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Title: ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons by John Paul Brammer
Details: Copyright 2021, Simon and Schuster
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "The first time someone called John Paul (JP) Brammer “Papi” was on the gay hookup app Grindr. At first, it was flattering; JP took this as white-guy speak for “Hey, handsome.” Who doesn't want to be called handsome? But then it happened again and again… and again. JP couldn't help but wonder: Who the hell is Papi?
What started as a racialized moniker soon became the inspiration for his now wildly popular advice column “¡Hola Papi!,” and launched his career as the Chicano Carrie Bradshaw for a generation of young queer people everywhere—and some straight people too.
JP had his doubts at first. What guidance could he really offer while he himself stumbled through his early twenties? He learned that sometimes the best advice to dole out comes from looking within, and he soon found readers flocking to him for honest, heartfelt, and irreverent wisdom.
In ¡Hola Papi! the book, JP shares his story of growing up biracial and in the closet against the backdrop of America’s heartland while attempting to answer some of life’s toughest questions: How do I let go of the past? How do I become the person I want to be? Should I hook up with my grade school bully now that he’s out of the closet? Questions we’ve all asked ourselves, surely.
With wit and wisdom in equal measure, ¡Hola Papi! is for anyone-- gay, straight, and everything in between-- who has ever taken stock of their unique place in the world, and offers considered advice, intelligent discourse, and fits of laughter along the way."
Why I Wanted to Read It: David Sedaris is notoriously stingy about recommendations for other authors, and his personal page warns he is observing a "blurbatorium" when it comes to blurbing new books. So a book he actually did recommend and genuinely on his social media, this one (which he praised accordingly as "What a wise and charming book. He’s such a good writer, and so well rounded."), of course is going to grab attention, and it grabbed mine.
How I Liked It:
Let me let you in on something you already know. Authors influence other authors. Not at all surprising, right? It even factors into advertising ("For fans of [famous author/famous book]!"). But how they influence other authors isn't always the way you might think.
But first! Meet John Paul (or JP) Brammer! The book is told in a series of personal essays, framed as responses to advice column questions, wherein the author relates his biography as a half German-American, half Chicano, gay, bullied kid turned prolific writer (and how he dealt with that inner bullied kid) and his quest to figure out himself, mostly (but not entirely) through a Queer lens.
The last (and currently most recent) David Sedaris book left me with a lot of conflicting feelings and Sedaris went a lot of places I feel he shouldn't. So this book wouldn't have the shining tinge that, say, a 2011 Sedaris rec might have. Add to that the deeply unfortunate flap text ("¡Hola Papi! is for anyone-- gay, straight, and everything in between") which is far more appropriate for 1991 than it is for 2021 (seriously, we've said "LGBT" for over a decade now; also, bi and asexual people are not "in between" we and they are our own separate things) and I was full of reservations.
The author doesn't quite start out strongly either. When you're developing your memoir voice and thus your relationship with your audience early on in the book, something small can throw it off easily:
My friend Matthew Rodriguez asked if I'd be interested in pitching a regular column for INTO. At the time, I was working as an associate producer at NBC News, commuting daily to 30 Rock and crying on the M train while composing Teen Vogue articles on my phone's notes app about Kylie Jenner's being spotted with a fidget spinner. I'd get to work, report on the day's atrocities for NBC, rinse, and repeat. (pg 5)
Not exactly terribly relatable.
But hang in there. Unlike many things, it gets better.
Brammer isn't just a talented writer, he's frequently a brilliant writer, particularly in expertly sharing and plucking apart his trauma and unlearning it.
Trauma lives in the body long after the events that birthed it go away. It builds a home for itself in our memories, where it assets itself as reality. I was treated this way because there is something wrong with me, and if I am to protect myself, then I must carry a healthy, vigilant sense of paranoia with me at all times. Never again, it says. (pg 34)
But it's not just trauma, it's also relationships.
