REVIEW: Alligator Tears: A Memoir in Essays by Edgar Gomez

Reviewed by Brian Watson

I remember when I first heard of Edgar Gomez. Buzz permeated the queer writing community for his first memoir, High-Risk Homosexual, in 2022 — before it was named a winner of a Lambda Literary Award, the American Book Award, and a Stonewall–Israel Fishman Honor Award — and several people in my orbit recommended I read it. “Maybe you can use it as a comp title?” they said.

I flew through the book, entranced, but reading so quickly that all I can recall are the emotions his writing triggered: joy for his triumphs, shared sorrow for the family challenges he faced, and perhaps that most writerly of feelings: jealousy. Will I ever write with such passion, such cleverness, such vulnerability?

When Edgar was slated to read at AWP Seattle in 2023, I required an autograph. My vanity demands that I tell you all that he complimented my nail polish; I nearly swooned on the spot. Therefore, I eagerly volunteered to review Alligator Tears: A Memoir in Essays, but I vowed to read it more attentively this time.

***

I’m at a point in my life where I accept the old queen appellation. With queer age, one says, comes an admiration — tinged, perhaps, with bitter regrets — for younger generations. “It’s so much easier to come out nowadays,” I have heard myself mutter, and I am therefore grateful (if grateful is the right word, and I highly doubt it is) to Edgar for correcting me. No, Alligator Tears makes it clear that coming out is still not easy for many people.

Take the moment immediately after Edgar came out to his mother in a shopping mall.

“…She didn’t disown me or kick me out. Just a few tears, but maybe those were normal. Wasn’t coming out supposed to be sad? The moment we entered the next store, I grabbed a random pair of jeans from a stack and fled to the dressing room. Inside, I sat with them folded on my lap, laughing. I did it, the thing I was most afraid of, and she’d said it was okay.

“It wasn’t though….”

In seven sentences, just seventy-six words, I am haunted by my 1987 coming out moment. Although I chose to do so at home (and I admire Edgar’s choice of doing so in public, much braver than I could have been), my mother’s tears, her white lie — saying it was okay when it wasn’t—and the fear that weighed me down before my confession began, are all present.

I won’t speak for all queer men. Some, I know, are blessed with welcoming mothers. Many of us dread that Heisenberg moment when two distinct futures exist simultaneously. If I come out, when I come out, will the mother I loved, will the mother who loved me, will she remain constant in that love, or will it all end? Will she no longer be mine? Will I no longer be hers?

Edgar doesn’t give up or back away from his mother. As Alligator Tears continues on its tender way, the author describes everything he does to help his mother. Her work as a barista at a Florida airport has wreaked havoc on her health, and Edgar not only sends love and support from his time in Florida, California, and New York as he describes the path to publication for High-Risk Homosexual, he also charts his intimacy journey, tempting the reader to consider how the fear that precedes coming out lives on within our hearts.

***

I shivered with regretful knowledge, however, in this paragraph near the halfway point.

“At Pulse, you could be anyone. A Puerto Rican makeup artist who transformed into a glamorous Amazonian on stage. A butch lesbian, finally in a good place after some rough years. A Brazilian restaurateur with a Portuguese accent that didn’t fool anyone, visiting Orlando to scout out new locations. You could be yourself, whoever you couldn’t be anywhere else.”

The 2016 massacre at Pulse in Orlando ended with 49 people dead and 53 wounded. Edgar reminds us how close queer people remain to unjustifiable death in the United States and, as the news in 2025 continues to remind us, the situation is only worsening, as pointless legislative attacks on our trans siblings further encourages violence against all queer people and further emboldens the violent among us.

But Alligator Tears does not end in tragedy. For Edgar and the reader, in equal measure, the arc of history bends not only to justice but to personal redemption, too.

With a profoundly heartfelt statement, the author shares a preamble for the penultimate and ultimate essays that is also a statement of hope.

“It frustrates me to think that the people I love may never be rewarded with everything they deserve, but I’m comforted by the fact that they don’t let the current bleakness of the world keep them from fighting to make it a better place. Every day they claim their joy, dreaming out loud with me on the phone, dancing in line outside Friend’s, marching through the streets.

“I don’t know what happens after, when this is all over. But wherever they’re going, that’s where I’m trying to go too.”