J.P. Brammer’s “¡Hola Papi!”: Memoir Turned Delightful Survival Guide

The popular LGBTQ advice columnist gets even more personal in essays about sexuality, race, and authority.

Graphic by author.

“How do I make peace with the years I lost in the closet? How do I forgive and forget? How do I let go of a rotten relationship?” These are a few of the questions John Paul Brammer has received in his time as a gay, Mexican American advice columnist since 2017. He answers them by sharing his own experiences in a new memoir titled ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons.

Brammer’s debut book is published by Simon & Schuster and joins a growing shelf of modern LGBTQ memoirs. Readers who enjoyed Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, Saeed Jones’ How We Fight for Our Lives, or Jacob Tobia’s Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story will find a quick friend in Brammer’s prose and frank exploration of queer existence.

Each essay in ¡Hola Papi! is framed as a response to troubled readers of Brammer’s column by the same name. In “How to Kiss Your Girlfriend”, he pushes back on the notion that time spent closeted is time wasted by reflecting on his first relationship with a girl. Another anecdote about Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 becomes a how-to on embracing moments of joy, no matter how shallow or unexpected. Within 14 brief entries, Brammer acknowledges the absurdity of everyday existence and simultaneously illustrates the good we can make of it.

Advice is everywhere. Influencers, priests, life coaches, oracles, underwear brands, parents, Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide, and talk show hosts all stand at the ready to impart seemingly endless wisdom, solicited or not. In particular, the advice column has reigned supreme for roughly 300 years.

But advice from and for LGBTQ people only became widely available in the last decade, with regular columns appearing in Xtra magazine, Autostraddle, and Brammer’s very own, which is currently syndicated by The Cut. Before that, gay and trans youth relied on shady chat rooms, random zines, and befriending the rare queer elder for help. Brammer reveals that his own questions about being gay were often answered (or ignored) by people only a few years…