Gomez’s vulnerable and humorous voice gives strength to High-Risk Homosexual. Gomez’s memoir werks it and serves the tea with humor while addressing serious issues therefore, the reader is not overwhelmed with sadness.

Among the most beautiful scenes in the book is one in which the narrator finds his tribe. High-Risk Homosexual creates a safe space where Gomez navigates through the hostile world that wants him to be someone other than himself. Gomez captures a truth for many LGBTQ+ youths: ignore the hate, silence your secret, and you may survive. Gomez’s pain is felt in the narrator’s silence and in words unwritten. Like a night out in Manolos, High-Risk Homosexual brings both pleasure and pain, and readers are lucky to be invited to this coming-of-age ki-ki. Read Full Review >Įdgar Gomez’s High-Risk Homosexual sashays and shantays readers through the author’s teenage years and into his early 20s. By its own admission, the book doesn’t have all the answers, but it makes a compelling case that they will come from the razor-sharp queers living in the margins. These minor complaints do little to dull the shine of an exciting debut from an author with a rare point of view. Gomez’s voice is equal parts warmth and acid wit, like a good friend you’re slightly afraid of, but there are times in the middle of a passage where you’ll feel you know what he’s going to say before he says it. Ever committed to parsing its central themes of masculinity and queer identity, High-Risk Homosexual does circle back on itself a bit, the chapters teetering on uniformity. Gomez writes with a humor and clarity that generally keep the melodrama at bay, an absolute must in a memoir that might otherwise have been a laundry list of painful experiences. As a writer, he invites us into the chasm between what he is expected to do and what he is capable of, giving himself plenty of room for emotion, self-deprecation and acerbic observation. It’s a compelling portrait of machismo: a surveilled, violent dance. It’s largely the ugly that High-Risk Homosexual is concerned with, and though often heavy, Edgar Gomez’s debut is also a breath of fresh air.

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