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. But fear isn’t the only thing,” Papi responded, lovingly and precise.
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: sex, dating, work drama, even, yes, our sometimes shared existential doom.
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 says, “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.”
But 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 and 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, called 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?
