RISK AND SHIMMER: Óscar Moisés Díaz Interviews Edgar Gomez

Óscar Moisés Díaz: This might be a funny place to start, but it really jumped out at me that you thanked Pedro Almodóvar in your acknowledgements. I kept his visual aesthetic in my head as I imagined all the various settings as I read. I really wanted to ask you what entices you about his films and your relationship to his work.

Edgar Gomez: There’s so much about his films that I love. One thing that I drew a lot of inspiration from while writing High-Risk Homosexual is how he juxtaposes bright, primary colors and campy characters with dark, twisted plots. A murder might be happening on screen, but trust that there’s going to be a beautiful bowl of fruit in the background and someone is wearing a Jackie O suit. There’s a lot of important conversations going on right now about trauma and how much of it the publishing industry demands from marginalized writers. Generally, these seem to focus on fiction. As a memoirist, I’ve always thought, “Well, I don’t want to contribute to all the queer narratives of suffering that are already out there!” but at the same time, I would be lying if I pretended there was no suffering in my life whatsoever. I have to tell the truth. I don’t want a young queer reader to pick up my book and think that being gay is going to be all rainbows and confetti and then walk out into the world and be crushed. I’ve been interested in how I can be truthful about trauma but render it in such a way that there’s also a hopeful undercurrent to it, and I believe Almodóvar does that particularly well. 

The second thing I drew inspiration from is that across his films you see characters behaving in incredibly over-the-top ways, especially the women, but their motivations are still clear. They’re not crazy or cartoonish, though they easily could be in another writer’s hands. I’m thinking here of Penelope Cruz in Volver opening a fake restaurant for a TV crew while her dead ex is in a freezer in the kitchen. It seems like a lot, but then you realize that under all that, she’s a mother trying to protect her child. I thought of that as I tried to figure out how to write about my own mother, who might come off as unreasonable to someone who doesn’t understand her motivations, so I made sure to try to nail those down as clearly as I could on the page. 

ÓMD: Continuing with film, I really love that you went to school for a bit for TV Production and you talk about it in the book. I wanted to know more about the scripts you wrote and the short films you made during that time. 

EG: Oh god. They were really, really terrible. One was about Tinder when that was still new. It was mostly an excuse to film a scene with two people on a date eating chili. I don’t know what I was thinking. Another was more ambitious: it was about a gay guy traveling to California to spread his mother’s ashes. In some small-town gay bar along the way, he meets this drag queen who says she wants to go with him. Once they’re on the road, she takes off her makeup and reveals a black eye. She confesses she’s 17 and trying to get away from an abusive household. The baby Almodóvar in me must have written this.

ÓMD: I know you are a double Pisces and I’m a Pisces rising myself and so I just have to ask you about the incredible amount of day-dreaming and altered states that happen in this book. It’s like everywhere! Sometimes as rehearsal space, sometimes escape zone. What do you think about daydreaming?

EG: I am very much a Pisces. I am constantly daydreaming or escaping into my little fantasies, especially when I’m not happy. I remember in college, and I think after the Pulse nightclub shooting as well, there were times when I’d be driving somewhere and my thoughts would start drifting off and then… I’d suddenly come to and realized I was parked in the middle of the road and there was a line of cars honking behind me. It’s a little scary, to be honest, how casually I leave my body. I suppose it’s a coping mechanism. But it can be fun, too. I don’t mind the quiet or being alone. I can easily entertain myself.

ÓMD: I was really struck by the chapter “Everything is Sexy!” and how evocatively you take us through this performance-arty burlesque troupe. It reminded me of some of my favorite art writers like Eileen Myles and Chris Kraus, who write with the art and not just about it. Could you see yourself ever venturing into art writing?

EG: Nope! I wish I had that gift, but nope! I have such a difficult time articulating how I feel about art. For me it’s all about the personal associations I make, the memories a piece triggers in me. Were I to write that down, it would likely come off really self-centered.

ÓMD: You have a knack for describing embarrassing situations. Can you tell me about the process of writing the awkward or embarrassing? If you have favorite writers who you think deal well with shame/humiliation/embarrassment? I love John Wieners who, when asked how he writes, answered, “I try to write the most embarrassing thing I can think of.”

EG: Thank you! I get so much cringe from memoirists who try to make themselves seem perfect. To be honest, I’m just a naturally awkward/embarrassing person and I’ve found that the best way to navigate that is by embracing it and being the first one to point it out and laugh. Samantha Irby does this brilliantly. So does Natalie Lima. And also basically every drag queen in the world. Because I already laugh about myself a lot in real life, it wasn’t too hard for me to do that in the book. Essentially, every time I thought, “No one is ever going to ever have sex with you if this is published,” I knew I had to write it. 

