In their second collection, Alligator Tears, Edgar Gomez delivers a tenderly sweet, heart-wrenching, and comical memoir-in-essays I was excited to escape into in the dread-heavy weeks leading up to the second Trump administration. Edgar and I began our interview the week of Trump’s inauguration, with both our heads swirling. Despite the daily disgusting news of Trump’s fascist agenda and Edgar being in the process of moving during the week we went back and forth, we responded to each other with a hungry swiftness, a joyful call and response. We were both very excited - to riff back and forth, to build the heart-wrenching and humorous stories of the book into a discussion on craft, on childhood queerness, and on the importance of America’s Next Top Model and Jane Austen. Through the harrowing, harsh events of the world, Edgar reminded me that “we’re never alone. There’s always someone.” I hope this interview makes you all feel less alone. I hope it reminds you of the magic of queer connection and how writing brings us together, how it helps us to see what we are trying to say.

Sam Herschel Wein: The collection is in a confessional first person voice, with so much tender insight shared alongside your experiences. The strong forward momentum and flow feels natural, and your tone really ties the linked stories together. Talk a little about your strong confessional voice. Did you conceive of these essays individually? Or did you think of them more as one building story? 

Edgar Gomez: I like to think of Alligator Tears as a rags-to-riches story, except that I never get rich but instead gradually discover what a “rich life” looks like to me. Along the way there are chapters that feel like stand-alone “episodes” because they vary in time and place, from relationships I’ve been in to weird jobs that I’ve had, all of them building towards realizations I’ve had about money and community and the American Dream. It was really important to me that I stayed true to my voice, because your voice is all you have as a writer. I used to worry all the time about not using fancy enough words or people not getting my references, but then one day, I was watching Pride and Prejudice and thought: I have no idea what these people are saying or what they’re talking about, but I’m obsessed and I want more. I love when characters are specific, when writers don’t change themselves to satisfy the aesthetic of every single reader, so maybe I don’t have to change my voice for other people to want to read my stories. Thank you, Jane Austen!

SHW: I was a huge fan of the references throughout this book – they make it so specific! I can’t imagine a gay kid of that time who didn’t have a life-changing experience watching America’s Next Top Model or Cadet Kelly or Ellen. I also want to thank Jane Austen! 

EG: For sure, ANTM shaped a whole generation of gay kids for better or worse. On one hand, it obviously perpetuated all these harmful stereotypes, but it’s also where I first met Mr. and Miss J and one of the few times I saw queer people not being treated as freaks but instead valued for our insights. One of the other big things for me was that these were – aside from being beautiful – ordinary, everyday women who were basically being plucked from obscurity and given the chance to be rich and famous. Watching the show was when I first began to fantasize that something like that might happen to me one day and I wouldn’t have to be poor anymore.

SHW: I also think these spoke to a kind of escapism I was familiar with as a young queer child, a longing for a different world that was outside the one I was in. This also showed up in the obsession with “getting rich” and the cyclical obsessions with “the American Dream,” which did really feel like a circle the narrator kept returning to. How do you think repetition and obsession play a role in your work? 

EG: Escapism has always been huge for me. I’m a Double-Pisces so I am happier in my imagination than I am in the real world a lot of the time. Repetition and obsession are necessary for me because often you have to look at something more than once to get the full meaning of it, or to broaden your perspective, especially with subjects as big as these. Each time I return to them, it’s through a new set of eyes and with a new set of questions. How did growing up poor affect my relationship with my family as a kid? In what ways did money impact my romantic relationships as an adult? How did believing in the American Dream inform the decisions I made in high school? What about in the pandemic, when I became more skeptical of The American Dream and the stories people in power tell us about “pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps”? By returning to these questions, I hope I can take readers on a journey of discovery with me and they can see how my thinking has evolved from the beginning of the book to the end.

SHW: The pandemic shifted the way a lot of us understood our government and leadership. Like, oh, you all actually don’t care if we live or die, at all, you just want us to be making you money! That’s what made the moment when the illusion of the American Dream fell through hit so hard. When I read that, I had to stop and stare at the wall – this thing we hold onto for our entire lives to survive can just shatter, and what do we do then?

EG: That’s exactly what I was asking myself. What do I do now that all these old illusions that kept me going before don’t anymore? On the flip side, the pandemic was also a time when communities were forced to come together, to really lean on each other, because the government and billionaires clearly weren’t looking out for us. I remember there were protests for Black Lives Matter and queer and immigrant rights every day, new grassroots mutual aid projects forming. Food pantries and community gardens and people making masks in their living rooms to give away to their neighbors. They taught me that we’re never alone. There’s always someone. 

