I'm Not Broken

May 9, 2022
Leon debuts with a staggering tale of survival in this raw account of his youth as a sex worker. The child of working-class Mexican immigrants in 1980s California, Leon was bullied relentlessly by his white peers at school and, at age 11, was raped by a storekeeper who would molest and traffic him for years. Embittered by his own closeness to his mother—whose love, he writes, “turn me into a sissy”—Leon turned to drugs in his teens to dull his pain, and began offering up his body for money to fulfill “the masculine male Latino sexual fantasy of white men.” As he offers an unflinching account of his drug addiction (“I did more lines of crystal... smoked more heroin”), Leon renders in tender prose his mother’s unflagging support, a constant that remained even when her own health began to fail her. Still, it wasn’t until the author discovered “a whole world of Latinos I had not been exposed to” at a college event that he began his difficult path toward sobriety, found a home in his queerness, and eventually made his way to Harvard. Despite the grimness of his subject matter, Leon’s story of resilience pulsates with verve and breathtaking grace. The result is a gripping portrait of perseverance that radiates with humanity.