Plus, I find that embarrassing moments are so interesting, because they lead to questions like: Why is this embarrassing to you? What are you afraid of? Why do you believe you acted that way? What don’t you want people to think about you? These questions are the heart of every good story. 

ÓMD:I found it very cinematic the way you  juxtaposed the night out that Tío César arranges with the scenes at the cock fighting ring. I felt  they illustrated the structures of patriarchy and surveillance and performing. I was excited by this idea of pretending to play along and then doing something else, rescuing each other. I guess I’m asking a question  about surveillance and defiance through playing dead, pretending, and then running somewhere else, and the way tricking power can lead to other solidarities and scaffolding. What do you think?

EG: Absolutely. On one hand, there’s the obvious connection to cockfighting and queerness: how much pressure is put on queer kids who may be living in dangerous environments to “come out,” when they would be better off pretending until they’ve reached a place of safety. But I think, like you hint at with words like “surveillance and defiance,” this is a lesson that could be applied to several situations. Whenever you feel pressure to reveal yourself, it’s important to assess where this pressure is coming from, who is placing it, what risks you may be taking, what the benefits are.

An example is work. I’ve had so many jobs where I’ve felt I was actively being harmed, but in order to survive, in order to pay my bills, I pretended everything was all good until I was able to get myself out. Voicing my concerns—to HR, let’s say—might have helped in theory, but then I had to ask myself: Is HR here to help or protect this place from lawsuits? What concrete action is this realistically going to lead to? Who is looking out for me? In the end, it made more sense to stay quiet and commiserate with my coworkers. Rescuing each other by simply giving each other space to be like, “UGH.”

ÓMD: I really like knowing about a writer’s “left pages.” Things that were left out of the book or surround the book. Are there any lost chapters or things that you think hover around the book or wish you could’ve included?

EG: Yes, there was one chapter I ended up cutting at the last minute and replacing with “A Room of My Own.” On the surface it was about how I used to catfish men online when I was a closeted kid and then it cuts to me as an adult being catfished by guys on Craigslist and Grindr (I don’t make fun of them, to be clear. I felt connected to them.) But beneath that it was about the spaces we turn to when we feel we don’t have anywhere else. And there was a section about the SESTA-FOSTA bill that made Craigslist take down their Personals section. Toward the end, I ruminate on myself as a child who turned to places like Craigslist for community and love, and who I am now that I can do something that not every gay person feels comfortable doing, like go to a gay bar. I actually plan to include a version of the story in the second book I’m working on. I’m glad I took it out, because it made space for “A Room of My Own,” which in retrospect I can’t imagine High-Risk Homosexual without.

ÓMD: I love this thing that Gala Mukomolova said once in BOMB about the Craigslist missed connections being themselves a queer genre for people who cannot speak their desire. Speaking of desire, in the chapter that carries the book’s title you are at an awkward doctor’s visit trying to get on PrEP and there is this inter-splicing of memories of past hookups. This chapter felt in conversation with some writing by Lauren Berlant that I’ve been spending time with lately. She talks about how sex is a way to get “disorganized” and how we accept stumbles, awkward moments, and misunderstandings, in order to approach a sense of freedom. Berlant writes, “We bear each other hoping to breathe in each other’s freedom. This is what it means to be amazed.” Tell me your thoughts on risk. I see it as a kinda divinatory space, slightly touching the future.

EG: That’s interesting, both the Berlant quote and the idea of risk being a divinatory space. I’d have to sit with that for a while. I love “breathe in each other’s freedom.” I know that throughout my life, particularly when it comes to sex, seeing how open and free men I’ve hooked up with have been has pushed me to deconstruct my own fears. There’s a chapter in the book titled “Boy’s Club,” about going to a bathhouse in Orlando, where this was especially true to me. I remember thinking, “I so do not belong here! I’m different!” and then, towards the end of that chapter, a man touches me and I get hard and I really have to be honest with myself about what that means. I even say something about inhaling each other’s breaths, now that I think about it…

Same goes for the chapter you mention, where I grappled with my fear around HIV. When I was hooking up with men who seemed not to have the same fear as me, I did feel inspired by them, because I thought, “Well, we live in the same world. Our lives have similar risks. What tools did they use to unpack their fear to get to where they are now and how can I have access to those?” It was really mind-opening to have sex with people like that, because it showed me that being fearless, or managing fear in a healthy way, was possible.

ÓMD: “Boys Club” is probably my favorite chapter in the book! It leads into my next question. Robert Glück has this quote I love: “Bataille showed us how a bathhouse and a church can fulfill the same function in their respective communities.” This chapter is such an emotional rollercoaster. Even if, in the end, it doesn’t pan out ideally, you still kinda touch divinity. You brush against it. I know at some point you got hired at a bathhouse. How was it being in that space again and did you have any revelations there for the chapter or was it written before you got that job? Talk to me about bathhouses.

