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4.0
High-Risk Homosexual
ByPublisher Description
This witty memoir traces a touching and often hilarious spiralic path to embracing a gay, Latinx identity against a culture of machismo—from a cockfighting ring in Nicaragua to cities across the U.S.—and the bath houses, night clubs, and drag queens who help redefine pride.
"I’ve always found the definition of machismo to be ironic, considering that pride is a word almost unanimously associated with queer people, the enemy of machistas. In particular, effeminate queer men represent a simultaneous rejection and embrace of masculinity . . . In a world desperate to erase us, queer Latinx men must find ways to hold onto pride for survival, but excessive male pride is often what we are battling, both in ourselves and in others."
A debut memoir about coming of age as a gay, Latinx man, High-Risk Homosexual opens in the ultimate anti-gay space: Edgar Gomez’s uncle’s cockfighting ring in Nicaragua, where he was sent at thirteen years old to become a man. Readers follow Gomez through the queer spaces where he learned to love being gay and Latinx, including Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, a drag queen convention in Los Angeles, and the doctor’s office where he was diagnosed a “high-risk homosexual.”
With vulnerability, humor, and quick-witted insights into racial, sexual, familial, and professional power dynamics, Gomez shares a hard-won path to taking pride in the parts of himself he was taught to keep hidden. His story is a scintillating, beautiful reminder of the importance of leaving space for joy.
"I’ve always found the definition of machismo to be ironic, considering that pride is a word almost unanimously associated with queer people, the enemy of machistas. In particular, effeminate queer men represent a simultaneous rejection and embrace of masculinity . . . In a world desperate to erase us, queer Latinx men must find ways to hold onto pride for survival, but excessive male pride is often what we are battling, both in ourselves and in others."
A debut memoir about coming of age as a gay, Latinx man, High-Risk Homosexual opens in the ultimate anti-gay space: Edgar Gomez’s uncle’s cockfighting ring in Nicaragua, where he was sent at thirteen years old to become a man. Readers follow Gomez through the queer spaces where he learned to love being gay and Latinx, including Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, a drag queen convention in Los Angeles, and the doctor’s office where he was diagnosed a “high-risk homosexual.”
With vulnerability, humor, and quick-witted insights into racial, sexual, familial, and professional power dynamics, Gomez shares a hard-won path to taking pride in the parts of himself he was taught to keep hidden. His story is a scintillating, beautiful reminder of the importance of leaving space for joy.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesHigh-Risk Homosexual Reviews
4.0
“There's something to be said for finding yourself as a young, queer, Latinx man in the world.
Edgar Gomez’s reflections on trying to protect himself from so many externalized forms of violence and his thoughts around the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_nightclub_shooting were painful but felt real and understandably conflicting. His moments of first love and first distancing, deep friendship, and friendship breakdown were poignant. I feel better having engaged with his thoughts, musings, and experiences.
There was quite a bit of discussion of sex in this book. It was interesting and simultaneously awkward at points.
A couple of standout moments to me in the book:
re: the complexities of coming into yourself - "If I could have done it with a knife, I would have. If I could have forced my body to do what they needed it to, I’d swear to like it. If they would listen to me, I’d apologize. I was so sorry. I didn’t mean to be like this.” — 9% in High-Risk Homosexual by Edgar Gomez
re: finally getting there - "I’d spent so much of my life trying to be palatable, trying to stay safe, and now I was in a city where survival wasn’t my number one priority, but I didn’t know what to do with myself. Eat gay cookies? Read gay books? Listen to Lady Gaga? Those things were fun, but were they all the last two decades of my life had been leading up to? Was this really everything that was waiting for me, for us, at the end of the rainbow?” — 95% in High-Risk Homosexual by Edgar Gomez
Big thanks to Netgalley for letting me read this book for free.”
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