¡HOLA PAPI!
How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons
by John Paul Brammer
Simon & Schuster. 212 pages, $26.
“WE CAN’T LIVE without stories,” John Paul Brammer writes in ¡Hola Papi!, his collection of sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant personal essays about the trials and triumphs of a “person with unique difficulty accessing heterosexuality.” First appearing as a regular column on Grindr’s INTO app as a “Queer Latino ‘Dear Abby,’” the essays were originally intended to poke fun at the larger world of advice columns. But the letters Brammer received started getting serious, and he fell into the accidental role of an authority figure. Now he has collected fourteen of these stories of “lived experiences,” assembling them into a collection of engaging life lessons. The result is an impressively deft first book.
Brammer, a mixed-race Mexican-American (“American with a squeeze of lime”), grew up in Cache, Oklahoma.
In these essays, we learn a lot about his early years: president of several clubs in high school, a university degree in writing, followed by “the unpleasant task of turning my writing degree into anything worth anyone’s time.” With infectious self-mockery, he describes a succession of short-lived post-college writing gigs, such as helping to reboot a progressive blog, from which he was fired in two weeks for “not being passionate enough,” and writing recaps of gay porn “for a small family of cheap-looking blogs with neon logos.”
The “late-capitalist hellscape” of these apprentice jobs—“My abuela picked fruit in this country for me to become this?”—was, to say the least, disheartening. But the enterprising Brammer powered on to bigger things. His journalism credits include stints at The Guardian, NBC News, Teen Vogue, and Condé Nast. On his website, he notes that he’s “available for freelance writing projects, illustration commissions, speaking engagements, and more.” In short, he’s doing all the things that a young, 21st-century writer apparently needs to do these days in order to make a go of it.
Each essay in ¡Hola Papi! begins with a “Dear Abby” type of question from a gay reader: “How do I overcome my imposter syndrome to live my life as an authentic Latino?” “How do I forgive and forget?” “How do I let go of my childhood trauma?” These questions are the pretexts for Brammer to spin another personal reminiscence about his life as a young gay man (he’s thirty) and what he’s learned along the way.
There are stories about “the mess that was me” in the eighth grade; about being “A Person with a Girlfriend”; about gay dating and hookup sex; and about trying to be “a Real Mexican.” Other stories find the narrator learning to get over the idea of the one perfect love and trying to live off the emotional scraps that an ambivalent boyfriend throws his way: “he wanted to fool around and call it something else.”
Brammer’s prose style reminds me of the chatty storytelling flair of The Moth, the earnestness of a TED Talk, and the punchy panache of “This American Life.” For fans of David Sedaris, he can serve up a bit of that writer’s wit and verve as well. All in all, Brammer’s essays strike a nice balance between engaging entertainment and hard-won wisdom. Each piece ends with a neatly wrapped-up payoff, an insight dispensed with appropriate advice-column sincerity. Hence: our fantasies are fine so long as we make sure we’re dreaming in the same direction; it’s important to interrogate the gaze with which you behold yourself; no part of one’s past is disposable; it’s more important that you listen than that you speak.
The overall message in ¡Hola Papi! is that each of us is in charge of the narrative we tell ourselves about our lives. Indeed, each story is a variation on the idea that it’s important to unlearn a tendency to be overly critical of oneself, or, as he puts it, to marshal “the courage to express myself in ways I hadn’t allowed myself to before.”
A few of these essays feel rushed or underdeveloped, and occasionally the advice struck me as warmed-over insights from therapy sessions. But the best pieces are smart, savvy accounts of what it’s like to be a Millennial gay man trying to live a life of integrity. This is a book about quiet, but unapologetic, gay bravery.
In the final essay, Brammer asks what qualifies him to give advice, to tell another person what to do. “I guess if I thought about it, I’d say it’s a life lived in the general direction of correctness. People seek advice for this reason: the overwhelming notion that there are incorrect and correct choices to be made. Bad things have to happen; you learn from them and come out on the other side without letting those experiences, or their ghosts, join you and cloud your judgment.”
¡Hola Papi! is another one of those books that I wish had been around when I was leading the LGBTQ Club at the high school where I taught for many years. The positive messages of self-acceptance that Brammer delivers are not just uplifting; they very well could rescue some queer kid from hopelessness, despair, or worse.
