Alligator Tears is a memoir that doesn’t flinch—from poverty, from queerness, from rage, from joy. Edgar Gomez offers a searing yet tender series of essays tracing a coming-of-age shaped by broken systems and impossible expectations. The story begins with a stroke and an ambulance too expensive to call, and spirals through minimum wage jobs, racist school programs, queer Latin clubs in the shadow of Pulse, and the bitter inheritance of American “opportunity.”

Gomez writes with biting wit and raw clarity about the class realities so many of us are told to survive with silence. Whether recounting their mom’s bankruptcy filed in the same breath as gifting veneers, or watching white shoppers waltz through a mall staffed entirely by Black and brown workers, Gomez refuses the false comfort of bootstraps narratives. These essays are especially sharp in their depiction of familial love that is both fierce and fraught—his mother, a Nicaraguan immigrant turned Starbucks barista, is both his anchor and his wound.

As a queer Latin American kid growing up in Orlando, Gomez’s journey into identity is marked by MySpace boys, theater crushes, YouTube influencer aspirations, and the slow unfurling of selfhood in the aftermath of rejection. His queerness glitters through every page, even when dulled by loneliness, toxic masculinity, or cultural silence. This book holds queer joy, too—not just the kind found in nightclubs and love stories, but the quiet victory of embracing your femininity and being seen without being exoticized.

If you’ve ever been told you had to work harder, be nicer, or take up less space to deserve stability, this memoir will meet you like a mirror and a machete. Alligator Tears isn’t about overcoming—it’s about exposing the game, surviving on your own terms, and laughing with all your (fake) teeth.

📖 Read this if you love: class-conscious queer memoirs, sharp humor layered with emotional depth, and stories that hold both love and resentment for family and culture.

🔑 Key Themes: Queer Coming-of-Age, Cycles of Poverty and Survival, Femme Visibility and Machismo, the Myths of Labor and Class. Familial Estrangement and Cultural Silence.