Born in Humacao, a coastal town, into a middle-class family, Sánchez took degrees at the University of Puerto Rico, New York University and the University of Madrid. While he has taught Latin American and Spanish Literature ant the University of Puerto Rico, he is best known as a novelist and essayist.

Sánchez's texts explore homosexuality through the simultaneous celebration of a certain Puerto Rican masculinity and the expression of homophobia. This entails both the creation of space to represent a more effeminate homosexuality and the disavowal of that homosexuality.

In a country that, in the 1970s, had a penal code that gave homosexual practices a particular criminal status this mode of representating homosexuals may have been the only way of giving it a literary presence.