HIGH RISK HOMOSEXUAL

A Florida-born writer’s account of how he learned to embrace and celebrate his identity as a gay Latinx man.

As an adolescent growing up in Orlando, Gomez fantasized he could live in a “rom-com” world like the one that Jennifer Lopez, his idol and beautiful Latina “damsel in distress,” often inhabited on screen. But an “artsy asexual” facade hid the queerness that his machista Latinx culture denigrated. In high school, a gay friend took him to clubs to revel in drag queen culture, and college brought with it the opportunity to move out and further define his sexuality on his own terms. However, Gomez quickly found himself forced into a binary existence. “It was obvious,” he writes, “that I could experiment with my appearance or I could have sex, but I couldn’t have both.” At the same time, the author also discovered a desire to engage in anonymous, multipartner gay club sex, and he joined a gay burlesque troop, where he learned, gradually, to be comfortable in his own skin. Leaving Orlando for graduate school after the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre gave rise to other important personal revelations. “I don’t have sympathy for the man who murdered forty-nine people I used to dance with. I promise you I don’t,” writes the author. “But I do for the child he’d been, despite knowing how this story ends, because he reminds me so much of myself.” Contending with the pervasive fear of contracting HIV, the author slowly began to learn to cautiously explore his desires while also continuing to “play the game. The game is hope.” Poignant, vivid, and often hilarious, this coming-of-age memoir fearlessly explores intersectional identity and shows what it means to live and love authentically as a gay man today.

An engagingly candid memoir from a promising young writer.