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A review by drjreads
High-Risk Homosexual by Edgar Gomez
2.0
More like "Humdrum Homosexual" if you ask me...
This book, a memoir in essays by a millennial author, feels like it is an endless complaint by someone who feels oppressed by the fact that he hasn't been oppressed enough - so much so that he internalizes and appropriates other people's traumas and oppressions as his own and then acts like they have been committed against him.
This book is a collection of micro-aggressions presented as though they were hate crimes, and it gets very old very quickly, until it becomes exasperating when he simply lacks any notion of self criticism and awareness. He does not seem for a second to recognize how much worse others have/had it than him, and when he seems to he takes it upon himself as some sort of historical burden that he has claimed as his own. It's an exhausting read.
Add in the fact that the essays are structured in ways that seem to come out of a "creative writing 101" class, and I should know since I teach those types of classes!
All in all I had a very bad time reading this. I just don't think the author was mature enough yet to have the perspective to write such a book and not question himself, his beliefs, or his experience with the benefit of time and maturity. Perhaps one day it would have been an interesting book, but as is it is a pretty lackluster and shallow narrative of a person that hasn't really gone through anything and mostly complains that he was born too late to participate in actually historical gay liberation movements and experienced queer life in the 70s and 80s, and that makes for a really boring, if not borderline offensive, reading experience.
This book, a memoir in essays by a millennial author, feels like it is an endless complaint by someone who feels oppressed by the fact that he hasn't been oppressed enough - so much so that he internalizes and appropriates other people's traumas and oppressions as his own and then acts like they have been committed against him.
This book is a collection of micro-aggressions presented as though they were hate crimes, and it gets very old very quickly, until it becomes exasperating when he simply lacks any notion of self criticism and awareness. He does not seem for a second to recognize how much worse others have/had it than him, and when he seems to he takes it upon himself as some sort of historical burden that he has claimed as his own. It's an exhausting read.
Add in the fact that the essays are structured in ways that seem to come out of a "creative writing 101" class, and I should know since I teach those types of classes!
All in all I had a very bad time reading this. I just don't think the author was mature enough yet to have the perspective to write such a book and not question himself, his beliefs, or his experience with the benefit of time and maturity. Perhaps one day it would have been an interesting book, but as is it is a pretty lackluster and shallow narrative of a person that hasn't really gone through anything and mostly complains that he was born too late to participate in actually historical gay liberation movements and experienced queer life in the 70s and 80s, and that makes for a really boring, if not borderline offensive, reading experience.