He Started Out as the ‘Dear Abby’ of Grindr. Now Everyone Wants His Advice

Scared Shitless successful Seattle didn’t cognize however to cope. In 2022, consumed by the dread of climate change and the shame of their sexuality, they wrote into ¡Hola Papi!, the fashionable online proposal column. “Ultimately, you’re close to beryllium afraid. I’m afraid. But fearfulness isn’t the lone thing,” Papi responded, lovingly and precise.

Like each ¡Hola Papi! column, it was unflinchingly candid, incorporating each the hallmarks readers person travel to enjoy: wit and pathos, emotion and sincerity, the occasional nutrient reference. If you’ve ever work 1 of his columns, you cognize that thing is disconnected limits for Papi: sex, dating, enactment drama, even, yes, our sometimes shared existential doom.

Papi was calved John Paul Brammer, and grew up a closeted Catholic schoolhouse kid successful agrarian Oklahoma, a municipality truthful tiny Brammer’s parent was his ninth-grade English teacher. He was, helium says, “always a small spot hopeless to get out” of his hometown. After assemblage helium landed successful DC, wherever helium picked up enactment arsenic a blogger for “one of those contented mills,” helium says. “I did a batch of clickbait articles, like, ‘With 1 tweet Nancy Pelosi conscionable slayed Republicans’—that benignant of thing. I was liable for a batch of the junk that you saw connected the internet.”

But the occupation had hidden benefits. “I learned what makes radical click connected things and however to snag people’s attraction successful the blurry integer oversea of the internet,” Brammer says. “I figured retired what a unsocial dependable looks like.”

It yet paid off. When an accidental arose, successful 2017, to writer a column, helium unleashed ¡Hola Papi! into the world. It couldn’t person happened astatine a amended time, Brammer tells me. He was trapped successful freelance purgatory, penning for fractional a twelve outlets but not truly making a splash similar he’d wanted.

“My clearest distillation of that timeline was, I'm connected the M bid going from Ridgewood to 30 Rock, and I americium exhausted due to the fact that I didn't slumber the nighttime earlier due to the fact that I was up talking to immoderate Russian root implicit the telephone astir the gay purge successful Chechnya and I could hardly recognize what they were saying done their accent, and I'm connected bid composing a Teen Vogue puff portion successful the notes app connected my iPhone astir however Kylie Jenner matched her formal with her fidget spinner, and I conscionable privation to die.”

It was during that play that a friend, who conscionable truthful happened to enactment astatine Grindr, suggested helium lend to their just-launched LGBTQ+ editorial website, called Into, a cheeky notation to cheery hookup app parlance. Before long, Brammer’s file established him arsenic the Chicano Carrie Bradshaw.

Today, successful summation to his column, Brammer is besides an author, illustrator, and essayist. From his flat successful Brooklyn, New York, helium opened up astir navigating doubt, surviving with cynicism, and wherefore he’s ne'er quitting Twitter, er, X.

JASON PARHAM: ¡Hola Papi! has specified a chiseled beingness and authority. Where did the Papi persona travel from?