you have become a sort of recluse when writing, but has that changed? If so, what is your routine like now?
GOMEZ: My relationship with writing is a little more relaxed than it used to be. There were definitely times in my life when I felt like I needed to shut myself away to write, and times when I was working a thousand minimum wage jobs and so whenever I had spare time, I prioritized writing over everything. Looking back, a part of me feels guilty about that, and another part is also trying to show myself compassion, because back then I was so broke and desperate and writing felt like this little treasure and bit of hope that I had, it was almost like a ritual that reminded me of my worth. I believed it could change my life, and it did. Now that I’m a few books in I don’t silo myself off as much as I used to. I still feel an urgency sometimes, and if I’m really deep into a story, then I’ll give myself permission to get lost in it, but especially in memoir, when you’re writing about your life, it’s just as important to be a person out in the world as much as you can. Understanding what matters to people in your community. Letting yourself get inspired by what’s happening around you. Those are part of the writing process too.
WSR: How did you arrive at writing a memoir in essays? What about the genre compels you? What does the episodic structure do for you as a writer?
GOMEZ: It wasn’t a super conscious decision, but it’s a format that felt right with how I organized my life for a long time. When I was in the closet and in the years after coming out, I had my gay friends and my school friends and my biological family at home and I kept all of these worlds apart, so when it came time to write personal essays, there wasn’t a ton of overlap. I liked the idea of almost completely severing each world off so that every chapter tells a complete story and is almost like its own episode, with the main thing linking each one being my coming-of-age. It also made it easier to limit how much I had to write about other people… I don’t like putting everyone I love’s business out there, so if I can just write about them for one chapter when they are relevant to the story I’m telling, then have them disappear from the rest of the book, then I’ll do that.
WSR: Who are your influences, literary and otherwise? Did you have any artists that functioned as your guide as you wrote both books?
GOMEZ: So many! I wrote a long list right now, but it doesn’t hit as hard when it’s just a list of names, so I’ll leave the first three: Janet Mock, Rigoberto González, Zora Neale Hurston. Mother, father, and holy Florida spirit.
WSR: Your voice is very singular: sharp, unflinching, and often really funny. How do you develop and revise voice on the sentence level? Also, when do you know that you have arrived at the right tone for a piece?
GOMEZ: I let the story I’m telling determine the voice. Some stories are funnier than others. Sometimes the subject is the kind of sad that makes laughing less of a priority in the moment. My general rule is to aim for emotional harmony; every story doesn’t have to have every emotion, but I like it when the emotions that are present are in some kind of balance and relationship. Humor to offer relief from darkness, or a little sincerity because too many jokes can get tiring, and so on…
WSR: High-Risk Homosexual interrogates shame and desire while navigating multiple cultural worlds: Latine expectations, assimilation pressures, queer community. How do the emotional questions of High-Risk Homosexual evolve or transform in Alligator Tears? What did the second book allow you to explore that the first did not?
GOMEZ: There were some threads in the background of High-Risk Homosexual related to class and capitalism and money that I wanted to explore further, but because those weren’t the focus of that book, I didn’t feel like I had space, or else it would have ended up being 500 pages long. Alligator Tears gave me the opportunity to really go in on the class and the financial angst of it all. It’s still a very gay book, but it’s also a book where queerness isn’t the main source of conflict or tension, and I’m realizing now how much I needed to write a book like that.
WSR: You often write about environments as extensions of emotional states. How intentional is the relationship between setting and interiority for you?
GOMEZ: Environment and emotion are linked in so many ways. Where we are impacts how we feel, emotionally, physically... I mean, when I’m cold, I’m mad. When it’s warm, I’m more relaxed and patient, but there’s also the way we perceive our environments, which is a reflection of our interior emotions. On the sentence level, your descriptions can establish a tone that is reflective of the character’s emotional state. If they’re in paradise, and they’re describing the suffocating heat and the annoying mosquitos, that is valuable information about that person.
WSR: In another interview you mentioned that people tend to project sadness onto poverty. So much of your work subverts this and infuses your experiences with earnestness and humor. How do you approach writing emotionally heavy moments?
