December 15, 2021 • 21 mins
For John Paul Brammer, there is no one right way to be yourself. Growing up in the South, he lived the complexities of being Mexican American in a society that wanted him to choose one culture over the other. In this episode of “In the Deep: Stories that Shape Us,” we hear how John Paul rejects this idea and proves that identity is less tethered to borders and stigmas, and instead focuses on the premise that people should be free to be themselves. As an author, editor and journalist, John Paul stresses the importance of building safe spaces that take the best parts of ourselves and multilayered experiences - creating an identity that leaves pain behind and instead, fosters health and healing.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Have you ever wanted a safe space where you can
just exist, where, for a moment in time, you can
be you, with all the intricacies and parts of you
that people don't always understand. Welcome to in the deep
stories that shape us. I'm your host, Zach Stafford, and
each episode we create a space to be you, all
of you and all your messy and complicated glory. Every
(00:25):
story shares what it means to be a black and
Latin X man living with different hardships, whether it's a
struggle of identity, discrimination, or health, and how they've managed
to push forward despite the circumstance. We hope to get closer,
even IF's just a little to a road of healing
and understanding. Hey, everyone, welcome back. I want to talk
(00:50):
about something that feels personal to me and I'm sure
many of you listening to the show. I'm a black
man from the South, and my whole life I have
felt like I've been living between two borders. And I'm
not talking about the borders that necessarily physically divide to
neighboring countries. I'm talking about borders that people like me
learn to navigate daily, the border of two perspectives to
(01:11):
ethnic groups to graph our own story. Meet John Paul Brammer.
He's a calumnist and an author. His story really stands
out to me because he's a combination of so many
identities like myself. He's Mexican, he's American, he's both in
neither all at the same time, and he infuses his
work with the same idea that we can be who
we are, even if that's a combination of many things
(01:33):
that may feel like contradictions to some. I am a
person from rural Oklahoma. I grew up in a Mexican family.
My dad is not Mexican, but I don't know that
side of my family very well. Aside from my dad,
(01:53):
I'm very close with my mom's side of the family.
We grew up in a very rural part of the country.
My sister and I did very isolated, kind of high
up on a hill, not a lot of other houses
near us, very quiet, very flat, very calm, but at
the same time very boring. Um. I spent a lot
(02:16):
of time at my Aboilo's house, this little place called
cash c A. Me and my cousins would go out
to the backyard. We would play with the concrete in
like the pulverized powdery form that my boilos had. We
would play in the garden. We would get fine, nice
sticks to hit each other with. We would tinker with
(02:37):
the old piano that they had, this really horrible dusty
dying piano that they had for like years and years
and years. I would sit at this desk and I
would tinker with the junk that my Boilo put in there,
so it was like big gummy racers screws, little metal
bits and ends wires. Uh. We went to tech this
(03:00):
quite a bit, which is where they had raised my mom.
My Mexican family has roots in Chihuahua, Mexico, but they
always saw Texas as their big homeland, and so we
were there all the time because both my parents worked.
My dad was a salesman and my mom taught English
at the high school. Growing up, I was just a
(03:21):
board Mexican, unknowingly gay child, just trying to get through
my days. Sometimes borders are there for better or worse.
Most of the time we don't realize that they're even
being created. John Paul explains what these cultural moments meant
for him as a kid growing up as Mexican, as American,
(03:44):
and what role these memories played and shaping his identity
as an adult. They think, when we're children, there's this
narrow window of time where we're more like animals than people,
and we don't have to question everything. Everything just is
what it is and it gets served to us and
it does and we don't think of things. It's terribly complicated.
(04:04):
We used to do the feast day of our lative
Quadaloupe every December. I would wake up really really early.
My Boilos would take me down to Texas and we
would go to the little church where they had regularly
used to attend Mass, and we would have this really
interesting feast day where everyone would bring food from their
house and they would have the don Santez, which is
(04:26):
people dressed up as like as tech dancers and the
feathers and the regalia, and they would dance down the
aisle of this Catholic church and it was very visually jarring,
very like audio wise too. There were a lot of
weird sounds, but you don't think about that as a kid.
