Scared Shitless in Seattle didn’t know how to cope. In 2022, consumed by fear of climate change and shame about their sexuality, they wrote in Hello Daddy!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 accurately.
Like all of Papi’s columns, it was dead-on candid, embodying all the hallmarks readers have come to enjoy: humor and pathos, love and sincerity, the occasional reference to food. If you’ve ever read one of his columns, you know that nothing is off limits to Papi: sex, dating, workplace dramas, even, yes, our sometimes shared existential doom.
Papi was born John Paul Brammer and grew up in a Catholic school in rural Oklahoma, a town so small that his mother was his ninth-grade English teacher. He says he was “always a little desperate to get out” of his hometown. After college, he landed in Washington, where he got a job blogging for “one of those content mills,” he says. “I wrote a lot of clickbait articles, like, ‘Nancy Pelosi Just Blew the Republicans With One Tweet,’ that kind of thing. I was responsible for a lot of the garbage that was on the Internet.”
But the job had hidden benefits. “I learned what makes people click on things and how to capture their attention in the blurry digital sea of the Internet,” Brammer says. “I discovered what a unique voice looks like.”
It paid off in the end. When the opportunity to write a column came up in 2017, he launched ¡Hola Papi! into the world. It couldn’t have come at a better time, Brammer tells me. He was stuck in freelance purgatory, writing for half a dozen outlets but not making the impact he’d hoped for.
“My clearest synthesis of that timeline was that I’m on the M train going from Ridgewood to 30 Rock, and I’m exhausted because I didn’t sleep the night before because I was up on the phone with a Russian source about the Gay purge in Chechnya and I could barely understand what they were saying because of their accent, and I’m on the train composing an article for Teen Vogue in the notes app on my iPhone about how Kylie Jenner paired her dress with her fidget spinner, and I just want to die.”
It was during this period that a friend, who worked at Grindr, suggested he contribute to their newly launched LGBTQ+ editorial website, called Into, a cheeky reference to gay dating app slang. Before long, Brammer’s column had him established as the Chicano Carrie Bradshaw.
Today, in addition to his column, Brammer is also a author, illustratorand essayist. From his apartment in Brooklyn, New York, he talked about dealing with self-doubt, living with cynicism, and why he’ll never give up Twitter—i.e., X.
JASON PARHAM: Hey, Papi! You have a very strong presence and authority. Where did Papi’s personality come from?