I have found that things beginning with a bang don't usually end with one. Most of the time they sort of spread out and cool off as a matter of entropy, as part of the grand cosmic plan all thing shave to eventually become still. (pg 113)
I paced around the house, recalling, of all things, a tree outside of my old apartment in Oklahoma City. It was warped like a big fishhook. The tree had grown up and around an object, perhaps a boulder, instead of straight up. The object, whatever it was, was later removed, resulting in the tree's strange trajectory. That was me: a weird-ass tree that had grown up, around, and in spite of [my hometown of]Cache, in spite of [school bully now trying to flirt on a dating app] Dillon, bending myself around obstacles even after they had long disappeared. (pg 124)
In mourning a relationship that ended before it began:
I used to shoot arrows out in the country with a bow. It's hard to describe how or why one knows when an arrow has been lost, before one even goes out to look for it. It's a realization that occurs the moment it's been loosed, well before it misses the target and buries itself in the grass, never to be retrieved. It was a small comfort, picturing this, in the moment Stefan told me Lukas would not be coming after all.
"Oh," was all I said. "We will have fun anyway."
"Of course!" Stefan said, like it wasn't even a question. (pg 194 and 195)
The author also describes navigating his multi-racial heritage with a family eager to erase their half of it, and struggling to make peace with it:
By all accounts, [my grandmother] wasn't exactly a loving mother. But she hadn't wanted her kids to deal with the things she'd dealt with. I suppose that's what love was to her.
The result, Panicked? We all lost Spanish. We lost Christmas tamales. We lost quinceañeras, and we lost the sense that we were from somewhere else, that immutable otherness that separated my abuelos from me-- their accents; the way they dressed; the color of their skin; their burdens. My mom, my sister, and I, meanwhile, were Americans with a squeeze of lime. (pg 56)
That spring, when I was admitted to Duke University and a classmate said I had only been let in because I was Mexican, I admit my first reaction was to feel validated. I felt maybe I was Mexican after all. Maybe I wasn't a fake, and maybe that meant I did belong in my own skin, because I felt pain, affirming pain, pain that would make me real if I got enough of it. (pg 62)
I didn't realize how intrinsically American it was of me to think I could "have" an identity by "having" things-- Spanish, tattoos, silver chains, scars. If I could do it again, Panicked, I would tell myself that identity is defined as much by what you have as it by what you've lost. Wanting to recover those things was like feeling homesick for a home I never had. That, to me, is Chicano. (pg 67)
But the bulk of the book, as you might imagine from the title, is reserved for the author's explorations of his Queer identity, specifically as a gay man. From vicious bullying to the point of attempted suicide as both a child and again as an adult (a "well-meaning" follower on Twitter asks about someone's "beef" with the author, linking a Tweet where a random user attacks the author's picture with a slur), to figuring out what he was, to seeking out relationships, to learning how to exist in the community, to unlearning his own bigotries and prejudices, to both externalized and internalized homophobia/Queerphobia, the author covers a lot.
Look, Wasted, I had a vague idea that I was gay. Although I'd never, ever used that word. I thought of myself more as "a person with unique difficulty accessing heterosexuality." Even when I was alone at night, with the family computer all to myself, armed with technological knowledge my parents didn't have, I only dared to look at straight porn. I'd end up focusing mostly on the man. The woman was there to grant me safe passage, like Charon ferrying me across the horny river Styx. (pg 41)
He reflects on his first real girlfriend, Rebecca.
It's hard, if not altogether impossible, for me to imagine a youth in which I was allowed to be gay. Or rather, a youth in which I was just allowed to be, to wallow in that fruitful messiness of early teendom without all the restrictions I'd placed on myself, to share my first kiss, to experience puppy love, to do everything I did with Rebecca, only, with a boy. It's easy to think of those years, Wasted, as an adolescence lost, precious time that was stolen from me.(pg 48)
But that's not quite right-- I did experience those things, with Rebecca. And while yes, it would have been nice to have experienced them with a boy like in some kind of progressive, gay young-adult-book-turned-movie, I do cherish the time I had with Rebecca. I cherish all of it-- the infatuation and the frustration and the drifting apart. So much of our formative years are spent on building ourselves against opposition, navigating social restrictions and taboos, looking for our reflection in the devil's water before cautiously dipping our feet in and wondering, Is this what I like? Is this who I am?