You just think like, oh, they're dancing and they look pretty,
and I'm in this building and we're gonna eat some
(04:48):
good food later, and I wasn't trying to find where
I started and began in all of it. I was
just sort of enjoying it. And I think at some point, unfortunately,
you think, wait, what am I? Who am? What's going
on here in Texas, which is, you know, part of
the United States. You have this really interesting display going
on in this Catholic church, and how do the people
(05:09):
in that church fit in with the United States versus
Mexico versus everything else that's happening. And I was so
thrilled by it. Everything felt so cool and it felt
like a discovery every day. But then you know, you
encounter a lot of things later in life that make
you more jaded, that makes you feel like, well, maybe
(05:30):
I don't really belong in all that. Yeah, And I
feel like you've been called to answer big questions about
your culture for years now, and you've been so entangled
in that kind of dance over and over, and you know,
it makes me think, where you go work in a
Mexican grocery store, can you tell the listeners about that
what happened there? It's very much pretty much raised by
my boilos. And one thing about my Boilos was just
(05:54):
that because I grew up in rural Oklahoma, and I
didn't have a whole lot of examples of what like,
what does them Mexican look like? What does a Mexican
American look like? What do Mexican people look like? The
whole world was my aboilos because they raised me. I
grew up with them. I was at their house all
the time, and so in my mind, that's what being
a Mexican was. And they introduced me to their world,
(06:17):
which is a world where Mexican isn't necessarily like an ethnicity.
It's almost like a class is what I was kind
of taught, which is like we would go to Texas
all the time and they're like, Nihole, Look all the Mexicans.
They make Christmas happen in this rich neighborhood. They put
up all the lights, they do the lawns, they clean everything,
They raise people's children. They they're the ones who are
(06:38):
the nannies, they're the ones who the gardeners, they're the plumbers,
they work in the kitchens. This is the world that
my aboilos had me interacting with on a day to
day basis, and it's the one that I carried with
me through most of my life. And I would say
it's only been in recent years in comparison to the
grand scheme of things as long as I've been alive,
that my narrative of Mexico and Mexicans and you know,
(07:00):
the Chicanos or whatever you want to call them, has
really been changed. Because I met, you know, like rich Mexicans.
I thought that I came from a place where everyone
in my culture is very poor, and so growing up
with my abolos um and feeling like I was in
conversation with them, and feeling like I was a part
of there, an extension of their legacy, I guess you
(07:22):
would say I was very troubled by the idea that, well, actually, no,
we don't have a lot in common. You know, I
don't speak Spanish. I mean I do now, but I
couldn't make Mexican food. Growing up in such isolation in Oklahoma,
without a community, really, I didn't know how my people
(07:42):
quote unquote behaved, how we were around each other, what
it meant to be a real Mexican or whatever. Um
And that existential crisis led me to take a job
at this tortilla factory down the road. And it was
at that tortillo factory where I learned a whole lot
of things, and a lot of things I learned actually
didn't have a lot to do with like my culture,
(08:02):
heritage or ethnicity. It had a lot to do with
just like what it means to be a worker, what
it means to be treated like you're less than and
at the same time hold all the privileges I held,
just because a lot of my coworkers, even though we
came from the same culture, we had some shifferent experiences.
(08:25):
I mean, these are some people who are like some
of them are undocumented, um, some of them could barely
speak English. And it just really highlighted to me, I
guess what a frail project identity and culture is, because
there's just hardly a roof you can build that will
put even two people together because experiences are so different
and everything is so complicated nuance that it was really
(08:48):
my initiation into my journey of understanding. As you're talking,
you know, I can only relate through my p o
V of being a black Southern kid growing up and
you know, kind of rule Tennessee. And as you begin
to realize you are a person and that you are
a person that moves to the world through certain cultures
and spaces and places. You very quickly, especially when you're queer,
you realize you don't fit into those places, that these
boxes that are being assigned to everyone else you don't
(09:10):
really fit in. And there's this existential crisis of like,
I don't fit, so do I belong? And if I
don't belong, where do I belong to? And for you,
as like a young queer you know, Latin, next person,
that seems very frustrating in Oklahoma, in a tortilla factory,
It's frustrating to me that identity is such a project,
and that figuring out who you are, what you are,
(09:31):
how you should call yourself. It's also subject to trends
to how culture changes, to how language changes. And I
eventually had to arrive at a place where I became
more agnostic than I ever thought I would be about
where I come from and who I am, because the
only things I found that can't really be changed or
taken from me are my memories and my time with
(09:53):
my willows growing up, and those are the things that
people can't challenge. And so I've I've lived there or
and more lately trying starting to see my boilos you know,
my Boilos no longer with me, but through I think
a more accurate lens of like people rather than placeholders
of like, well, that's my culture, that's my heritage, that's
(10:14):
my ethnicity, whatever it is. I think it's more complicated
than that, and so starting to look at them more
as like actual human beings with dreams of their own
and less of this like immigrant narrative that so often
gets placed on people like them, where they're just sort
of like their job is to be the people who
make a better life for their grandchildren, you know. And
that narrative is so embedded in American culture that even
(10:38):
when I thought I was critiquing it, I think I
was kind of low key buying into it at the
same time. And so now I'm looking back and I'm like, yeah,
I think that maybe a lot of things my Boila
did wasn't like Mexican culture. I think she was just weird.
