One queer man’s approach to hardship in 21st-century America? Humor and optimism

When he was 16, Edgar Gomez had gleaming new veneers glued to his top teeth. His freshly even smile was like a miracle: “I looked like the real me,” he writes, “not that other, shame-filled version of me I’d been living as before.” Despite wondering how he might pay for their upkeep, Gomez believed suddenly that “money would never be a problem again. … Images of myself as a doctor or a lawyer flashed behind my eyes, clinking wineglasses with my husband in our tasteful brownstone in Manhattan.”

This isn’t quite how things turn out in “Alligator Tears: A Memoir in Essays,” Gomez’s entertaining second memoir. But the veneer story is a tidy fractal, delivering in miniature much of the book’s message. The dazzling gnashers are a symbol, perhaps, of the humor and optimism with which Gomez faces hardship.

Alligator Tears: A Memoir in Essays

For a self-described queer “Nica-Rican mutt,” something about the veneers’ straightness and whiteness seems like a comment, as much of the book is, on the world’s uneven distribution of privilege. Perhaps his new smile will, like the stories he tells prospective boyfriends and employers, obscure his childhood disadvantages and lead to ever-greater success. But for all this, sometimes a veneer is just a veneer. As Gomez wrote recently, the expiration date for his false teeth has now passed, as the dentist foretold, and he’s scarcely better equipped to pay for new ones than he was as a high school junior.

This is one of many sad-funny vignettes in “Alligator Tears.” Like fellow memoirists ?douard Louis and Annie Ernaux, Gomez approaches life-writing as a way not just to process but to reprocess the past. A handful of scenes recall his first memoir, “High-Risk Homosexual”: growing up poor in Orlando, coming out, his discovery of his chosen family, the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in 2016. Readers may remember his hard-working mother, taciturn brother and absent father; their stories are central again here. The book’s subtitle, “A Memoir in Essays,” is less about the discursive qualities of Gomez’s writing than a hint that the book might best be understood as a series of attempts: to find love and a place in the world, to survive as a writer-activist and queer person of color, to reencounter his parents on an equal footing.

Despite its title, there’s nothing insincere about “Alligator Tears.” More so even than “High-Risk Homosexual,” it’s a book about survival at the sharp end of 21st century American life. This is illuminated by the lives of Gomez’s parents. At the start of the book his mother suffers a stroke, brought on by years of stress from raising kids while working all hours at an airport Starbucks. Fifteen years later, during the pandemic, she’s still “risking everything to serve drinks to tourists.” Even as the book ends, Gomez is launching a GoFundMe campaign to help her keep her home. His father, meanwhile, is mostly out of the picture — living in Miami after divorcing Gomez’s mother, and later in Puerto Rico, where his addictions and geographic remoteness preclude proper parenting.

“I am a memoirist,” Gomez writes. “There is nothing I want more than a happy ending.” Hence, perhaps, the book’s redemptive shape, which embraces both parents. His mother, whose first reaction to Gomez’s coming out had been cold and distant, remorsefully reappraises her behavior when she reads about it in “High-Risk Homosexual.” Around the same time, Gomez reconnects with his father — a trip to see him for the first time in 15 years leads to a rapprochement and a stint living in San Juan. The image of them paddling in the ocean together as they begin to heal is a little pat, but it’s also touching.

Gomez is especially incisive on the American caste system, with which he, like his parents, is intimately familiar. A system in which it’s standard for the brown kid at the white school to be asked if he’s in a gang, where it’s easier for him to falsely confess to dealing weed than to deny it. There’s a dark humor in his childhood dreams: “In one recurring fantasy of adulthood, I worked a regular nine-to-five at a cubicle in an office inputting numbers into spreadsheets.” In reality he finds himself working at a call center where his bathroom breaks are queried; doing stints at Auntie Anne’s and J.C. Penney, where he finds actual feces in a dressing room; and taking demeaning gigs at gay sex parties.

Often in stories like Gomez’s the realization of a creative dream brings a kind of salvation. But while seeing himself in print is cause for celebration — and, as noted, helps heal childhood wounds — he’s damningly frank about the labor economics of publishing. “Fifteen thousand dollars. Before taxes and my agent’s commission, spread out over two years. Fifteen thousand dollars. What I’d been working toward for years. Fifteen thousand dollars. Enough to fill my fridge a little while longer, to help my mom.”

Any gay boy who grew up in the age of NSYNC and “America’s Next Top Model” will recognize Gomez’s fear of “the three-letter word that might ruin everything” and his description of lies and loneliness, of living in a society that tolerates you one day and wonders the next if letting you marry might lead to people marrying their dogs. Despite that, “Alligator Tears” doesn’t read like a hardscrabble memoir. It’s nostalgia with a bite, but also a wry kind of affection.

To become a memoirist, one must believe your story will interest others. Happily, Gomez is great company. Occasionally, the well-maintained persona of the “Sassy, Gay BFF” he knowingly adopts slides a touch and he dips into sententiousness — even when he’s right, musings about “larger systems of oppression” have the airless quality of liberal boilerplate.

But often truth hides in absurdity. After one breakup, Gomez collapses on the floor of his apartment and commands Siri to play a sad song. “But she misheard me, and she played Sisqó’s ‘Thong Song.’ ” It’s anecdotes like this, when the human details Gomez is so good at spotting make his case for him, where “Alligator Tears” sings.

Charles Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes about books, films and music.