BOOKWORM: “HIGH-RISK HOMOSEXUAL: A MEMOIR”

Honored by the Guinness World Records as having the longest television career by a female entertainer

By: Mikey Rox Special to TRT

Last Thanksgiving, I spent by myself. I live in my van and travel full time as a roaming nomad, and I wasn’t near anyone special to celebrate. Naturally, I was in my feels, lonely on a holiday. So I published this to Facebook:

“Need something to be thankful for today? We’re less than two months away from Betty White’s 100th birthday.”

Current events considered, that post didn’t age well over the course of a few weeks; certainly not as well as its subject had over the course of her lifetime.

I know what you’re thinking: I killed Betty White. Of course not, but when the tragic news broke of the legendary actress’s passing on New Year’s Eve, I felt guilty for perhaps jinxing her chances of achieving centenarian status with my premature hopefulness. Thankfully, I’m not superstitious. The fact is, Betty White was old. Ninetynine years old. It was her time.

There was something else I felt when I read TMZ’s report the morning of 2021’s last hurrah: Cheated.

Yes, I felt cheated. I don’t think I’m alone when I say that we all deserved – after enduring several years of mounting setbacks and increasingly terrible headlines – to see America’s grandmother reach a milestone birthday that less than 1% of the human population reaches. Nobody deserved it more than Betty White herself, but we deserved it too. Still, her last-dayof-the-year death wasn’t altogether surprising. Chalk it up to one more way the 2020s are royally screwing with us.

Blue-check Twitter user Qasim Rashid, Esq. managed to soften some of that blow, however. Hours after Betty’s death dominated the news, he offered a virtual Band-Aid for our collective hearts with this (unedited) tweet:

“On one hand she was 99 years 348 days old when she died. On the other hand she lived through 24 leap years, i.e. 24 extra days. All I’m saying is mathematically, it arguably checks out that she lived 100 years and 7 days.”

That declaration is hereby official as far as I’m concerned.

Digging a little deeper, what was it about Betty White that endeared us to her – perhaps more than any other “Golden Girl” our queer community quotes, imitates and venerates?

That she was the last one left? Her singular dedication to animal welfare? Her Guinness World Record for the longest working person in television? Those inevitable appearances on our lazy Sunday game show rerun marathons? Or maybe it was the way she played Rose Nyland with such believable naivety.

“High-Risk Homosexual: A Memoir”

By: Terri Schlichenmeyer*

Special to TRT THE BOOKWORM

Here. Try this. It fits you, but the color isn’t flattering. It’s too long, too short, too tight, too loose. That’s not your style, so try something else until you find the thing that looks like you. The perfect thing is out there. As in the new book “High-Risk Homosexual” by Edgar Gomez, when something’s right, it’s right. He was thirteen when he figured out that he was a problem to be solved. Edgar Gomez’ mother had left him in her native Nicaragua with his “tíos,” just for a while because she had to return to Florida to work. He wasn’t there without her for long, but it took years for him to understand that his time with his uncles was meant to make him more masculine.

In retrospect, he says, nobody wanted him to be a man more than he did. He wanted to be liked by other kids and so he told lies in school to make himself stand out. He wanted his mother to see his love of pretty things and say that it was okay. He wanted his brother to acknowledge that Gomez was gay, and to tell him that he loved him.

Instead, after his brother left for college, Gomez got his first boyfriend, a boy he came out to but who couldn’t come out to himself. He was called names in school. He came out to his mother, who freaked out about it. He befriended a drag queen, but “Princess” used him.

Things he wanted: a real boyfriend. Love. A ban on the stereotype of a macho Latinx man.

Things he still had, while in college: his mother and older brother. A torSee Bookworm On Page 11

The iconic trailblazer & actor with the longest career in Hollywood, Betty White, was well known for her many roles on radio & TV shows. Portraying “Rose Nylund” in The Golden Girls, White passed away in her sleep on Dec. 31, 2021, a few days before her 100th B-day. White is missed by hundreds of thousands of people, ourselves included. “Thank you for being a friend!”

There’s something to the latter.

Betty played plenty of memorable TV characters before Rose: The title character on “Life With Elizabeth,” where she made history as the first female producer of a sitcom in the 1950s; perpetually perky Sue Ann Nivens on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”; and Ellen Harper Jackson on “Mama’s Family.”

But Rose was different than any character Betty had played before –and that’s exactly why she chose to play her.

Any LGBTQ+ person worth their salt knows that Betty was offered the role of Blanche, and Rose was meant for Rue McClanahan. The former didn’t want to play another iteration of sex-charged Sue Ann – the part she was most famous for before the 1985 premiere of “The Golden Girls” – nor did McClanahan want to regurgitate the sweet-but-scatterbrained Vivian Harmon, whom she played on Bea Arthur’s previous vehicle “Maude.” So they switched. And none of us can imagine it any other way. “The Golden Girls” was popular among queers then and now because we see ourselves in them. Among our own friends, we know a Sophia, Blanche, Dorothy and Rose. We personally identify ourselves as one of those character types as well or a blend of two or more. Me? I’m a quickwitted, smart-mouthed Dorothy-Sophia hybrid. Proudly. Betty wasn’t Rose, though. According to her friends, she was bawdy, a little bit crude at times. She enjoyed vodka and hot dogs. During World War II, she drove a PX truck as a member of the American Women's Voluntary Services. She never had a single acting lesson. While those first few characteristics make her relatable, especially for a ce-

◊ The USTS is the main source of data about trans people for the media, educators, policymakers and the general public, and covers health, employment, income, the criminal justice system and other aspects of life. 