John Paul's a Boilos were the first heroes he encoultured
in this coming of age story. But like any good story,
(11:01):
it's made up of your good guys and bad guys.
And I think to a certain extent, we're all taught
that good triubes over evil, and it can become part
of our own missions to fight for the right things
against the people that are doing wrong. But what happens
when bad guys aren't all bad, but rather complicated. During
a visit to his hometown, John Paul opened up a
(11:22):
dating app only to find that his high school bully,
who had once made life so difficult for him, was
also on the app and presumably gay. Talk about complicated
with this person, this person who in my life such
a living hell. I realized that I had kind of
assumed a lot of things about him, and I had
(11:43):
sort of wanted to paint him in a certain light,
because you never wanted to think that someone who was
so cruel to you, who could have done such horrible
things to you, has something in common with you. And
so both of us being closeted gay people back then,
it makes me feel like that's not fair. I had
this perfect villain set up for this story where I
could understand myself as the victim of everything, and I
(12:07):
had nothing to do with with that experience. I think
I was very interested in looking in the ways that
I wanted this person to be one dimensional. I wanted
this person to be my perfect monster, because I had
actually built so many other things around that idea. I
had built the idea of needing to be successful, of
needing to be better, needing to be the smartest person
(12:30):
in the room, the funniest person in the room, all
these other things in a quest for what. And the
answer is, like any monster that gets made, it's there
to represent the anxieties, there to represent all the things
that you're trying to run from. And so I was
using that image of him as fuel to keep me going.
And I thought that if I took that image away,
(12:50):
I wouldn't be as good anymore. I wouldn't have a
reason to be pushing myself the way I'm pushing myself.
It's masochistic in a way. It's just not health. But
I found that I was afraid to dispose of that
monster in a way because I thought, well, who am
I without that monster? And for me, it's amplified by
(13:13):
being formally Catholic, being raised in the Church, because you know,
growing up, I was certainly taught that there is a
virtuous and cleansing element to pain, to suffering that I
think that Catholicism is very interested in telling you that
pain is worth it that it means something. I remember
(13:34):
in my elementary school it was a thought that, you know,
the more you suffer in life like the martyrs, uh,
you know, you can get years taken off your purgatory.
You can skip the middleman and go to heaven. You
can win a quicker, better eternal life by being in pain.
And so for me, those themes stuck with me. And
that's the funny thing about themes. Even though I formally
(13:57):
distanced myself from the church, I have thought of myself
as a Christian or a Catholic in a very long time.
Those ideas have stuck with me and they appear all
the time. Making a conscious decision to opt out of
some or even all, of the cultural and religious groups
we belong to and create new ones is not only
incredibly difficult, but very scary. John Paul took the scary
(14:21):
and flipped it on its head, using sad tire to
create his own safe space with Ola Poppy and advice
column in our book, where people can write in and
ask for pointers on just about anything. Ola Poppy is
a space where John Paul can express himself and spread hope,
but also guide others and their very own identity journey.
Being on the receiving end of so much advice through
the years, through his family and through his religion, I
(14:44):
was curious, how does he approach his safe space given
that he's received so many bad suggestions in the past.
It's technically about other people. It's people complete strangers writing
to me about their experiences and then me taking that
letter and using my own stories or using my own
voice and kind of throwing myself into it. And so
(15:06):
I think that's what excites me about the project. And
it's my longest ongoing project of my life. You know,
I can't. I can barely hold a job for longer
than a year. So it's amazing that Ala Poppy is
still alive. But I've received so much bad advice over
my lifetime. I think the funniest answer to this would
be to not download Grinder, just because, I mean, talk
(15:31):
about a life that has been shaped by Grinder. It's mine.
