Tough Guy (A Memoir and a Search)

A powerful hybrid memoir exploring the connections between father and son, addiction and disease, and what it really means to be a man, from an award-winning queer journalist

Growing up in and around New York City, all Mat really knew of his father, Tofi, was that he loved to cook, he loved to dance, and he was, for the most part, completely absent from his family’s life. As Mat grew older, he realized his father was an addict despite his mother’s silence on the subject, and he realized that he himself was gay, a revelation that was met only with “Don’t get AIDS,” a stinging blow to young Mat.

But it was not until Tofi was on his deathbed that his son learned his father had been HIV-positive for all of Mat’s life. The two had had such different, disparate lives; yet lives that ran parallel to each other all the while, and this set Mat on a journey to truly understand his father’s story, as well as his own.

Tough Guy is a moving debut memoir that combines Mat’s story of growing up as a gay Puerto Rican American with binge-eating disorder alongside his father’s story of growing up poor in the Lower East Side and turning to heroin as an escape route.

Mathew Rodriguez seeks to pinpoint the ways in which Tofi embodied a nexus of major cultural shifts: his parents’ flight from Puerto Rico to New York City in the 1940s, just as the construction of the city’s first affordable housing projects was underway; the rise of the heroin crisis in the U.S. during his teenage years, when he began using; and the insidious spread of the virus that would come to be known as HIV, lurking unnamed for decades before what history has thus far deemed the start of the AIDS crisis.

In tracing the arc of his father’s life, Rodriguez asks his readers to widen the lens of our cultural memory of whom the AIDS crisis affected, zooming out from our focus on cis-gay white men to center the people of color and drug users also lost to the disease, a too often forgotten piece of our collective history.

Through historical research and examination, as well as family stories passed down, Rodriguez take the reader on the journey of understanding just how complicated, heartbreaking, and beautiful being a person in this world is, as we all have to make our choices within the contexts we can’t control.

Ultimately, Tough Guy is a stunning memoir of forgiveness and understanding.