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Scared Shitless in Seattle didn’t know how to cope. In 2022, consumed by the dread of climate change and the shame of their sexuality, they wrote into ¡Hola Papi!, the popular online advice column. “Ultimately, you’re right to be afraid. I’m afraid,” Papi responded, lovingly and precise. “But fear isn’t the only thing.”
Like every ¡Hola Papi! column, it was unflinchingly candid, incorporating all the hallmarks readers have come to enjoy. Humor and pathos. Love and sincerity. The occasional food reference. If you’ve ever read one of his columns, you know that nothing is off limits for Papi: threesomes, friendship drama, energy vampires, even, yes, what to do when you are the weekend boyfriend.
Papi was born John Paul Brammer, and grew up a closeted Catholic school kid in rural Oklahoma, a town so small Brammer’s mother was his ninth-grade English teacher. He was, he confesses, “always a little bit desperate to get out” of his hometown. After college he landed in DC, where he picked up work as a blogger for “one of those content mills,” he says. “I did a lot of clickbait articles, like, ‘With One Tweet Nancy Pelosi Just Slayed Republicans’—that kind of thing. I was responsible for a lot of the junk that you saw on the internet.”
The job had hidden benefits. “I learned what makes people click on things and how to snag people’s attention in the blurry digital sea of the internet,” Brammer says. “I figured out what a unique voice looks like.” It eventually paid off. When an opportunity arose, in 2017, to author a column, he unleashed ¡Hola Papi! into the world. It couldn’t have happened at a better time, Brammer tells me. He was trapped in freelance purgatory, writing for half a dozen outlets but not really making a splash like he’d wanted.
“My clearest distillation of that timeline was, I'm on the M train going from Ridgewood to 30 Rock, and I am exhausted because I didn't sleep the night before because I was up talking to some Russian source over the phone about the gay purge in Chechnya but I could barely understand what they were saying through their accent, and I'm on train composing a Teen Vogue puff piece in the Notes app on my iPhone about how Kylie Jenner matched her dress with her fidget spinner, and I just want to die.”
It was during that period that a friend, who just so happened to work at Grindr, suggested he contribute to their just-launched LGBTQ+ editorial website Into, a cheeky reference to gay hookup app parlance. Before long, Brammer’s column established him as the Chicano Carrie Bradshaw. Today, in addition to his column, Brammer is also an author, illustrator, and essayist. From his apartment in Brooklyn, New York, he opened up about navigating doubt, living with cynicism, and why he’s never quitting Twitter, er, X.
JASON PARHAM: ¡Hola Papi! has such a distinct presence and authority. Where did the Papi persona come from?
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JOHN PAUL BRAMMER: I didn't want to think of a new subject to write about every single week so I thought, OK, I'll do an advice column because then the people come to you with the subject. I'll tap into the inexhaustible well of gay drama that fuels this thing. It was a way to compensate for the fact that I had no business giving anyone advice whatsoever.
I wanted it to be a satirical advice column where the joke is, “‘What if Dear Abby was like a gay Mexican American man on Grindr?”’ And instead of giving good advice she just makes fun of people for writing into her and breaks the fourth wall, talking about how great she is instead of trying to help people with their problems. I really thought I was going to do a parody advice column.
That’s actually pretty brilliant.
But the thing about launching an advice column on a dating app is that there's a lot of lonely people on dating apps. There's a lot of people on Grindr specifically who might be living in countries or in cultures or in unique circumstances where they don't feel safe enough to come out, or they don't have an immediate community. There's no one around them they can talk to.
So when you give people that the opportunity to send a letter to this anonymous person who's going to read it, and maybe help you, I started receiving an avalanche of really heartfelt, sentimental, kind of intense letters. I was like, Oh man, I can't make fun of these people. I have to start taking this seriously.
The column has had a few different homes since launching in 2017—Into, Them, Out magazine, Substack, The Cut. Have you had to adapt to the different readerships?
The column in its most mature form right now. The Cut is supplying me with people with maybe less chaos in their lives than the Grindr audience did. But the Grindr audience—that was my favorite era of running the column because I was getting crazy shit. Letters saying, Hey, ¡Hola Papi!, so I downloaded Grindr to see if my husband was on it, and I found him on it, and then I started catfishing him as revenge, but he fell in love with the catfish and I'm sort of in love with being the catfish. What do I do? And I’m just like, this is crazy.
Insane.
I don't get things anywhere near that anymore, which is kind of sad because I really thrived in that environment. It’s much more tame nowadays.
Do you miss that?