It it led me to some really interesting avenues. But
you know, like I think I came out in the
very like love is Love um read equality Facebook photo
filter kind of era where you know, we hadn't had
marriage equality yet, and that really dominant strain of popular
(15:56):
mainstream gay activism had that sort of instant am friendly,
very bubbly, very hopeful, very optimistic, but at the same
time so traditional and was such an appeal to sort
of like sis hetero values. So a lot of it
was just like, yes, I'm gay, but that doesn't mean
(16:17):
that I am a slut, that doesn't mean that I
act like a woman. It was very that and that
was way more socially acceptable as messaging back then than
it is now. And so I got a lot of
advice right after I came out that was along those lines,
you know, like, oh, yeah, welcome to being gay. You
don't have to act like those sissies like you know,
a lot of advice just about like making sure that
(16:40):
I was appealing to the right people, that I was
being an upstanding, virtuous gay person. It's so striking to
me that me coming out at that time in Oklahoma,
I was introduced to advice that nowadays would be unthinkable,
but back then it was popular. So I would say
I got a lot of bad advice in I was
(17:04):
going through some columns of yours today and I came
across one that actually fits perfectly with what you're saying,
and it was from two has A nineteen I think,
and it was a out magazine and the columns out
and it was a reader writing in saying that they
were it should be positive and depressed. And what was
so interesting about the story is that they had disclosed
their status to a friend and a friend said to them,
(17:27):
it's not that big of a deal being paused, and
it was really confusing for this person. You answered this
letter as someone of the side positive in a really
compassionate way. Do you remember this letter and talk to
me about what made you want to take this letter on.
There's such a stigma around it. There's a moral dimension
to it. There are people who, you know, even when
(17:47):
they're not blaming you, kind of sound like they're saying, oh, well,
you should have been a little bit of a better
person and that wouldn't have happened to you. That sentiment
is so common. And so I really felt something for
this letter writer because I wanted to be a voice
that said, actually, yes, I hear you, and this is
important and it does matter. It's part of your life.
And just validating that for them was important for me
(18:09):
because sometimes the best advice for me anyway is really
just a conversation with someone who accepts your terms of
what matters and what doesn't. If you say it matters,
then it matters. And I think that that's what a
good friend so and a lot of times, an Ola Poppy,
I'm not always out to fix anyone's life. Sometimes I'm
just out to be a good friend, like someone at
(18:30):
a bar that you can talk to and I'll talk
back and maybe you feel better at the end of it.
And regardless of how complicated the subject matter is, like
in this case they're dealing with HIV status, I want
to give that to as many people as I can.
What struck me about this rereading it today was your
ability to comfort someone in real time saying I know
what you're going through is complicated. You're sad, you're going
(18:51):
through all these emotions, and what must not feel good
is someone telling you those things are not valid. And
that's like what everyone should remember when someone comes to
you for advice or help, you should always say, I
hear you, I see you, and you're gonna be okay.
And you know, for us, we're like black and brown
men dealing in the world with a lot of HIV
around us at all times. So you know, it's important
for us to always remember that, like we're gonna be okay,
(19:12):
especially in these conversations like if you are positive, there's
access to care. If you're not, there's prep. There's so
much out there, like you deserve to exactly to live
a life. It's messy if you need So before I
let you go, can I ask for some advice? Yes,
of course. Okay, So you share a similar sentiment to
me that the world kind of let's say it's complicated
(19:32):
right now. There's a lot going on. You've been answering
questions through the whole pandemic for the past few years,
giving people a little bit of hope to make it through.
What's your best advice right now to keep hope alive
for all of us as we keep going through all this.
What are you telling yourself? So I think of my past,
and I think about how I've really risen to every
(19:54):
occasion that's been put in front of me when it
was put in front of me, and how people tend
to become all together different beasts when they actually have
to cross that bridge, when they actually have to come
face to face with something they're afraid of. Um. So
realize that I'm actually kind of a more competent person
than I've ever given myself credit for. And I think
most people are like that. I think most people are
(20:15):
maybe a bit stronger than they think they are, and
so you just need to be able to trust yourself
that I think that there will be good things in
there somewhere, and I think I'll be able to find
them for me. That really helps me every day. For
John Paul and so many people living amongst these borders,
(20:35):
the borders of geography, of identity, of culture. Knowing who
we are and where we fit in can be a
lifelong search, but evolving into ourselves and our own story
is often more important than the destination or checking a box.
