Deez Interviews: John Paul Brammer on his complicated relationships with authority, his advice column, and of course, Twitter
Today’s interview is with John Paul Brammer, the writer behind the ¡Hola Papi! newsletter and also most of the best tweets on the internet. We talked about Twitter fame, how ¡Hola Papi! has evolved from a 2017 advice column, and writing the best critique of that whole American Dirt mess from way back (February. It was only February.) Enjoy!
Tell me about your path into writing and New York.
It all feels like such a fever dream now. When I was in Oklahoma, my thinking was kind of, "okay, your path into the writing world is probably going to be through social media, so invest there." I wanted a platform that couldn't be snagged out from under me and that didn't have a whole lot of institutional hurdles in place to access because I couldn't, like, intern in New York for a news outlet and I hadn't gone to an Ivy League or anything. I told myself just read, write, and share. Read, write, and share.
So those principles have held, even if the road has been chaotic. When people ask me how to get their start in writing, I have all these flashbacks of the website I was working for shuttering, not knowing how I was going to make rent, making those chance encounters with colleagues and stumbling into those key relationships. I try not to think about it too much. If I do, I think it will all go away and reveal itself to be fake.
So I guess I just took it one day at a time with a vague North Star of "keep going," and it eventually landed me in New York, which wasn't a destination I had in mind, but here I am. I very much enjoy the life I've found myself in.
I was doing a big Google search to find all of your previously published work and ended up totally overwhelmed and muttering he has clips...everywhere!!! to myself. What secret sauce have you perfected in terms of being able to be so prolific?
In retrospect, I'm not super happy with having written everywhere or having been so prolific. It was easy back then, when my only thought was clawing my way out of my present conditions and into something better, to say yes to everything and chase after those flashy bylines.
I can't be sure if that was the right thing to do, and maybe (probably) it was! I mean, it got me to where I needed to. But now I feel like maybe I just didn't have enough faith in myself as an artist or a creator or whatever, and that's why I decided to publish everywhere.
To be clear, I love a lot of the things I wrote, but I don't see myself in most of it. I see a businessperson who knew how to be a chameleon. Was I impatient, or was I savvy? In any case, it can only be viewed from a place of privilege today where I have the freedom to say no to things and take on more personal projects.
If anyone wants advice on getting more bylines, which I do think is important to making a living, I have found it helpful to think of everything, absolutely everything (the news, the topics, the critiques, the anxieties, the frustrations, etc.) as all one giant conversation as opposed to thinking in silos. It's easier for me, then, to consider what my place in the conversation might look like. Be unique, and be professional.
¡Hola Papi! started as an advice column for INTO in 2017 and has since been hosted everywhere from Condé Nast to Out Magazine. Now it lives as your newsletter. How have you seen the column change over the years, and what can you tell us about the forthcoming memoir it’s being adapted into?
In normal years, Papi is a baby. In media time, he's Methuselah. Whole media outlets can be launched and then die within a year's time: staff writers hired, then fired, then hired again elsewhere.
Papi lives on because the column occupies a sort of perennial niche of gay anxiety. There will always be gay anxiety, and I think I've worked out a solid way to tackle it. It's always been 40% funny, 40% earnest, 10% bonkers, and 10% Valentina hot sauce. I think my writing skills have improved over time and I myself have become more mature, but the core of the voice is pretty much the same.
I'm super excited for the memoir because it's the column, but also not the column at all because it's about the real me. It wrestles with the notion of "authority" and uses the idea of "the advice column" as a vehicle for addressing that.
I think we all grapple with that subject: How do we overcome imposter syndrome? How do we express agency over the traumatic things that have happened to us, things we can't change? It's kind of a self-helpless book instead of self-help. I really wanted to undermine the idea of knowing everything, the idea of the sage advice-giver who has everything in order. I wanted my memoir to actively challenge my memories, because I think while we can't change what happened to us, we can, to some degree, challenge the way we perceive them.
If I had to sum it up, it's about a professional advice columnist who "finally made it" by settling one narrative about himself, then undoing that narrative by revisiting his formative experiences in life, love, and sexuality, and finding that, well, there's more than one way to tell the story.
