May 19, 2021
Becoming The Gay Teacher I Wish I'd Had
What I could offer wasn’t life changing—it was just a break, a little time to gather the strength to keep going.
Edgar Gomez is a Florida-born writer with roots in Nicaragua and Puerto Rico. A graduate of University of California, Riverside’s MFA program, he has written for POPSUGAR, Narratively, Longreads, Catapult, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Lamda Literary, and elsewhere online and in print. His first book, a memoir titled High-Risk Homosexual, is forthcoming in January 2022 with Soft Skull Press. He lives in Queens, New York.
What I could offer wasn’t life changing—it was just a break, a little time to gather the strength to keep going.
I privately couldn’t get over the fact that she’d even felt comfortable speaking to me that way.
Though the person in the skirt and I weren’t the same, when I saw them, I felt something I never had before at work: like I could be totally, completely myself.
We were two stereotypes—the sassy gay best friend, and the hyper-sexualized reporter—working at a place that highlighted our biggest insecurities.