Knowing that you are healthy, knowing your status, having peace
with embody and mind can be a bigger marker of identity,
(20:56):
and one I'm positive leads to a happier life in
the long run. This has been in the deep Stories
that shape us. Find this episode and others on the
I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen
to podcasts. Don't forget to share, rate and review if
you enjoyed this conversation. The show is produced by Evan
(21:17):
Chien and mastered by James Foster. Our show researcher is
John and Raggio and our writer is Yvette Lopez. A
special shout out to our guest John Paul Brammer. I'm
your host, Zach Stafford
Have you ever wanted a safe space where you can
just exist, where, for a moment in time, you can
be you, with all the intricacies and parts of you
that people don't always understand. Welcome to in the deep
stories that shape us. I'm your host, Zach Stafford, and
each episode we create a space to be you, all
of you and all your messy and complicated glory. Every
(00:25):
story shares what it means to be a black and
Latin X man living with different hardships, whether it's a
struggle of identity, discrimination, or health, and how they've managed
to push forward despite the circumstance. We hope to get closer,
even IF's just a little to a road of healing
and understanding. Hey, everyone, welcome back. I want to talk
(00:50):
about something that feels personal to me and I'm sure
many of you listening to the show. I'm a black
man from the South, and my whole life I have
felt like I've been living between two borders. And I'm
not talking about the borders that necessarily physically divide to
neighboring countries. I'm talking about borders that people like me
learn to navigate daily, the border of two perspectives to
(01:11):
ethnic groups to graph our own story. Meet John Paul Brammer.
He's a calumnist and an author. His story really stands
out to me because he's a combination of so many
identities like myself. He's Mexican, he's American, he's both in
neither all at the same time, and he infuses his
work with the same idea that we can be who
we are, even if that's a combination of many things
(01:33):
that may feel like contradictions to some. I am a
person from rural Oklahoma. I grew up in a Mexican family.
My dad is not Mexican, but I don't know that
side of my family very well. Aside from my dad,
(01:53):
I'm very close with my mom's side of the family.
We grew up in a very rural part of the country.
My sister and I did very isolated, kind of high
up on a hill, not a lot of other houses
near us, very quiet, very flat, very calm, but at
the same time very boring. Um. I spent a lot
(02:16):
of time at my Aboilo's house, this little place called
cash c A. Me and my cousins would go out
to the backyard. We would play with the concrete in
like the pulverized powdery form that my boilos had. We
would play in the garden. We would get fine, nice
sticks to hit each other with. We would tinker with
(02:37):
the old piano that they had, this really horrible dusty
dying piano that they had for like years and years
and years. I would sit at this desk and I
would tinker with the junk that my Boilo put in there,
so it was like big gummy racers screws, little metal
bits and ends wires. Uh. We went to tech this
(03:00):
quite a bit, which is where they had raised my mom.
My Mexican family has roots in Chihuahua, Mexico, but they
always saw Texas as their big homeland, and so we
were there all the time because both my parents worked.
My dad was a salesman and my mom taught English
at the high school. Growing up, I was just a
(03:21):
board Mexican, unknowingly gay child, just trying to get through
my days. Sometimes borders are there for better or worse.
Most of the time we don't realize that they're even
being created. John Paul explains what these cultural moments meant
for him as a kid growing up as Mexican, as American,
(03:44):
and what role these memories played and shaping his identity
as an adult. They think, when we're children, there's this
narrow window of time where we're more like animals than people,
and we don't have to question everything. Everything just is
what it is and it gets served to us and
it does and we don't think of things. It's terribly complicated.
(04:04):
We used to do the feast day of our lative
Quadaloupe every December. I would wake up really really early.
My Boilos would take me down to Texas and we
would go to the little church where they had regularly
used to attend Mass, and we would have this really
interesting feast day where everyone would bring food from their
house and they would have the don Santez, which is
(04:26):
people dressed up as like as tech dancers and the
feathers and the regalia, and they would dance down the
aisle of this Catholic church and it was very visually jarring,
very like audio wise too. There were a lot of
weird sounds, but you don't think about that as a kid.