SHW: Something I loved about this collection was the humor. How do you try to infuse humor into your work? In what ways does the humor add to this project? 

EG: Whenever someone says my stories made them laugh, I breathe such a huge sigh of relief. Thank you, because I never know how any of it is going to land and there’s been so many times where I’ve been telling a friend a story about my childhood that I think is so, so funny, and they just look at me with horror-stricken eyes like, “Babe, no, that’s trauma you’re describing…” So, with this book, I was like, well I think this is funny, but what about everyone else? 

I knew from the very beginning that I needed to work in as much humor as I could, because the subject of poverty can be very depressing, and the last thing that I wanted was for a poor person to spend money on my book only to end up feeling sad. I tried to use humor to subliminally signal to readers that, no matter how tough a scene they’re reading is, I’ve made it far enough in my life that I can look back and laugh. It’s another way for me to imbue my stories with a sense of hope. 

SHW: Sometimes artists and writers forget that we are making Art, which is to say, I do believe that all art should be entertaining in some way. I use humor to try and make the reader feel more comfortable and at ease engaging with my difficult subject matter. I see it as an invitation- a reminder that yes, just like you said, I survived all of this, and it made me hilarious!

EG: Yes, for sure, and it also makes the process of writing about difficult subjects easier for me as the writer. If I know that I’m going to have to sit down and write about sad stuff, I’ll never do it, but if I can at least get to poke some fun of myself, the job doesn’t feel as daunting.

SHW: In response to the “girl, that’s trauma” stare, at least for us funny people, there’s an intrinsic link between trauma and humor. It becomes a coping skill, which I mostly feel grateful for, but I do get nervous about overusing it when discussing trauma. How do you find the balance with how much humor to use? I’m asking this selfishly because I think about it all the time.

EG: I don’t think there’s a perfect recipe. I write like I cook, by just sprinkling in a little of this and a little of that and tasting along the way to make sure everything is working. Sometimes with humor and jokes you get the feeling that the writer is hiding behind comedy to avoid vulnerability, so I try to be self-aware and make sure that there’s always a deeper truth that I’m hitting at in my stories so that they don’t read like a wannabe stand-up routine. Or if certain scenes are painful for me to write, that’s a sign for me that the reader might also need a break, either in that moment or soon after. Ultimately, it’s all about intention so that each line is serving the reader and the story in some way and not distracting from it. 

SHW: This book explores the dichotomies between childhood/adulthood and being a caretaker/receiving care and straddles the line between anger and acceptance of the mother figure. I can’t stop thinking about this line, “my mother, who loved bloody steak and chased the snakes out of our backyard with a machete, trembled holding up the remote.” How did you balance anger and understanding of your mother through the writing of this book? Did you have to dial yourself back at any point, or did it all balance itself quite naturally? 

EG: I love my mom so much, so if anything, I was worried the book would come across as me just complimenting her for hundreds of pages and talking about all she sacrificed and how hard she worked to keep our family afloat. Don’t get me wrong, she didn’t do everything perfectly and I had to be honest about that too, but the good and the bad did balance itself pretty naturally. There were a few scenes that hurt me to remember, but even then, I’d tell myself, “Well, you two are doing great now. She’s your best friend again. How did you get to this point?” and I’d try to lean into that. 

SHW: Can you share your journey with getting this collection published? From the MFA, to a first book with an independent press, to this memoir in essays with a Penguin imprint? What did that process look like?

EG: I graduated from my MFA with about 70% of my first book written and immediately moved to New York and hustled and hustled and wrote every spare second until I got an agent and she sold my manuscript to an independent press. It was incredibly alienating and exhausting (and sometimes fun and actually heavenly but mostly alienating and exhausting!), but I was so desperate to sell my book because I believed it would be my ticket out of poverty and I wouldn’t allow myself to think about anything else. If I could do it again differently, I would remind myself that writing is important, but it isn’t everything, and I wish I’d set more time aside to just live and be with my friends and family. But I was also working a million part-time gigs, writing a book, and trying to survive in one of the most expensive cities with no financial support system, so I try to not judge myself too harshly. My first book didn’t make me rich at all, but it did give me a bigger platform. Suddenly I was being invited to do talks and reading all over the country, the book was winning awards, and those things helped me land my second book deal. I sold Alligator Tears “on proposal,” which basically just means I wrote three chapters of it and put together a detailed summary and my agent sold that to a publisher, and they paid me to finish the rest, which was very nice.

SHW: Final question - what are you going to wear to your book launch?

EG: It’s a surprise, but I can tell you that it’s cosmic and that it used to belong to queer royalty.