You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Scan barcode
meadowbat's review
5.0
I got the sense that if I were to meet Gomez at any point during the timespan of this funny, layered memoir, he would have come across as all the things I envied (or, when I was a young closeted queer myself, the things I feared)—flamboyant, confident, and artistic. But his precise narration captures the complexities of being "out," from his need to be independent from his mother before she can be truly okay with his sexuality, to feeling squirmy about citing queerness as a hardship (though it is) to get financial aid for college. He also writes meaningfully about his relationship to the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando—a place he went often, but not that night—contemplating the ways his own story did and didn't intersect with that of shooter Omar Mateen. In all these ways, Gomez turns the classic coming-out story inside out and outside in.
kgmittty's review
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
fast-paced
4.75
“… you can lose part of yourself to save the rest.”
Edgar Gomez’s writing is precise and beautiful and cuts straight to the heart of what so many of us have feared and loved growing up queer in a world that hates queerness.
Following him through snapshots of his life as he tries simultaneously to hide and embrace who he is so familiar and heartbreaking.
He reckons with the inherent contradictions of being effeminate and gay, how masculinity is covered by gay men while also being a standard they can never truly live up to in the eyes of others. His nature is something he tries to camouflage but is constantly met with the reality that it’s not enough — people can somehow see though it and hate him for it, this thing that he is and cannot control and still loves in so many ways.
“Everything I’d been taught about surviving was wrong. I wasn’t surviving before. I was existing.”
Hiding is not living. Surviving is one thing, but shoving down parts of yourself to appease others kills a part of you. Gomez spends this memoir recounting the steps he took to come to that realization in a way o could see parts of myself reflected in, even though there is so much that separates our experiences.
He speaks about his identity as a gay Latino in a way that tries to hold all the contradictions they carry. His passages about Pulse and the aftermath of the massacre there are especially gutting, but so so tender. They’re something I think everyone should read.
This book is about survival, about learning to face yourself in a broken mirror. Sometimes what you are given is not enough, but each step you take makes the path a little more clear for the ones behind you. And sometimes that’s all you can do and that is enough.
There’s a lot more I could say about this because I loved every page of it. But for now I’ll leave off with Gomez’s final words:
“What you do when you’re not afraid anymore is the same thing you do when you are: Keep Going.”
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty and Animal death
Moderate: Homophobia, Misogyny, Racism, Sexism, and Transphobia
camilleberedjick's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
funny
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gun violence, Homophobia, Sexual content, Xenophobia, and Mass/school shootings
pastelsux's review
5.0
I don’t even know what to write in a review of this. I don’t know how you can review the stories of someone’s life and do that justice. What I will say is that this year I started seeking out more LGBT nonfiction to read (it’s all on my TBR I promise), and I’m really glad I did. There is, somewhat, a shared “gay experience” that I’m privy to, but books like this also give me glimpses into “gay experiences” so different from my own as just a white lesbian in the Midwest who’s not yet old enough to go to bars and clubs (it’s one of the things I look forward to about turning 21 soon, going to the bars and clubs not to drink, but just to be there and start making my own “gay experience”).
augkali's review
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcoholism, Drug use, Hate crime, Homophobia, Racism, and Mass/school shootings
possibilityleft's review against another edition
emotional
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
3.5