GOMEZ: My first drafts are almost always trauma dumps. Just me laying the foundation for the story and trying to get through it. Later when I’m revising, I dress it up for the reader and add jokes and try to make the writing beautiful and all that, but it’s important that I let my first drafts just be raw and sad if that’s what I’m feeling. If I know that I’m writing something emotionally difficult, then I can’t give myself the task of trying to make it perfect all in one go, or else I would be way too intimidated to approach the page.
WSR: What is your personal philosophy when writing about the real people in your life? What does your process look like, especially when someone might not see themselves or a specific moment the way you do? Do you rely on interviewing family and friends or more so on intuition?
GOMEZ: I let myself write about anyone in my life as long as, 1) I’m not doing it from a place of revenge, and 2) Writing about them won’t put them in harm. Generally if I can avoid writing about other people, then I do, because I understand that most people like their privacy, but I’m also a human in the world and it would be almost impossible to explain anything about myself without bringing up my family or my friends or the people who have shaped me.
In terms of memory recall, I do a combination of interviewing and researching, but the biggest gift any memoirist can give themselves is time. Once you start writing about a certain memory you have, it’s like opening a door in your brain, and if you keep that door open, with time more details will inevitably start coming back to you.
WSR: Your work explores machismo, queerness, familial dynamics, and Latine identity with so much nuance. Has writing ever changed your mind about something you thought you understood, either during the drafting process or when returning to a piece long after publication? How do you reconcile that personal evolution with the fact that writing is such a static medium? Can you speak to a specific moment when your perspective shifted?
GOMEZ: Absolutely, and that’s what I love about writing: that it changes how I see and understand the world. I remember, shortly after the Pulse Nightclub shooting, I was very anti-gun. I kind of cast this blanket judgement over anyone who had a gun. Later, when I moved to California, I found out about this group called The Gays with Guns who’d meet up at a shooting range to practice using their guns, and I was just looking at them sideways like, How are you real? I did more things for the plot back then, so I decided to join them one afternoon, and just being around this group of people and hearing their stories, and later writing about the experience, totally shifted my perspective. I met this trans actress who had to walk to her car late at night and wanted practice with guns to protect herself, a lesbian couple who was planning a cross country road trip and were nervous, and lowkey I also met this suspicious twink who was in college and was sad he couldn’t keep a gun in his dorm (obviously you can’t do that!). Writing the story helped me understand my community more. I still don’t think anyone needs to own a machine gun, but I understand now why queer people would join a group like that.
WSR: How do you translate the complexity and richness of your experiences into scenes rather than broad statements? Which chapter or piece was the most difficult to write emotionally, and what was the hardest to write technically?
GOMEZ: There’s the classic writing advice “show, don’t tell,” though I don’t really agree with that. I think it’s an overcorrection that maybe comes from memoirists starting out doing more summarizing than scene-work. Both showing and telling are useful tools, so I’m not mad at broad statements or reflection, but for the most part I try wherever I can to let the actions and the images do the work of guiding readers toward meaning or emotion. By not explicitly telling readers what to feel or what a scene means, it’s like an invitation for them to bring themselves and their own histories into the story, which invariably will make the scene more rich and the experience more engaging.
The hardest chapter to write emotionally was the titular essay, “Alligator Tears.” It’s about the Pulse Nightclub shooting in my hometown, and it’s just a subject that requires a bit of mental preparation for me to get into. The first couple drafts were tough, but I’ll say that because I don’t have a lot of pictures from that time of my life, it’s also nice to write about Pulse because it’s my way to revisit all the good memories I had there too, through prose. So it’s not all sad.
The hardest to write on a technical level was the first chapter, “Orlando Royalty,” because there’s always more pressure on the first chapter and because I had to do a lot of things like establishing the voice, setting up the stakes of the book, introducing the characters in my life and the world.
WSR: Where do you feel your writing is headed after these two books? Are there new projects or books we can look forward to?
GOMEZ: I’ll probably keep writing about gay people until I get tired of us.
Edgar Gomez is the author of the memoir High-Risk Homosexual, winner of the American Book Award, a Stonewall Israel-Fishman Nonfiction Book Honor Award, and the Lambda Literary Award.