Whether he’s writing essays about Caliban, Paris is Burning, or Mass Efect, publishing a memoir of his life growing up as a queer Puerto Rican and Mexican kid, or creating futures full of Latinx, Marcos Gonsalez will make you feel things. He’ll have you thinking critically about media, race, queerness, bodies, intimacy… and you’ll feel all the more like a different person once you see things from his perspective.
I talked to him about what makes the essay a malleable format, his fiction, and the stories he wants to see for Latinx.
I love reading your essays seeing as they make my brain almost explode with the way you posit certain topics and still make them accessible. What do you believe is the most thing to keep in mind with the essay format and what makes it an attractive format for you?
The essay is a very malleable form. It can be whatever you need it to be: brief or long; elliptical or to the point; satirical or funny or melancholic. And it’s that one genre where ideas and personal experience are able to be together so unapologetically. That has always been its allure to me: it allows my embodied reality and experience to take shape into prose. I become most free in an essay. Free to represent how my mind and body moves. For instance, the flash essay I wrote for Black Warrior Review has a kind of immediacy and speed to it that I feel I have not been able to recreate. I wrote that essay in a particular moment in my life, feeling very particular things, and I like how that reflects in the way the words are on the page. Every essay has a unique tempo like that, and I can sense that early on in the writing of it. That rush is what makes me keep coming back to essays.
Your new book, Pedro's Theory, was announced that it's going to be published! Can you talk a bit more about what it's about?
As the incomparable JLo playing Selena described it best, “me siento muy…excited!” Pedro’s Theory is a book about coming to terms with who you are, after so many years of being ashamed of you are. Growing up with a Puerto Rican mom and Mexican dad in predominately white town in rural New Jersey was a very unique experience. One where I was confused, and alone with my confusion, for decades. So the book sets out to figure out how to make home for yourself when you feel like you never belonged anywhere as a queer person of color. And it does this by having a dialogue with my younger self, writing to that little boy in order to let him know he will make it through, that all his hurt and pain isn’t because he is a problem, but because the world he lives in won’t make room to try and understand him for who he is.
Besides your non-fiction work, you also write fiction, as evidenced by your contribution to Latin@ Rising: An Anthology of Latin@ Science Fiction & Fantasy, wherein you put your love of technology and video games together with a look at what identity and memory could mean for Latinx (specifically Mexicans in your story) in the near future. How do you feel about that future today?
Wow, you really deep-dived into my early writing career! Love it! Science Fiction is a genre I definitely want to continue writing because it allows us to imagine a future for ourselves that is on our terms. As anti-Latinx sentiment continues in the United States, and people continue moving through Latin American in search of refuge, we desperately need to imagine futures that don’t see us as burdens or problems.
You have free reins to collab with another Latinx creative and they’re free and on board as well, who are you picking and what are you making?
Such a difficult question! So many! But I would love to collab with Cristela Alonzo on a messy and zany and ridiculously over-the-top sitcom about a straight Latinx girl and a gay Latinx man live together in NYC. Imagine it! Very Will and Grace-esque but we talk about issues facing our communities and lives. I already have a whole narrative arc in my head about how the boy’s mom and the girl’s dad start to fall in love and this puts a pressure on their friendship.
Who do you write for?
For those kids out there, those kids who I used to be, who felt their voices, ideas, and lives didn’t matter. For the people who feel out of place or that they don’t belong. For anyone who thinks that writing and literature can help shape a better world, a world free of violence and cruelty, for all of us to live in.
Is there a piece of media (book, TV, movie, etc) created by a Latinx that has helped shape your creativity?
Another impossible question to answer! But if I had to pick one I think it would have to be Justin Torres’, We The Animals. That book showed me how prose can be sensual and tragic and stunning and mysterious all at once, and how you can do all that through a queer Latinx perspective. It opened up a way of writing and telling stories that I didn’t know was possible, and a way to do it on my terms. That’s why it is still so special to me.
Shoutout a Latinx writer or creator whom you admire!
Chris Gonzalez, hands down! His ability to conjure short stories that can be both humorous, and devastatingly beautiful, at the same time is something that is really special. He can do so much with so few words. I wish I could do that all so seamlessly!
Anything you else you wish to share about your upcoming projects?
My book-in-progress is about dating between queer people of color, and the absence of white men from my intimate and erotic life. So that’s been a real blast to write up. It’s a continuation in many ways from Pedro’s Theory, where now I look at my 20’s and see how I formed, or couldn’t form, queer community and bonds in New York City.
You can add Marcos’ debut memoir, PEDRO’S THEORY, to your Goodreads TBR today!
Follow him on Twitter for his latest essays and news!
Marcos Gonsalez
Marcos Gonsalez is a writer and doctoral candidate in English Language and Literature. His memoir, Pedro’s Theory, is forthcoming with Melville House. His essays have appeared in Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Inside Higher Education, Ploughsares, Catapult, The New Inquiry, and elsewhere. He teaches literature and writing courses at CUNY. He lives in New York City.