During the American Dirt controversy, you wrote this hilarious yet searing piece that did a better job getting to the heart of the issue than anything else. What inspired you to use satire for this case instead of just straight criticism?
I'd love to say that piece was mostly about communicating a nuanced, structured critique on what I genuinely believe to be a complicated subject. But mostly, I was writing it with tears in my eyes from laughing at my own bullshit.
Like, I was writing the part about my fascinator wiggling violently on my head while I was telling off the poor moderator of the discussion and just saying "noooooo" aloud in the coffee shop. I was having so much fun.
But if I had to reflect seriously on my approach, I would say I did it because taking it seriously felt like giving both the book and myself too much credit. Like, yeah, I'm a gay Mexican in publishing. I've encountered hardships on that front. Citizenship is not one of them, nor is cartel violence. I tried writing about it seriously, and I kind of felt like a phony just because, well, this book has no real, material impact on my life like it might a Central American or an undocumented person. Being "Mexican" doesn't automatically give me access to that.
But I did read a bit of it, and I saw that there were sentences like "it was her quinceañera (her fifteenth birthday ;) hehe)" and it sent me into hysterics. I thought it was the campiest, worst thing ever. So I thought about how funny it would be if I did that same thing to some other culture, and the poor blokes across the pond happened to be the target because I find Britain so ridiculous in an endearing way. My dad got me hooked on Monty Python as a kid, you see. Britain is not synonymous with "white people," of course, but the classic, Dowager Countess, oppressively white British vibe has always, and will always be, so, so funny to me.
My last question is about your amazing Twitter presence @jpbrammer. No doubt, most media types would kill to have your following and "viral" batting average — but I'm wondering if there's a hidden side to ~Being Extremely Good on Twitter~ that comes with all of that.
Sometimes people say "I love you on Twitter," and I thank them, but it doesn't move me much because I genuinely feel like I'm not the one tweeting. There's a weird room in the back of my brain where some hideous creature is cranking a giant BINGO cage and calling out words, and I have to type them out or the creature will eat me.
There's an unhinged rhythm to Twitter that's very off-putting to most rational human beings, but once you "learn the language," it kind of writes itself. I guess it reflects my overall feelings about life lately. My mood over the past year or so has been to flush everything about myself down the toilet. Burn it. Take it all down from the walls, smash it with a hammer, and move on. I've found that, to get on with myself, I have to separate from all the feedback and the ego and wanting to cling to identities like "funny" or "talented" or "gay twitter" or "shitposter" or whatever. It sucks, because I've wanted to be successful for most of my life, and I think I could very well be right now, but it's just not something I want to inhabit. It feels tacky to move around in.
It actually feels, and continues to feel, like people online are reacting to some entity that has little to do with me. Even when people compliment my work or my art or pictures of myself. I sort of think, that's nice, but it doesn't really reach my gut, you know? Because if I allowed that to happen, then all the negativity that people send so thoughtlessly would hit me as well, and I just don't have time for that.
People get so obsessed with wondering if so and so is "like that in real life" or if the Twitter personality matches up and, like, who the hell cares? Most people are fake offline too.
I've come to think of myself as a person who likes to be left alone, which doesn't square with my social media presence at all. I just live in this paradox where I want people to read my work, because sharing it is what completes it for me as a worthwhile artifact, while also not wanting much to do with people or with their notions of who I might be at all. I find those terribly constraining and frustrating.
On the other hand, woof, having a platform is super handy for new jobs and getting those eyeballs on my work that I need and want. It's not all bad. I've made some really great connections on Twitter, and I get exposure to some absolute geniuses who post their work between their everyday complaints and jokes and anxieties. What a window!
Also, because I am in the end and despite my best efforts a pretty vain creature, sometimes people approach me to tell me how much they like my work, and yes it does make my entire day, week, month. I mean, what artist doesn't want that? It's always way better than "I love your twitter," because the work is the work and it's what matters to me. That said, I will never, ever stop posting.
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