I navigated that fraught process with Rebecca, who was, at worst, just a friend. In a way, I couldn't have been luckier. (pgs 48 and 49)
Incidentally, if you harbored any doubts based on the front flap of the book, the author himself realizes it's nuanced.
I've entertained the notion that I might be bisexual, Wasted. I'd be silly not to have. The conclusion I've reached is that yes, there are very specific circumstances in which I could see myself enjoying physical or romantic stimulation with a woman, but I've yet to see those circumstances materialize or have that situation actually occur. I remain open to challenges to my perception of my sexuality and to my reading on my desire, and as we as a collective continue to shift the vocabulary around sexual orientation and identity, I imagine that self-understanding will change, or at the very least, my vocabulary for it will. It already has in some ways, with words like "queer" waxing and waning in popularity. (pg 49)
He also considers the importance placed on coming out.
In so many ways, I am still trying to figure myself out, trying to crudely map the fugitive psychological landscape of my likes and dislikes, my affinities and revulsions. What if "coming out of the closet" didn't herald the beginning of an entirely new life, an event that partitioned my life into a BC and AD?(pg 49)
Don't get me wrong. I think coming out is an important life event, and I want so very, very badly for young people to have the freedom to be themselves and to worry less about being bullied half to death like I was.
But I'm not willing to see any part of my past, or Rebecca, as disposable, as I think of lot of gay men do with prolific concepts like "gold star gay" (a gay man who's never had sex with a woman) or a performative disgust for vaginas (vuh-guy-nas). I think we sometimes reduce women, diminish women, cast women and their bodies as jokes or as failed attempts on our sexual liberty because we think that's a small revenge on the straightness that was unjustly imposed on us. I find that impulse somewhat understandable but its manifestations lazy at best. (pg 50)
He relates a struggle that most same-gender-attracted people (myself included) have encountered when trying to check into a hotel.
When we arrived at the Holiday Inn where we'd booked a king-sized bed, the troubles began almost immediately. "Wouldn't you prefer twin beds?" the receptionist, who became my new worst enemy in that moment, asked with concern on her face. "I just had one open up."
"Oh!" I said. "Yes, of course. Two twins, please." I said it so urgently that I was all but shouting to the world that we were two heterosexuals with nothing but heterosexual business to attend to during our stay. (pg 88)
Can hotels maybe do some sensitivity training on this, please?
In public spaces, when I heard a gay man speaking in a flamboyant, feminine way, sometimes I would reflexively cringe, wishing he'd tone it down. There had been times I'd seen people dress in gender-nonconforming ways and felt secondhand embarrassment or shame for them. I wasn't just policing others, either. I hated my own voice. I'd tell myself my taste in clothes was too feminine, that I could never go out wearing that. I'd never be successful enough, good enough, until I had the right kind of body, the right kind of attitude, was the right kind of man. Examining this was a bitter pill to swallow. (pg 126)
That's the paradox of lazy masculinity, Boring. All clothing is selected with some degree of care, even the clothing I was wearing. I wanted to look apathetic and masculine, which required a concentrated effort from my costuming department. (pg 144)
Being gay, queer, or whatever you'd like to call yourself doesn't have a uniform. There's no such thing, I've found, as "dressing gayer" or "looking gayer." You don't have to dye your hair or paint your nails. It's more important to interrogate the male gaze with which you behold yourself. Whose gaze is it, and what is it looking for, Boring? What might it be like to have a lens that is more your own?
