What I Learned about Queerness and Latinidad While Working at Telemundo

This is Werk., a monthly column from Edgar Gomez on what he’s learned about queerness and identity while navigating the US workforce.

The day I found out I’d been chosen as the newest production intern at the local Telemundo news station in Orlando, no one was more excited—or confused—than my mom.

“What does that mean? Production assistant?” she asked, then gasped and waved those questions away: “Wait, does this mean you’re going to meet Olga?”

She was referring to Olga Aymat, one of the station’s anchors, who was basically a novela star as far as my mom was concerned. With her brunette clip-on extensions and hourglass figure, I could easily see her warning viewers about rising crime one second, then pulling out a revolver and stepping into a scene from La Reina del Sur the next.

“I already did,” I told her. While giving me a tour of the station, the woman interviewing me left me in the studio with Olga for a few minutes before the show. Olga had been sitting behind the elevated news desk. Below her, I was taking note of the station’s camera set-up, which looked like a more complicated version of the one at my college’s news station. There, we had three cameras—two people assigned to operate each. Here, one person was expected to run them all. Olga must have seen the worry on my face.

“Are you scared?” she asked me from her pedestal.

The studio lights gave her an otherworldly glow. I swallowed the hard lump that formed in my throat.

“No,” I said.

She smiled, said, “Good,” and dropped her eyes back to the notecards in her hands.

I decided to keep the interaction to myself, and instead explained my new job to my mom. This wasn’t one of those fetching coffee internships. As a production assistant, my responsibilities included operating cameras in the studio, going on location with reporters to film news packages, helping edit their segments down to three-to-five-minute clips for the broadcast, and controlling the teleprompter (a task that involved scrolling through the portion of the script displayed on a small monitor in perfect sync with the anchor reading it, nearly impossible because Latinx people speak Spanish a thousand words per minute).

“That’s nice,” Mom said. I suspect she’d checked out around the word production. “If you get a chance, find out what color lipstick Olga uses.”

I promised I’d try.

Other than discovering Olga’s beauty secrets, there were two things I looked forward to about the job: getting to work with other Latinx folk, since my college news station had mostly been full of white dudes with neckbeards, and spending time with the cast of female reporters, who were all a tiara away from being beauty queens (whereas the male reporters were all painfully average). If that sounds cliché, just look at any news program in Latin America. To succeed in TV journalism, women must be intelligent, articulate, lingerie models. It also helps to have a fair complexion. By “fair,” I mean the light brown skin tone that’s typically associated with Latinx people. Though nearly a quarter of the Latinx population in the US identifies as Afro-Latinx, a quick Google image search for “Latin woman” or “Latin man” will yield you row after row of fair-skinned faces, representation of Afro-Latinx folks few and far between.

It was the same in the newsroom, both in front and behind the cameras. My first day at Telemundo, I couldn’t keep track of my coworkers; all of them were nearly identical: dark hair, beige skin, and flattened out versions of Spaniard accents that supposedly made them easier to understand by the biggest percentage of our audience.

“Where are you from?” one of them said after I asked him why everyone kept calling me “Chino,” which he explained had nothing to do with appearing to be of Chinese-descent, but was a nickname based on Mexican slang for my curly hair.

When I told him I was half-Nicaraguan, he responded similarly to the gringos at school who asked that question: by smiling politely and changing the subject. I wasn’t surprised. In addition to being very white, the current face of Latinidad in the US is also usually Mexican, due in large part to Mexico’s flourishing film and television industry, border politics, and which stories about “us” get told (Another Selena tribute? More Frida memorabilia? And listen, I teared up watching Coco and The Book of Life, but when is Central America getting an animated film?). Those of us who don’t check one or both of those boxes often find ourselves speaking to people who don’t know what to say when we alert them to our existence. Satisfied to have pegged us as “other,” or in my case Chino, they move on. In truth, working at Telemundo wasn’t all that different from my time among the neckbeards, except everyone here ate empanadas.

It wasn’t much, but it was enough of a draw for me to stay. At least we had something cultural in common, and I desperately craved that. Only weeks before I got the internship, one of my university professors had gone on a rant in front of the class about a trip she took to Miami and how she couldn’t go anywhere because everyone spoke Spanish. Despite its deep flaws, Telemundo still felt like it could be an oasis where I wouldn’t have to worry about someone spewing anti-immigration nonsense.

As for queer people, from what I could tell, I was the only gay person on staff. Because a huge part of so-called Latinx culture is religion—77% identify as Christian, according to Pew Research Center—I was hesitant to come out to my coworkers, especially since they already looked at me sideways for my curls (courtesy of my Puerto Rican dad) and flawless, dewy skin (courtesy of Maybelline, foundation shade: Rich Tan).