Oh my god, do I miss it! For me, the brand in the early days was so chaotic. I got to be the sensible person in the room who got to expose the horrors of the crazy side of gay dating life to a lot of people. I got to take people on guided tours. It also made me feel like I didn't have to take my role as an advice giver super seriously because the advice was so easy. Oftentimes it was like, “OK, everyone here is kind of out of their minds. That's fine.” So it gave me carte blanche to, you know, flex my humor and to really lean into the absurd. The column much more readily wrote itself in situations like those and now I have to really think.
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Do you ever feel unqualified to give advice?
I still do feel unqualified all the time. I don't know, I think I've become pretty disenchanted over time with experts of a lot of different flavors. But it's a matter of how you position yourself, and I'm never trying to say that I'm a therapist. I'm definitely not a stand in for anyone's therapist. I'm not someone who can, you know, help you work through your trauma in a clinical sense.
I’ve always molded ¡Hola Papi! after the unofficial mentors that I had when I first came out in Oklahoma as gay. I went to Catholic school as a kid. I was in rural Oklahoma for most of my life. There was just so much I didn’t know. I was sheltered in so many ways without even knowing it, and the people who kind of taught me what was what during that really turbulent time weren't therapists and they weren't medical professionals. They were just random guys that I met at the bar, or people who had been in the community for a while and were willing to take me under their wing.
It’s such a vulnerable time.
And I think that a lot of people who write in to me are experiencing vulnerability in some way and so I've always tried to just be like, Hey I'm like your good friend at the bar. I know a few things, I've been around the block, and I'm going to key you in on what I think about all this. It’s very casual, very informal, which is kind of how I like it.
Who do you go to for advice?
I am a mama's boy, so I call my mom quite a bit, and I just sort of start blabbing to her about my problem. And often, unfortunately, the answer is that I just need to sleep. That I'm not getting enough rest. The most boring advice in life tends to be the one that's the most applicable. There are many issues in life that are pretty easily solved, it's just that we refuse to accept the easy solutions for whatever reason. So for me, like, I will never start getting an adequate amount of sleep. And I know that it contributes to me being cranky and irrational but I don't want to go to bed, you know?
Same. I’m always running off five hours of sleep.
It's like, when would I even sleep?
Brat summer! We gotta be outside.
We have to. Brat summer is all about pushing your limits.
Does the work ever make you feel cynical about the world or people?
It’s funny. I’m working on a Substack piece right now that's sort of about the writer's blocks that I've been feeling lately. I talked a little bit about the column and my status as a writer. and how sometimes I kind of resent the fuzzy adjectives that people use describe it. So they'll say, oh, it's so vulnerable and heartfelt. But I want to be wicked and nasty sometimes. I think that my real self maybe is much more cynical than the ¡Hola Papi! voice would let on, but that's kind of why the column has been such a nice refuge for me in my writing career. ¡Hola Papi! is a nice little way for me to escape my more natural instincts toward pessimism.
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Twitter—I refuse to call it X—is maybe the worst it’s ever been. Why are you still there?
It's just been a really nasty place to be since Elon Musk took over. I'm still there because I'm like a gutter creature. I’m bent thick at this point. I'm like those weird deep sea creatures, the angler fish. I've been horribly disfigured by the pressure surrounding me and now I can't live anywhere else. So I'm going to be on social media until the day I die for sure.
The first-gen social media lifers—I’m including myself in this—are going to have such bad PTSD from being so online for so long.
At some point we will have to reckon with how social media has affected our brains and that's not going to be a very fun time, because I know on an instinctual level it's done something to me, and I know that that something isn't great. I am worried to see what the official diagnosis will be.
I try not to think about it.
Talking to yourself that much, which is what I believe social media to be, is like Plato’s allegory of the cave. Like, these are my shadow people and I think they are real. But they're not. I’m mostly just projecting things onto the wall. It can’t be good for you. It’s such an inherently isolating experience even though it feels like there are massive voices everywhere in it. Ultimately it is an individual journey. Social media is sort of contingent on the individual you. There's not a whole lot of community to be had there and I think we pretend otherwise sometimes. It’s a lot of projection. It’s a lot of groupthink.
Real community used to be possible. It’s certainly changed. But it hasn’t always been an individual journey.
I do think it used to be different and I think it's getting worse. Meaningful connection can happen almost anywhere. It can arrive to you in the darndest places and I've met a lot of amazing people through the internet. But when we're talking about social media, we're talking about the architecture of something more than we're talking about the individual human moments that can happen within it. We’re talking more about a system, the way it's designed. For me, I see so many problems in it. It worries me, it really does. But yeah, the effect it has had on me, it feels like I have a smoking habit or something.