It's not about buying things or reducing queerness to commercial goods, or even down to aesthetics. It's about the relationship between presentation and identity, recognizing that our bodies exist in conversation with the world and asserting autonomy over what we're saying in it, even against the threat of violence. I found that in other forms of speech, in my writing, for example, I had no problem speaking up for myself and for others. I can only imagine what it might have been like if, in those glossy pages of Vogue, I had seen anything approaching the visions of myself that I held close and secret. I wish that, through visuals, someone had communicated that it was okay for me just to think about myself that way, not even necessarily to be that way, but to merely expand my horizons. I think that's why it's important that we express ourselves: you never know who might be listening and who needs to hear you. (pgs 150 and 151)
The author manages to both speak to his own experience as well as speak to the experience of a lot of Queer people while simultaneously not trying to speak for all Queer people. And given his turns of phrase and often poetic descriptions, he does it in a particularly beautiful way.
One thing the book was not, at least, not to me, was the knee-slapper it's sold as being. Trauma can be funny, even hilarious. Samantha Irby and Jenny Lawson for just two, have made the best-seller lists by relating absolutely horrific events no one should experience. Sedaris himself has plenty of personal stories that are atrocities he's made funny. Laughing at something you know you should not laugh about is always irresistible, and horrifyingly, several of the author's traumatic events are sadly still common Queer experiences. But the author doesn't try to make them, nor much of the book, really, funny.
His funniest asides are offhand:
Dave had silver streaks in his black hair and steely gray eyes, which were beautiful but impossible to describe without cringing, as I'd discovered when I'd told Kelsey about them. "My God," she'd said. "Please don't ever say 'steely' again. Say it any other way."
"I guess they looked kind of like a husky dog's?"
"Yes, say that." (pg 108)
As for my friends, I will thank them once I make some. (Acknowledgments, pg 211)
But I'm not entirely sure the author's book is supposed to be funny. Not every book of personal essays has to or should be humorous. The book is heartfelt, raw, compelling, and liberating, and doesn't really need to be funny as well. And that's a bit of what shocked me about the book. The author must have been influenced in some way by David Sedaris, but the book clearly isn't trying to be one of the myriad of David Sedaris knock-offs. We feel confident in the author's voice as his own. He's not trying to convince us of anything, merely trying to understand and unpack the world, particularly his life. He's a thoughtful, knowingly-contradictory philosopher, navigating his way through existence as best he can.
It seems strange that a book in which an author clearly influenced another author equals the quality of the work by that author without venturing into imitation or at least the same book category ("Humorous Memoir") but here we are. John Paul Brammer is not David Sedaris, he's John Paul Brammer, and if this book is any indication (and it is), we're all the better for that fact.
Notable:
When we finished, he took me out to Kerbey Lane, an all-day-breakfast café with specialty pancakes like carrot cake and lemon poppy seed.
"Here's that lemon glaze," the waiter, a young, probably gay guy with his hair in a bun, said, sliding over an aluminum cup. "It looks kind of dirty, doesn't it?" He meant it looked like cum.
"Does it?" I asked innocently. (pgs 108 and 109)
From the bottom of my heart, it's COME, not "CUM". Sex is not some dirty thing that requires weird spellings and "to arrive" is a great way to describe an orgasm (or in this case, the effects of an orgasm).
________________________________________
The author, a millennial, ventures into a well-tread subject, Why Millennials Are Like That.
A pervasive narrative about millennials-- one millennials themselves like to propagate-- is that we were teed up for failure because we were told too often that we were special. We were placed in "special" programs with names like Talented and Gifted (TAG) or Advanced Placement (AP) that were held in "special" rooms and carried "special" perks, and along the way were were deluded into believing that we must really be something to write home about.
Then the reality of late capitalism stepped in, be it in the form of student loans or a bleak job market, and our lack of fortune was compounded by a profound twist of the knife: But I'm special. This wasn't supposed to happen to me.
