John Paul Brammer - Hola Papi: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

Hola Papi!

I loved Hola Papi! and Im certain you will, too.

SHEA SERRANO

How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

John Paul Brammer

For Madre

Hola amigos!

While the following stories recount my lived experiences, many of the characters have had their names and identifying details shifted or have been rendered as composite characters. Thats when a few different people are put in a blender and turned into one person. Some dialogue has also been re-created from memory.

Hola Papi!

Are you even qualified to help me?

Signed,

Reader

I was warned not to download Grindr. I remember the conversation clearly. I was a junior in college at the time. It was a sun-drenched afternoon in 2011, and I was sitting on a bench with a Swedish guy named Erik whom Id met off a sleazy hookup site called Adam4Adam with a nigh-unusable interface. Erik, a senior, had taken it upon himself to show me the ropes of gay life for reasons Id navely assumed were platonic. I was twenty years old and had only been out of the closet for a couple of months.

Oh goodness, he said, his regular preamble to addressing my mistakesmy not knowing what a top or bottom was, the menagerie of mediocre men Id arranged to have sex with, none of which ever met Eriks standards. You havent heard of Grindr?

Erik was manifestly chlorinated: an avid swimmer, he had bleach-blond hair and matching bleach-white skin. He always smelled clean in a chemical way, always seemed like hed rather be swimming; hed make absent paddling motions with his hands while walking. Hed drag me to the pool to criticize my form and show me what a real breaststroke should look like (mine was a stroke in the loosest sense of the word).

And I went, Reader. I went because I was desperate for the knowledge Erik held so casually: how to date and hook up and live as a gay person, things I didnt yet know how to do. Id grown up in the Oklahoma countryside, where my only real exposure to gayness had been through the judges on Americas Next Top Model and an estranged uncle on the white side of the family who was too busy chain-smoking and drinking Franzia out of a box to make idle chitchat.

I worried, Reader, that I had gotten too late a start on this being gay business. I was an all-or-nothing kind of person. I wasnt gay until one day when I decided that, no, actually, I was. Aside from one failed romantic endeavor with my best friend from high school, I hadnt really fooled around with guys while I was in the closet. I didnt watch gay porn or hit up gay bars only to go back to pretending I was straight. But once Id committed to being gay, I immediately started throwing myself at whoever would have me, which at least brought a colorful new cast of characters into my life, Eriks pallor notwithstanding.

What exactly is Grindr? I asked.

Its nothing a sweet girl like you needs to know about, Erik said, chewing his gum and staring off into the middle distance. Erik always seemed like he had something better to do than muck about with me, which made it all the more confusing that he kept inviting me places. Stay away from it. Youll thank me later.

Its a hookup app? I said, pressing him. At the time, during my personal Stone Age, the only apps I had on my phone were Candy Crush and Facebook, like a soccer mom in the suburbs. My scandalous homosexual activities were reserved for my laptop during the witching hour, when I would log in to Adam4Adam and exchange nudes with faceless strangers, seeking the dopamine rush of approval. The notion that I could get such a thing on my smartphone was novel and exciting.

Its the gay hookup app, Erik said, as if I were the worlds purest baby. But for, like, the worst people. Dylan is always on it. Have you met Dylan? Oh, you will. Erik was always threatening me with these inevitable landmarks of my journey, prophecies of dates gone awry and conflicts with catty gossips whom Erik always referred to as she and her, which only confused me further. Shell find you, he said. Dont worry. Shell get to you.

The first thing I did after freeing myself from Erik for the day was, of course, to download Grindr.

I opened it up in my apartment, an orange icon with an ominous black mask on it (the color scheme was inverted back then). I was introduced to the grid: row upon row of profilesmen, all within reach, mere feet away. The guys Id glanced at in coffee shops. The men Id checked out at the gym. The classmates who made me wonder, What if? All made tangible with a little blue chat button.

I was instantly hooked.

It was on this app that, for the first time ever, some white guy greeted me by saying, Hola papi. Id never really considered myself any kind of papi. I was a mixed-race Mexican American with noodle arms who couldnt legally drink yet. But in the overwhelming influx of everything that came with coming outnew customs, new vocabulary, new ways of seeing myselfI didnt think too much of it. I accepted it as another sideways fact of my chaotic new life and moved on.

In that long process of moving on, Grindr and I stayed together, even as Erik faded into my past. When I took an internship with the Austin Film Festival for a summer before my senior year of college, Grindr went with me. When I studied abroad in Barcelona, Id hang out in cafs with Wi-Fi and open Grindr. When I moved to DC for a blogging job, and then to New York for another gig, the grid was a constant in my life. The men came and went, with varying degrees of success. But Grindr was forever.

I wouldnt have called myself a sex addict, Reader. I wasnt having near enough sex to qualify for that. I was more of an affirmation junkie. I was into the idea of being wanted by people who didnt have any obligation to want me. After a life spent languishing with repressed desires, it felt good to openly want and be wanted. To lust, to flirt, to show off and to be showneven if nothing came of itwas a destination unto itself. On the grid, I got to sit and survey all my options, my delicious options, exquisitely illustrated possibilities, at no cost. I developed a visceral, Pavlovian reaction to the brrrrp of a new message.

After logging countless hoursyears!on the foul application, it was in 2017 that I was beamed up to the mother ship of Grindr HQ in Los Angeles. It seemed like the natural conclusion of our journey together, but it was only the beginning.

A friend Id met in the New York gay Latino hive mind had recently been hired as a staff writer for a new editorial brand published by Grindr, called INTO (a clever play on the common Grindr refrain What are you into?, the phrase most asked by gay men sniffing out possible hookups). My friend Mathew Rodriguez asked if Id be interested in pitching a regular column for INTO. At the time, I was working as an associate producer at NBC News, commuting daily to 30 Rock and crying on the M train while composing Teen Vogue articles on my phones notes app about Kylie Jenners being spotted with a fidget spinner. Id get to work, report on the days atrocities for NBC, rinse, and then repeat.

So, really, what did I have to lose?

In fact, I had everything to gain. Ever in the freelance mindset of you are going to fail and bring shame to your family unless you say yes to everything, I said yes and tried to engineer a weekly column for weekly checks. The problem was, I didnt trust myself to come up with a new topic to write about with such frequency. I would need an inexhaustible well of material.