You just think like, oh, they're dancing and they look pretty,
and I'm in this building and we're gonna eat some
(04:48):
good food later, and I wasn't trying to find where
I started and began in all of it. I was
just sort of enjoying it. And I think at some point, unfortunately,
you think, wait, what am I? Who am? What's going
on here in Texas, which is, you know, part of
the United States. You have this really interesting display going
on in this Catholic church, and how do the people
(05:09):
in that church fit in with the United States versus
Mexico versus everything else that's happening. And I was so
thrilled by it. Everything felt so cool and it felt
like a discovery every day. But then you know, you
encounter a lot of things later in life that make
you more jaded, that makes you feel like, well, maybe
(05:30):
I don't really belong in all that. Yeah, And I
feel like you've been called to answer big questions about
your culture for years now, and you've been so entangled
in that kind of dance over and over, and you know,
it makes me think, where you go work in a
Mexican grocery store, can you tell the listeners about that
what happened there? It's very much pretty much raised by
my boilos. And one thing about my Boilos was just
(05:54):
that because I grew up in rural Oklahoma, and I
didn't have a whole lot of examples of what like,
what does them Mexican look like? What does a Mexican
American look like? What do Mexican people look like? The
whole world was my aboilos because they raised me. I
grew up with them. I was at their house all
the time, and so in my mind, that's what being
a Mexican was. And they introduced me to their world,
(06:17):
which is a world where Mexican isn't necessarily like an ethnicity.
It's almost like a class is what I was kind
of taught, which is like we would go to Texas
all the time and they're like, Nihole, Look all the Mexicans.
They make Christmas happen in this rich neighborhood. They put
up all the lights, they do the lawns, they clean everything,
They raise people's children. They they're the ones who are
(06:38):
the nannies, they're the ones who the gardeners, they're the plumbers,
they work in the kitchens. This is the world that
my aboilos had me interacting with on a day to
day basis, and it's the one that I carried with
me through most of my life. And I would say
it's only been in recent years in comparison to the
grand scheme of things as long as I've been alive,
that my narrative of Mexico and Mexicans and you know,
(07:00):
the Chicanos or whatever you want to call them, has
really been changed. Because I met, you know, like rich Mexicans.
I thought that I came from a place where everyone
in my culture is very poor, and so growing up
with my abolos um and feeling like I was in
conversation with them, and feeling like I was a part
of there, an extension of their legacy, I guess you
(07:22):
would say I was very troubled by the idea that, well, actually, no,
we don't have a lot in common. You know, I
don't speak Spanish. I mean I do now, but I
couldn't make Mexican food. Growing up in such isolation in Oklahoma,
without a community, really, I didn't know how my people
(07:42):
quote unquote behaved, how we were around each other, what
it meant to be a real Mexican or whatever. Um
And that existential crisis led me to take a job
at this tortilla factory down the road. And it was
at that tortillo factory where I learned a whole lot
of things, and a lot of things I learned actually
didn't have a lot to do with like my culture,
(08:02):
heritage or ethnicity. It had a lot to do with
just like what it means to be a worker, what
it means to be treated like you're less than and
at the same time hold all the privileges I held,
just because a lot of my coworkers, even though we
came from the same culture, we had some shifferent experiences.
(08:25):
I mean, these are some people who are like some
of them are undocumented, um, some of them could barely
speak English. And it just really highlighted to me, I
guess what a frail project identity and culture is, because
there's just hardly a roof you can build that will
put even two people together because experiences are so different
and everything is so complicated nuance that it was really
(08:48):
my initiation into my journey of understanding. As you're talking,
you know, I can only relate through my p o
V of being a black Southern kid growing up and
you know, kind of rule Tennessee. And as you begin
to realize you are a person and that you are
a person that moves to the world through certain cultures
and spaces and places. You very quickly, especially when you're queer,
you realize you don't fit into those places, that these
boxes that are being assigned to everyone else you don't
(09:10):
really fit in. And there's this existential crisis of like,
I don't fit, so do I belong? And if I
don't belong, where do I belong to? And for you,
as like a young queer you know, Latin, next person,
that seems very frustrating in Oklahoma, in a tortilla factory,
It's frustrating to me that identity is such a project,
and that figuring out who you are, what you are,
(09:31):
how you should call yourself. It's also subject to trends
to how culture changes, to how language changes. And I
eventually had to arrive at a place where I became
more agnostic than I ever thought I would be about
where I come from and who I am, because the
only things I found that can't really be changed or
taken from me are my memories and my time with
(09:53):
my willows growing up, and those are the things that
people can't challenge. And so I've I've lived there or
and more lately trying starting to see my boilos you know,
my Boilos no longer with me, but through I think
a more accurate lens of like people rather than placeholders
of like, well, that's my culture, that's my heritage, that's
(10:14):
my ethnicity, whatever it is. I think it's more complicated
than that, and so starting to look at them more
as like actual human beings with dreams of their own
and less of this like immigrant narrative that so often
gets placed on people like them, where they're just sort
of like their job is to be the people who
make a better life for their grandchildren, you know. And
that narrative is so embedded in American culture that even
(10:38):
when I thought I was critiquing it, I think I
was kind of low key buying into it at the
same time. And so now I'm looking back and I'm like, yeah,
I think that maybe a lot of things my Boila
did wasn't like Mexican culture. I think she was just weird.
