By Philip Gambone
“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 an online column, which Brammer called a “Queer Latino Dear Abby,” the essays were intended to poke fun at the larger world of advice columns. But the letters Brammer received became serious, and he fell into the accidental role of an authority figure. He collected 14 of these stories of “lived experiences,” into a collection of engaging life lessons, resulting in an impressively deft first book.
A Mexican-American (“American with a squeeze of lime”), Brammer grew up in Cache, Oklahoma. It was a place, he writes, where it was “entirely common to be married before you could legally drink.” While sex outside of marriage was considered sinful, “if you hadn’t had sex by 16, well, what’s the holdup, fella? You gay or somethin’?” The place was “utterly inhospitable” to the interests of a nascent gay youth such as Brammer. When one of his classmates wore a Hollister shirt to school, he was grilled, “Isn’t Hollister a gay-guy thing?” The shirt disappeared. Needless to say, the teenage Brammer could not imagine a youth in which he was allowed to be gay. He was “constantly looking within myself for errors.”
In these essays, we learn a lot about Brammer’s 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 reboot a progressive blog. He was fired after two weeks for “not being passionate enough.”
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, disenchanting. 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, Brammer 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 question from a gay reader, such as: “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 personal reminiscences about his life as a young gay man (he’s 30) 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, about trying to be “a Real Mexican,” about learning to get over the idea of the one perfect love, and about 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 brings to this reader’s mind the chatty story-telling flair of The Moth Radio Hour, the earnestness of a TED Talk, the punchy panache of This American Life. And for fans of David Sedaris, he can serve up a bit of Sedaris’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 as long as we make sure we’re dreaming in the same direction.” Or: “It’s important to interrogate the gaze with which you behold yourself.” Or: “No part of one’s past is disposable.” Or: “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. Still, the best of Brammer’s pieces are smart, savvy accounts of what it’s like to be a Millennial generation, Mexican-heritage 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 one of those books that I wish had been around when I was leading the LGBTQ discussion group 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 kids–Mexican-American or otherwise–from hopelessness, despair, or worse.
Philip Gambone taught high school English for over 40 years while, at the same time, publishing fiction, nonfiction and journalism. His latest book, As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe.