So for a few weeks, I didn’t tell anyone I was gay, though I didn’t not tell anyone. Almost always, people know upon giving me a cursory glance, but the business casual slacks and collared shirt I pulled from the back of my closet had the side effect of making me look like I was, well . . . still in the closet. There was also something else throwing my new coworkers off, something that I’d never noticed before: when I spoke Spanish, no one could hear my lisp. Or maybe they could and didn’t comment on it because they thought I was practicing the Spaniard accent, replacing my s’s with th’s. Either way, it was like I was only gay in English.

While I got a feel of the place, I kept my distance and let everyone think whatever they wanted about me, justifying not being open with them by telling myself I wasn’t technically lying.

Then my internship supervisor was transferred to another station. Without her around, I didn’t have someone to hide behind and had to find someone else to tell me what to do. One of the camera operators took an interest in being my mentor, probably because running all three cameras was tough alone. During an average live broadcast, he’d have to set up close-up shots for Olga, then move the heavy cameras during the three-minute commercial breaks to film the weather segment against a green screen, then back again for the news, and once more for sports and the lottery, all the while not tripping on the obstacle course of extension cords strewn throughout the studio floor. I helped keep them all untangled and avoided eye contact with Olga.

Once, after the show ended, and she left the studio, I sat behind her desk in the dark, imagining what it would be like to be on TV.

“Breaking news,” I said very seriously into the camera. “I’m gay.”

I suppose I just wanted to say the words, not necessarily because I cared about people knowing who I like to sleep with, but because I resented the culture that made me feel like I was evil. Making it a joke reminded me I wasn’t.

“So?” someone watching me on their screen might have responded. “Why does that matter?”

And I’d have said, “Exactly!”

Clearly, however, the lack of LGBTQ folk across Latinx media shows that it does matter to a lot of people. The closest approximation to me I’d ever seen on the news was Walter Mercado, the nationally syndicated astrologer who wore sequined capes and costumes dripping in jewels during his horoscope segments, which were as much of a daily staple as the weather forecast. Growing up, my friends and relatives often speculated about his queerness. We’ll never know if he was, because he kept his sexuality and gender identity ambiguous. He was already breaking ground by bringing astrology into so many Catholic households; to have said he was gay, or trans, or asexual would have been outright scandalous. Asked about his romantic life in a recent Netflix documentary, he famously claimed to “have sexuality with the wind.”

The subtext was clear to me: If I wanted to learn anything from him, I’d have to pretend to have sexuality with the wind.

I wonder, if there was something he was keeping to himself, whether it was easier for him to give his audience an outlandish answer than reveal the truth. I wondered, sitting behind Olga’s desk, if my coworkers were speculating about me. Were Walter and I scared? Or was everyone else?

When the cameraman and I weren’t shooting the broadcast, reporters frequently sent us out to interview the public about topical subjects that they would later edit into their news packages.

Our questions were fairly vague, usually something like: “There’s been an increase in burglaries in Orlando. What do you think about that?”

In order to eliminate bias, we would then have to grab a sound bite from someone who thought burglaries were bad, and one who could see the silver lining in being forced to downsize.

That wasn’t the hard part. The problem was finding new Spanish-speaking people to interview every day. In a city like Miami, where you can stand on any street corner and yell “hijue” with the assurance that someone will yell back “puta,” collecting sound bites is easy. In Orlando, however, the station had to come up with a slick way of hunting down Spanish-speakers. The cameraman told me his favorite places: the bus stop outside the mall, the parking lot at Walmart, the picnic tables at a nearby taco truck.

The latter is where we went the first time he let me tag along. He operated the camera while I approached dudes brooding into their al pastor tacos with a microphone. I was a little grateful that in Spanish, wearing business casual clothes, my queerness was invisible. I wasn’t so sure these guys would have talked to me if they suspected that beneath my slacks I had on a Nasty Pig jockstrap. “So, um, how do you think Obama is doing on immigration?” I’d ask.

Although I was happy to have an important job, I didn’t really love spending my weeknights with the cameraman, who ate fried chicken as he drove us between locations and left greasy fingerprints on everything he touched. Being with him reminded me of all the awkward excursions my mom used to send me on with my straight uncles to toughen me up. I never knew what to talk about, and though some of it was paranoia, I felt like he was constantly testing me.

“What kind of music do you like?” he’d want to know as he turned the knob on the radio. By the uncomfortable look on his face, I could tell “Shakira’s first album” wasn’t the right answer.