John Paul's a Boilos were the first heroes he encoultured
in this coming of age story. But like any good story,
(11:01):
it's made up of your good guys and bad guys.
And I think to a certain extent, we're all taught
that good triubes over evil, and it can become part
of our own missions to fight for the right things
against the people that are doing wrong. But what happens
when bad guys aren't all bad, but rather complicated. During
a visit to his hometown, John Paul opened up a
(11:22):
dating app only to find that his high school bully,
who had once made life so difficult for him, was
also on the app and presumably gay. Talk about complicated
with this person, this person who in my life such
a living hell. I realized that I had kind of
assumed a lot of things about him, and I had
(11:43):
sort of wanted to paint him in a certain light,
because you never wanted to think that someone who was
so cruel to you, who could have done such horrible
things to you, has something in common with you. And
so both of us being closeted gay people back then,
it makes me feel like that's not fair. I had
this perfect villain set up for this story where I
could understand myself as the victim of everything, and I
(12:07):
had nothing to do with with that experience. I think
I was very interested in looking in the ways that
I wanted this person to be one dimensional. I wanted
this person to be my perfect monster, because I had
actually built so many other things around that idea. I
had built the idea of needing to be successful, of
needing to be better, needing to be the smartest person
(12:30):
in the room, the funniest person in the room, all
these other things in a quest for what. And the
answer is, like any monster that gets made, it's there
to represent the anxieties, there to represent all the things
that you're trying to run from. And so I was
using that image of him as fuel to keep me going.
And I thought that if I took that image away,
(12:50):
I wouldn't be as good anymore. I wouldn't have a
reason to be pushing myself the way I'm pushing myself.
It's masochistic in a way. It's just not health. But
I found that I was afraid to dispose of that
monster in a way because I thought, well, who am
I without that monster? And for me, it's amplified by
(13:13):
being formally Catholic, being raised in the Church, because you know,
growing up, I was certainly taught that there is a
virtuous and cleansing element to pain, to suffering that I
think that Catholicism is very interested in telling you that
pain is worth it that it means something. I remember
(13:34):
in my elementary school it was a thought that, you know,
the more you suffer in life like the martyrs, uh,
you know, you can get years taken off your purgatory.
You can skip the middleman and go to heaven. You
can win a quicker, better eternal life by being in pain.
And so for me, those themes stuck with me. And
that's the funny thing about themes. Even though I formally
(13:57):
distanced myself from the church, I have thought of myself
as a Christian or a Catholic in a very long time.
Those ideas have stuck with me and they appear all
the time. Making a conscious decision to opt out of
some or even all, of the cultural and religious groups
we belong to and create new ones is not only
incredibly difficult, but very scary. John Paul took the scary
(14:21):
and flipped it on its head, using sad tire to
create his own safe space with Ola Poppy and advice
column in our book, where people can write in and
ask for pointers on just about anything. Ola Poppy is
a space where John Paul can express himself and spread hope,
but also guide others and their very own identity journey.
Being on the receiving end of so much advice through
the years, through his family and through his religion, I
(14:44):
was curious, how does he approach his safe space given
that he's received so many bad suggestions in the past.
It's technically about other people. It's people complete strangers writing
to me about their experiences and then me taking that
letter and using my own stories or using my own
voice and kind of throwing myself into it. And so
(15:06):
I think that's what excites me about the project. And
it's my longest ongoing project of my life. You know,
I can't. I can barely hold a job for longer
than a year. So it's amazing that Ala Poppy is
still alive. But I've received so much bad advice over
my lifetime. I think the funniest answer to this would
be to not download Grinder, just because, I mean, talk
(15:31):
about a life that has been shaped by Grinder. It's mine.
