November 2025 Open Secrets Book Club Pick: 'Alligator Tears' by Edgar Gomez
Join us as we read this powerful memoir in essays about growing up poor and queer in Florida and interview Edgar Gomez on November 17
Our November 2025 Open Secrets Book Club pick is memoir in essays Alligator Tears by
, who spoke on our identity panel at personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live in May. Start reading now and join us in a Substack chat starting Monday, November 10 to discuss the book.Then on Monday, November 17 at 8:30 pm ET, check out our Substack Live interview with Edgar and bring your questions! You can watch Substack Live interviews in the Substack app or on your desktop by clicking the link above. Subscribers will be notified via email when the interview starts. We will post the full interview afterward.
You’ll have the opportunity to ask Edgar your own questions during the Q&A, and if you can’t make it live, you can leave those questions as comments in this post or in the chat and we will do our best to ask them.
About Alligator Tears:
In Florida, one of the first things you’re taught as a child is that if you’re ever chased by a wild alligator, the only way to save yourself is to run away in zigzags. It’s a lesson on survival that has guided much of Edgar Gomez’s life.
Like the night his mother had a stroke while he and his brother stood frozen at the foot of her bed, afraid she’d be angry if they called for an ambulance they couldn’t afford. Gomez escaped into his mind, where he could tell himself nothing was wrong with his family. Zig. Or years later, as a broke college student, he got on his knees to put sandals on tourists’ smelly, swollen feet for minimum wage at the Flip Flop Shop. After clocking out, his crew of working-class, queer, Latinx friends changed out of their uniforms in the passenger seats of each other’s cars, speeding toward the relief they found at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Zag. From committing a little bankruptcy fraud for the money for veneers to those days he paid his phone bill by giving massages to closeted men on vacation, back when he and his friends would Venmo each other the same emergency twenty dollars over and over. Zig. Zag. Gomez survived this way as long as his legs would carry him.
Alligator Tears is a fiercely defiant memoir-in-essays charting Gomez’s quest to claw his family out of poverty by any means necessary and exposing the archetype of the humble poor person for what it is: a scam that insists we remain quiet and servile while we wait for a prize that will always be out of reach. For those chasing the American Dream and those jaded by it, Gomez’s unforgettable story is a testament to finding love, purpose, and community on your own terms, smiling with all your fake teeth.
A note from Edgar Gomez:
I’d known for a long time that I wanted to write a book about my experiences growing up poor in Florida—the good, the bad, the weird swamp sex and working at The Flip Flop Shop and living in a motel with my family and selling bootleg CDs at the flea market—but I wasn’t sure what the deeper message was until the pandemic hit.
I was living in Jackson Heights, Queens, in a neighborhood home to immigrants home from all over the world, and seeing how my undocumented neighbors were repeatedly failed by the government, forced to continue working without access to social benefits like food stamps and unemployment, reminded me of all the false promises this country is built on and that I used to believe in. That if you work hard and stay humble, you can “pull yourself by the bootstraps.” That the American dream is available to everyone. In the darkest days of the pandemic, I couldn’t stop thinking about my mom, who’d immigrated to the US from Nicaragua in the 80s, and how decades later she was still working the same job as a barista at the airport Starbucks, exposing herself to COVID-19 because she couldn’t afford to take time off.
Alligator Tears is a love letter to her and to all the people who held me up when I was too weak to stand on my own: the coworkers I spent holidays in the back room with, the friends I spent nights dancing with at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando on Noche Latina, and lowkey the entire cast of season 3 of America’s Next Top Model, especially Eva (this will make sense later). It’s a book about survival that I hope makes you laugh and feel a little less alone. Think of it as a rags-to-riches story, except I never get rich, but learn that you can still have a rich life full of love, purpose, and community. That’s the message.
You can check out excerpts from the book at Queerty and Electric Lit.
About the author:
Edgar Gomez is a queer NicaRican writer born and raised in Florida. Gomez’s first book, High-Risk Homosexual, won the American Book Award, a Stonewall Nonfiction Book Honor Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His second book, Alligator Tears: A Memoir-in-Essays, was released in February to critical acclaim. He lives between New York and Puerto Rico.
Here’s where to buy Alligator Tears, which you can also borrow or request at your local library or order it from your local independent bookstore. When you shop from these Bookshop links or our Bookshop storefront, we get a small percentage of each sale, which goes toward paying our writers.
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Have any questions about the book club? Leave a comment or email us at opensecretsmag at gmail dot com! Please note that we don’t accept book club submissions from authors or publicists, but manually select among our contributors and event speakers.