One day I asked one of the reporters, who I’ll call Carmen, if she needed help filming. There weren’t enough cameramen on staff to go around, so she often had to set up a tripod and record herself on the scene, flipping the camera screen over and squinting at the monitor to make sure she was in focus. She squealed and clapped her hands. “Yes! Thank you! You’re an angel!”

As we drove to the airport, where the story we were shooting that evening took place, Carmen asked me how the internship was going, whether I was learning a lot. Frankly, I wasn’t. None of the straight male producers or production people wanted to teach me what they did. “We got it covered,” they’d say when I offered them help. I was certain it had to do with the fact that I didn’t watch soccer with them on my break, or talk about the hot chicks on the novelas playing constantly on the television monitors all around the station. I couldn’t prove it, but I believed the cameraman was, indeed, speculating about my sexuality, and as soon as he had an answer he would join everyone else in giving me the cold shoulder. To survive at Telemundo, I realized, I needed allies.

If I had them on my side, the women at Telemundo might get me hired on permanently, or at least show me how to properly pack away a shotgun microphone.

At the airport, I tried to find a way to naturally bring up that I’m into dudes. “This lobby is stunning,” I told Carmen, though we were standing in front of a Starbucks. “By the way, that nail color is gorge on you. What is that . . . red?”

It was overkill. And desperate.

“I’m sorry if this is personal,” she said, smiling knowingly. “But can I ask you something?”

It worked.

By the following week, all the women at the station got the memo. Perhaps because they didn’t have to dodge unwanted sexual advances with me, they suddenly became extremely friendly, whereas before I’d just been a no-name intern.

On my daily walk to the vending machine for a bag of chips, a reporter stopped me.

“Edgar!” she said, ironing out the wrinkles on her body-con dress with her palms. “I need your help. Don’t lie. Do you think I’m fat?”

It was then that I realized my mistake. In my attempt to bond with the women about things like hair maintenance and dating, I’d accidentally turned myself into a cartoon of a queer person. We were two stereotypes—the sassy gay best friend, and the hyper-sexualized reporter—working at a place that highlighted our biggest insecurities. Maybe I should have been more prepared for this. After all, I’d sought Latinx community here, and that’s what I got: the same machismo, racism, misogyny, and homophobia that plagues Latinidad everywhere else.

“Girl, shut up,” I told her, and it was as if I was reading from the world’s most annoying script. “I would kill for that body, honey!”

“You’re not just saying that?” she asked.

I pursed my lips and snapped my fingers in a z-formation. “You are sick-en-ing.”

She looked so grateful; I thought she might cry.

The months passed, and I kept up the character I’d fallen into, figuring it was better than going back to being under the cameraman’s wing. After we were sent to a Catholic church for a shoot, he used the setting to talk to me about being saved by Christ for almost an hour. Apparently, the news that I was gay finally reached him. It didn’t get completely out of line—he didn’t call me a fag or say I was going to hell—but the subtext was clear to me: If I wanted to learn anything from him, I’d have to pretend to have sexuality with the wind.

Part of me wished I could be like Olga, who, to my mom’s endless disappointment, I never got to know. It’s not that she didn’t care about the rest of the crew. She was busy. Mostly she stayed in her office, working on the 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. broadcasts. When she did emerge, it was to go to the studio and sit behind her desk for the show. Olga gave the staff exactly as much as we needed, getting her work done on time, maintaining a professional air about her, keeping up with unreasonable beauty standards. Her private life she kept to herself.

Yet as much as I tried to keep mine to myself, my silence ended up being part of what outed me. The hints I dropped may have been what pushed me completely out, but it was obvious that I was different from my other male coworkers every time they bragged about women they wanted to hook up with, and I sat there quietly. They had the opportunity to bond with each other about their relationships, bonds that led to better opportunities, or promotions or, for an intern like me, the chance to be taught. I, on the other hand, spent most of my time agonizing over who it was safe to reveal myself to, and how much, and in what spaces (definitely not the taco truck).

In the years since that internship, things have begun to change for the better in Latinx media—across race and sexuality. In 2018, Ilia Calderón made history as the first Afro-Latinx person to anchor the weekday evening news at Univision, the rival news station. And for years now, Paola Ramos (the openly queer daughter of Ilia Calderón’s Univision co-anchor Jorge Ramos) has served as an on-air contributor at Telemundo. Still, the fact that these are standout examples only proves how long a way we have to go.

I’m not interested in making history as the first openly gay, gender-nonconforming Nicaraguan-American anywhere I work. These days, all I want is to find a job where I can show my worth and be myself, performing nothing for no one.

Until then, if you happen to see me in a hallway, wagging my finger at a girl’s butt and telling her she looks fierce, mind your business. I’m working.

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