It it led me to some really interesting avenues. But
you know, like I think I came out in the
very like love is Love um read equality Facebook photo
filter kind of era where you know, we hadn't had
marriage equality yet, and that really dominant strain of popular
(15:56):
mainstream gay activism had that sort of instant am friendly,
very bubbly, very hopeful, very optimistic, but at the same
time so traditional and was such an appeal to sort
of like sis hetero values. So a lot of it
was just like, yes, I'm gay, but that doesn't mean
(16:17):
that I am a slut, that doesn't mean that I
act like a woman. It was very that and that
was way more socially acceptable as messaging back then than
it is now. And so I got a lot of
advice right after I came out that was along those lines,
you know, like, oh, yeah, welcome to being gay. You
don't have to act like those sissies like you know,
a lot of advice just about like making sure that
(16:40):
I was appealing to the right people, that I was
being an upstanding, virtuous gay person. It's so striking to
me that me coming out at that time in Oklahoma,
I was introduced to advice that nowadays would be unthinkable,
but back then it was popular. So I would say
I got a lot of bad advice in I was
(17:04):
going through some columns of yours today and I came
across one that actually fits perfectly with what you're saying,
and it was from two has A nineteen I think,
and it was a out magazine and the columns out
and it was a reader writing in saying that they
were it should be positive and depressed. And what was
so interesting about the story is that they had disclosed
their status to a friend and a friend said to them,
(17:27):
it's not that big of a deal being paused, and
it was really confusing for this person. You answered this
letter as someone of the side positive in a really
compassionate way. Do you remember this letter and talk to
me about what made you want to take this letter on.
There's such a stigma around it. There's a moral dimension
to it. There are people who, you know, even when
(17:47):
they're not blaming you, kind of sound like they're saying, oh, well,
you should have been a little bit of a better
person and that wouldn't have happened to you. That sentiment
is so common. And so I really felt something for
this letter writer because I wanted to be a voice
that said, actually, yes, I hear you, and this is
important and it does matter. It's part of your life.
And just validating that for them was important for me
(18:09):
because sometimes the best advice for me anyway is really
just a conversation with someone who accepts your terms of
what matters and what doesn't. If you say it matters,
then it matters. And I think that that's what a
good friend so and a lot of times, an Ola Poppy,
I'm not always out to fix anyone's life. Sometimes I'm
just out to be a good friend, like someone at
(18:30):
a bar that you can talk to and I'll talk
back and maybe you feel better at the end of it.
And regardless of how complicated the subject matter is, like
in this case they're dealing with HIV status, I want
to give that to as many people as I can.
What struck me about this rereading it today was your
ability to comfort someone in real time saying I know
what you're going through is complicated. You're sad, you're going
(18:51):
through all these emotions, and what must not feel good
is someone telling you those things are not valid. And
that's like what everyone should remember when someone comes to
you for advice or help, you should always say, I
hear you, I see you, and you're gonna be okay.
And you know, for us, we're like black and brown
men dealing in the world with a lot of HIV
around us at all times. So you know, it's important
for us to always remember that, like we're gonna be okay,
(19:12):
especially in these conversations like if you are positive, there's
access to care. If you're not, there's prep. There's so
much out there, like you deserve to exactly to live
a life. It's messy if you need So before I
let you go, can I ask for some advice? Yes,
of course. Okay, So you share a similar sentiment to
me that the world kind of let's say it's complicated
(19:32):
right now. There's a lot going on. You've been answering
questions through the whole pandemic for the past few years,
giving people a little bit of hope to make it through.
What's your best advice right now to keep hope alive
for all of us as we keep going through all this.
What are you telling yourself? So I think of my past,
and I think about how I've really risen to every
(19:54):
occasion that's been put in front of me when it
was put in front of me, and how people tend
to become all together different beasts when they actually have
to cross that bridge, when they actually have to come
face to face with something they're afraid of. Um. So
realize that I'm actually kind of a more competent person
than I've ever given myself credit for. And I think
most people are like that. I think most people are
(20:15):
maybe a bit stronger than they think they are, and
so you just need to be able to trust yourself
that I think that there will be good things in
there somewhere, and I think I'll be able to find
them for me. That really helps me every day. For
John Paul and so many people living amongst these borders,
(20:35):
the borders of geography, of identity, of culture. Knowing who
we are and where we fit in can be a
lifelong search, but evolving into ourselves and our own story
is often more important than the destination or checking a box.
Knowing that you are healthy, knowing your status, having peace
with embody and mind can be a bigger marker of identity,
(20:56):
and one I'm positive leads to a happier life in
the long run. This has been in the deep Stories
that shape us. Find this episode and others on the
I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen
to podcasts. Don't forget to share, rate and review if
you enjoyed this conversation. The show is produced by Evan
(21:17):
Chien and mastered by James Foster. Our show researcher is
John and Raggio and our writer is Yvette Lopez. A
special shout out to our guest John Paul Brammer. I'm
your host, Zach Stafford
Host
Zach Stafford
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