Seattle’s fear-seekers didn’t know how to cope. In 2022, gripped by fears of climate change and shame about their sexuality, they wrote to the popular online advice column “Hola Papi!” “At the end of the day, it’s natural for you to be afraid. I’m afraid too. But I’m not the only one who is afraid,” Papi replied with endearing precision.
¡Like all of Hola Papi!’s columns, it’s unflinchingly candid and packed with all the traits readers love: humor and pathos, love and honesty, and the occasional food reference. If you’ve read his columns, you know that nothing is off-limits to Papi: sex, dating, work drama, and, yes, even the existential doom we all share from time to time.
Papi was born John Paul Brammer and grew up closeted as a Catholic in rural Oklahoma. The town was so small that Brammer’s mother taught him English in ninth grade. “I always wanted to get out of my hometown for a bit,” he says. After college, he ended up in Washington, DC, where he got a job as a blogger for “content factories.” “I wrote a lot of clickbait articles like, ‘Nancy Pelosi crushes the Republican Party with one tweet.’ I wrote a lot of the crap you see on the internet.”
But the job also had hidden benefits: “I learned what makes people click and how to capture their attention in the murky digital ocean of the internet,” Brammer says. “I learned what a unique voice sounds like.”
In the end, it paid off: In 2017, an opportunity to write a column presented itself, and he launched “Hola Papi!” Brammer tells me it couldn’t have come at a better time: He’d been stuck in freelance hell, writing for a half-dozen publications, but never quite achieving the breakout success he’d hoped for.
“The clearest summary of that timeline is: I’m on the M train from Ridgewood to Thirty Rock, I couldn’t sleep the night before because I was on the phone with a Russian source talking about the gay purge in Chechnya and I could barely understand a thing they were saying in their accents, and on the train I’m writing a Teen Vogue blurb in the Notes app on my iPhone about how Kylie Jenner matched her dress with a fidget spinner, and I just want to die.”
Around that time, a friend who happened to work at Grindr suggested he contribute to the company’s newly launched LGBTQ+ editorial website, Into, a tongue-in-cheek reference to gay dating app lingo. Soon, Brammer’s columns were positioning him as a Chicano Carrie Bradshaw.
In addition to his column, Brammer is also a writer, illustrator, and essayist. Speaking to us from his Brooklyn, New York, apartment, he talked about overcoming doubt, living with cynicism, and why he’s not quitting Twitter.
Jason Parham: “Hola Papi!” has such a unique presence and authority. Where did the Papi persona come from?