I think there can be something to that idea while still believing it's for people whose schools had SMART Boards and, I don't know, textbooks. Lawton High had disabused me of any illusions that life was fair. The stabbings and the metal detectors and "general paper shortage" taught me life was a lottery. Being in AP classes in Lawton High just meant you had more money than other people, which was true in my case.
But I did have an inkling-- chalk it up to regular old hubris-- that I was "better" in some way. Not better than other people, but better than what I was being given. The notion that so many in my generation think this way because we were coddled or given too many participation trophies seems off. I think it's more about the idea of indignity. Or more specifically, the idea that our inherent dignity has been denied, molested. We want to do worthwhile work, work that satisfies us or at the very least adequately compensates us. We want to feel present in our labor. We want our labor to mean something.
These are not outlandish requests, but we make them in an environment that can't fulfill them, one where we are estranged from every tangible element of our work: our coworkers; the actual dollar value of our time; the people who make the decisions that govern our lives; the table those people are sitting at, wherever it is. In place of these concretes are intangibles: mission statements, values, and aesthetics. Open office plans and beanbag chairs also usually feature in the picture.
Industry understands this desire and uses it to its advantage, luring young people into content mills and chic startups with promises of creating not just a product but a culture, or giving space to tell important and overlooked stories. There is something violating about doing work for people you can't see, people who expect you to be a genuine believer in things they don't even believe themselves-- that you're going to change the world by selling a trendy piece of luggage, that you're going to build a loving community by launching a website that caters to runners, that you're going to "uplift minority voices" by writing a blog.
These are things that you, the worker, the believer, must have at your core, must carry with you into the office every morning, must strive to embody in every professional interaction you have while employed there, all so some guy who forgot he owned your company in the first place can decide to fire all of you while sitting on the toilet one day because it isn't raking him in enough money or prestige or whatever it was he felt he wanted when he threw his fortune at it.(pgs 134, 135, and 136)
He makes some good points here, but I feel I should debunk a few things, not that he's necessarily putting them forward as facts.
This is a generalization, as is all generational discourse, but loosely, Millennials (those born between, roughly, 1980-2000) and late/young Gen Xers (ehhh, possibly those born from the mid 1970s on) particularly in the United States were sold a model used by the Baby Boom generation and early/older Gen Xers, which was that you worked hard, went to college, and enjoyed a good (or at least, break-even) career as a result. The sky-rocketing cost of tuition (college tuition in the US soared to a 600% increase from 1970 to 2000 alone), historic wage stagnation, the slashing of a social safety net, and, to put it mildly, a vast shifting in the economy due to both increased corporatization (and the distance in pay for the average CEO and the average lowest worker being at one of its greatest gulfs in modern history) and the rise of the Internet, for just a few, all served to prove that model false.
Why can't these people succeed? Not because of programs put in place for our Boomer parents to get a pat on the back for raising an Exceptional child (like participation trophies and Gifted and Talented programs) and thankfully the author calls this out for the reductive nonsense that it is.
Also, this is only my experience and the state in which I attended high school is different from the one in which the author did, but my AP classes were covered (as in I nor my parents had to pay for them, and no one at my high school did) and were used for college credit. While my high school was pretty rough (I remember many, many fights that required police attention), it was also considered one of the best schools in a highly accredited area, so that too has something to do with it, surely. But my point is that his description of AP classes was not roundly accurate.
He lands truth as far as content-generators and the whole model, though.
His other takes on writing for pay (and considering different kinds of writing) are also interesting.
I considered what I could get out of the path I was on, if luck was with me. I imagined porn writing, the highs and lows of it. It really didn't feel all that distinct from other kinds of writing, and in many ways it was more honest. My other writing, the op-eds with their righteous, identity-based outrage, often hinged on the spectacle of trauma, a facsimile of courage: I am angry, I am brave, and here is my pain. Getting people off was at least a nobler, more serviceable goal. (pg 138)
Final Grade: A
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