◊ USTS reports have been a vital re source, including the reports on the experiences of people of color and reports by state.  ◊ In 2015, nearly 28,000 people took the USTS, making it the largest survey of trans people in the U.S. to date. A lot has happened since then, and it’s time to conduct the USTS again in 2022. 

Participants who sign a pledge form to participate will receive email updates from NCTE about the survey. Taking the pledge does not obligate anyone to take the survey and participation is voluntary. Participants will be asked to consent to take the survey once it becomes available.

Betty White From Page 9

lebrity who’s been a celebrity the entirety of most people’s lives still living on this planet, it’s the last detail that stands out for me. She never had a single acting lesson because she didn’t need one. She was a natural, but she also was genuine. We saw it and we felt it, in our homes and in our hearts, decade after decade. We didn’t have to meet her in person to know that, unequivocally, if we threw a party, in-

TRT Anniversary From Page 2

healthcare with the rise of telehealth; we’ve seen it for industries involving customer service, and virtually for any office job, even in education, and certainly we’ve seen it in media. We look forward to continuing to evolve as technology and our surroundings continue to change. We will continue being that watchdog as always, directly connecting with our readers and fighting another day to bring truth to vited everyone we knew, we would see …

You know where I’m going with this.

Betty White – thank you for being our friend.

*Mikey Rox is an award-winning journalist and LGBT lifestyle expert whose work has been published in more than 100 outlets across the world. Connect with Mikey on Instagram @mikeyroxtravels.

issues and telling the stories that are often left by the wayside. This is The Rainbow Times 2.0 and we are thrilled to do it with you.

*Nicole Lashomb is the Editor-inChief of The Rainbow Times & Co-Executive Director of Project Out. She holds a BM from NY’s Crane School of Music and an MBA from Marylhurst University. She can be reached at editor@therainbowtimesmass.com.

LGBTQ+ Health From Page 5

Fear of discrimination causes many LGBTQ+ people to avoid seeking health care, and when they do enter care, studies indicate that they are not consistently treated with the respect that all patients deserve. Studies (https://bit.ly/33liS79) by Lambda Legal show that 56% of LGB people and 70% of transgender and gender non-conforming people reported experiencing discrimination by health care providers — including refusal of care, harsh language and physical roughness because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. According to a report (https://bit.ly/3Fg0xFR) by the National Center for Transgender Equality, 23% of transgender respondents did not see a doctor when they needed to because of fear of being mistreated as a transgender person and a startling 55% of transgender respondents who sought coverage for transition-related surgery were denied.

According to HRC Foundation’s analysis (https://bit.ly/3GeMmSI) of the 2018 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), the nation's premier system of health-related telephone surveys, 17% of LGBTQ+ adults do not have any kind of health insurance coverage, compared to 12% of non-LGBTQ adults. Furthermore, 23% of LGBTQ+ adults of color, 22% of transgender adults and 32% of transgender adults of color have no form of health coverage. This can lead to avoidance of medical care even when medically necessary and to severe economic hardship when medical care is ultimately accessed.

The proposed CMS rule is available for public comment (https://bit.ly/3JROamG) now through Jan. 27. mentor-turned-mentor. A part-time job. His weirdness. His virginity.

Things he wanted to lose, while in college: his room at his mother’s house. His virginity, but that wouldn’t happen until later, during a painful one-afternoon-stand with a hot man who said he had a girlfriend. That hurt, both physically and emotionally but like so many things at so many times, Gomez tried not to think about it.

If he never considered what he didn’t have, he says, “I wouldn’t miss it.”

In a way, you could say that “HighRisk Homosexual” is a book in search of a point. It’s really quite random and told (mostly) linearly, but not quite. It has its high peaks, but also low valleys. And you won’t care about any of this, because you’ll be enjoying every bit of it.

Yeah, this memoir is good: author Edgar Gomez’s literary wandering makes it feel much like an honest conversation with readers. There are wince-worthy moments that allow empathy here, and experiences that are unique but oddly ubiquitous, that leave space for a sense of sympatico. There are passages that are so wistfully uncomfortable that you might squirm, or start “snort-laughing,” or want to stop a moment and just think.

And there’s room for that, too, so take your time. “High-Risk Homosexual” is an affable book with just enough seriousness to make it worth a try.

“High-Risk Homosexual: A Memoir” by Edgar Gomez c.2022, Soft Skull Press; $16.95; 304 pages

PHOTO: JOSEPH OSBORNE

Edgar Gomez

*The Bookworm is Terri Schlichenmeyer. Terri has been reading since she was 3 years old and she never goes anywhere without a book. She lives on a prairie in Wisconsin with two dogs, one patient man, and 17,000 books.