EG: Ha! Yes, I recently worked at a few sex parties (as a doorman/janitor) and that led to me being hired at a bathhouse (and fired a week later…). The bathhouse definitely felt like a full-circle moment. In the book, I talk a lot about this jaded front-desk man I encountered at a bathhouse in Orlando, and in a way I sort of ended up becoming him, because while I was working at one later in life I was so… bored. Like, once you see one dick you’ve seen them all. I was confused when I met the jaded front deskman, because I was like, this dude has such a wild job! But now I get it. It’s just a job like any other job.

By the time I got hired, the book was done, so my experience didn’t affect the story. I do plan to write about it someday. Bathhouses are such interesting spaces and attract fascinating people. People who are sexually liberated, yes, but also people who are afraid of publicizing themselves on the apps or online. DL dudes. Dudes with unique kinks. At the bathhouse, I worked “coat check” and also cleaned. It was, and I’ll let your imagination fill in the gaps, very messy work. My biggest revelation was that I understand more than ever why people ask you to take off your shoes before you enter their homes.

ÓMD: What are some writers who you feel have expanded what you thought writing can do/can be?

EG: Samantha Irby, Brontez Purnell, Minda Honey, Josh Kilmer-Purcell, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Cheryl Strayed, and Zora Neale Hurston. I’m sure I’m missing people but these are the first to come to mind.

ÓMD: The relationship between you and your mother hit close to home for me. o There are just so many rich and complicated moments, such as:  “My preferred greeting was a double kiss on the cheeks, just like Mom, though later I found out that was a trick of hers to make sure I wasn’t stealing her foundation.”  In addition, it made me think  of Princess, who is another mother figure in the book, and Berlant, when she writes, “Recognition is the misrecognition you can bear.” It also made me think of Cassavetes, whose films I was rewatching the week I read your book. There is something about the way his films show how messy love is and how we sometimes hurt each other in wanting to help…it all feels so big. How do you think writing this book has impacted how you see both of those relationships?

EG: I wanted to write a book with no villains. Something I understood going into it is that no one thinks they’re the bad guy. Everyone thinks they’re doing what’s right. As I wrote about my complicated relationships, relationships where a person did something harmful to me, I kept trying to understand why they thought what they were doing was good. And by speculating on that, I ended up uncovering a lot of love that made me see the harm in a deeper, more nuanced way. With my mother, and this isn’t an excuse for her behavior, I realized that she was trying to protect me and that she was acting in a way that the world taught her to act. I found a lot of empathy for her. It made me realize how few tools are given to mothers of queer kids, at least back when I was a teenager.

With Princess/Miguel, because the end of our relationship was so sudden and slightly ambiguous, thinking about motivations helped me to stop centering myself and see all the ways that I may have harmed Miguel. I probably made jokes about HIV. I was a mooch. Don’t get me wrong, he used me too. The conclusion that I arrived at is we both acted in harmful and positive ways with one another. I mean, he was the first person to take me to Pulse. He showed me what it could mean to be gay at a time when my relationship to my mother was especially rocky. Writing the story helped me appreciate all he did for me. I don’t know who I’d be if I hadn’t met him.

ÓMD: I want to wrap up by asking what are some of the favorite drag performances that you’ve seen in person? I love the Valentina one you describe in the book. One of my favorite sentences in the entire memoir is: “It’s peak drag: painful, messy, a constant negotiation between holding in and spilling out.”

EG: Because of COVID, I haven’t been able to see a lot of drag in-person lately, which is sad. The most recent great performance that I remember is from my last week out before the pandemic. I was working at a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen called Industry, as a cocktail server/coat check attendant. Either Tuesdays or Thursdays were Tina Burner’s night, and at the end of her show, she would always sing the same song—I think it was “New York, New York '' though it may have been something else. It’s been over two years now. Anyway, around that time we all expected the bars would be closing soon and we were sort of just bracing ourselves. There was a lot of tension in the air. So on this night, Tina comes out at the end of the show and she starts singing “New York, New York '' like she always does—and usually I was annoyed because I’d heard her sing it a thousand times--but it just hit different. We were living in what would soon become the epicenter of the pandemic. We knew we were about to lose our jobs. The bar was half empty. Everything was bleak. She was wearing this horrible yellow latex dress with CORONA (like the beer) printed on it. And almost immediately after she started singing, I started getting misty-eyed because there was so much anticipatory grief in the room, and despite that, we were still in there together. It felt very End of the World. I thought, “Everything is over and look where you are. A gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen.”