TRANSCRIPT:
Katelyn Howard: You describe your advice column “¡Hola Papi!” as the “Queer Latino ‘Dear Abby...,’” starting out as a bit of a joke, but it quickly became more serious as people in the LGBTQ community would turn to you with complex issues. Initially, you felt like a bit of a fraud, worrying that you weren’t qualified enough to be an advice columnist. How did you overcome that insecurity as the column became more popular?
John Paul Brammer: Yeah, I think like many insecurities, we sort of learn by doing. So I just by virtue of being in a situation where I had to sink or swim, sort of came into my own just by giving advice, tapping into the life experiences I could share. And that's sort of what the book is about. It's about the fitful process of understanding yourself, understanding the stories you tell yourself about how you move through the world. So it was this bit by bit, slowly but surely realizing, "Oh, okay. I think I do have something to say."
Howard: The book is a series of essays that take the form of advice columns, with you answering questions such as, “How do I make peace with the years I lost in the closet?” Why did you decide to structure your memoir this way?
Brammer: So the first book could have taken many different forms. I just needed it to be attached to something that people could recognize because the advice column has always been just a format for me. It’s been sort of a vessel. And so I wanted to incorporate it materially into the first book. So I thought a really good way of doing that would be to structurally format the whole thing, like the column itself.
Howard: There’s a chapter where you reflect on how you struggled throughout your teens with the feeling that you were not “Mexican enough” since you were raised without many Mexcan customs and traditions. And you even went as far as to work at a Mexican restaurant in an attempt to reconnect with your heritage, but you learned it is not that simple.
Brammer: So what I was trying to do in that chapter, and in my life, was I was trying to find Spanish. I was trying to find recipes. I was trying to find something that would authenticate me as a “real Mexican” because that's what my family was. That's what I grew up around. But at the same time, I felt like a tourist in my own body. How do I fix that? And I was really not able to see that the mere fact that my abuelos had lost all those things, that they had sort of cut them loose to move lighter, that was actually part and parcel to my family history and to a lot of Chicano history. And so what I'm trying to do is draw attention to loss, things we don't have, as a way to define ourselves instead of by the things that we have.
Howard: In the book, you look back at the severe bullying and homophobia you endured as a child while growing up in a small town outside of Lawton, Oklahoma. And it’s in this chapter that you perfectly sum up the book’s message, with the line, “The worst things that have ever happened to us don’t define us. We are the ones who get to define what those things mean.” How has that mentality helped you heal from past trauma?
Brammer: Yeah, that’s helped me immensely, because I think that one thing I had to accept about life in general is that we kind of can't go back and change what happened to us. But on the other side of the coin is the way we define those things and what we take them to mean. For example, in that chapter, me talking about going through abuse as a child and how that abuse impacted the way I saw myself years and years later because I was building so much of myself around it, around, not wanting it to happen again. It supplies us with a vocabulary for what we can and can't say, how we describe our lives. I'm not trying to downplay any of the pain or hardship that anyone experienced. But what I am trying to say is that there is an extent to which those things are stories. And if they’re stories, and that means that we're storytellers, we don't really understand just how much the stories we tell ourselves affect our daily lives, because our lives are very much are guided by narrative, because we're humans at the end of the day. And I'm trying to let people know that they have more creative freedom than maybe they thought they did.
Howard: You just touched on this a little bit, but this severe bullying caused you to minimize the space you occupied as a means of protection, which followed you into adulthood. One of the ways you worked to overcome this was by finding ways to express yourself, specifically through fashion.
Brammer: Absolutely. I think that fashion and style are really big elements to most people's lives. Even when I was pretending to be a straight Mexican kid in high school, I was very much cognizant of what to wear to sort of communicate that. And so to me, clothing is meant to communicate something. And understanding that was a long journey because obviously there were things I was afraid to say, but nonetheless wished I could say. And what's funny to me is that when I moved to New York City, I thought, okay, now the opposite problem is true. Now I'm feeling pressured to become more extravagant, to sort of draw more attention to myself. So I felt pressure in multiple environments. And nowadays,I still love fashion, but I'm not really feeling that same pressure to only buy really loud or extravagant things which I love on other people. But I also enjoy just being able to blend in wherever I am and getting to observe things. And I think at the end of the day, it's being willing to get to know what you like, what you want to communicate, and letting yourself have that.
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