Adios Papi

On saying goodbye and saying hello

Thank you for your paid support. I look forward to the future of my writing on here, and you make it all possible.

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A Grindr message I received today that felt relevant.

It’s bizarre to me now that I would have, for several years, answered people’s questions about anything. I like to believe I’m wiser today. If this is so, it means an even less wise version of me was an advice columnist. It’s far from the most egregious identity I’ve assumed on the internet. I was once a glamorous female law student with an amputated leg, at least in one chatroom. But enough about yesterday afternoon.

After eight fruitful years, I’m formally retiring my advice column. Since I haven’t written an advice column in quite a while, this means absolutely nothing. But every so often, this Substack, or even I, myself, will be referred to as ¡Hola Papi!, so I thought it a good idea to put this in writing. I wish I had something bombastic to impart, like that I’m in fact of Italian descent and was pretending to be Mexican-American, but I could only aspire to be so enterprising. Mamma mia! Thank you for the support. The column changed my life, and I’m grateful to have shared the experience with you.

As far as updates go, one need not read further. But I have thoughts to share, if thoughts are of interest.

It was never a goal of mine to become Dear Abby for depressed bottoms (a role already occupied by Dear Abby). But when you set out to make a living out of writing, you don’t ask too many questions when something starts working. When ¡Hola Papi! started working, I thought, Why not? I resolved to ride the train to its last stop, which is here on a beach in San Juan, where I’m splayed out and reflecting.

I no longer believe in advice. There’s a question as to whether I ever did. I started ¡Hola Papi! as more or less a satirical enterprise, which I think was an appropriate move for an advice column on Grindr. The joke got out of hand, owing in part to the fact that I started actually giving advice, which wasn’t the original plan. There are a lot of lonely people on Grindr who want someone to talk to. I was “someone.” I found it impossible to avoid earnestness. I wanted to help people, even if I didn’t necessarily like people.

“Advice columnist” might sound like an unlikely profession for a person who dislikes people to fall into, but it isn’t. I overstate the case. It’s not true that I dislike people. It’s that people and I have always had a fundamental misunderstanding. This fundamental misunderstanding gave rise to two developments on my end: a fetish for being understood, and a strong desire to be helpful. These lent themselves well to the job.

I’m jealous of people who don’t mind being misunderstood. To me, being understood feels like defusing a bomb. A relief. Being misunderstood, meanwhile, is watching the ticker count down to something that can’t be taken back. This is a difficult condition for a creative person to work with. It’s not really the job of a creative person to be understood. Sometimes, the job is to make a crater.

The truth is I’m a freak with crippling anxiety who’s historically lacked faith in his weirdness. I think that’s why the advice column felt so safe. It’s the ideal domain for an anxiety-addled recluse who still wants a public writing career. The form is ruled by hyper-legible entities that announce themselves: the authority figure, the hapless inquirer, the readers, the misunderstanding at the center to be dealt with and removed. It’s an ordered, contained universe.

Chaos is the antagonist. Clarity is the goal. Writing advice is the literary equivalent of a cleaning gig. The columnist dons rubber gloves and gets to work putting the mess in order: toxic exes go here and your insecurity goes there and your inattentive friend is shelved. “Agony aunt” is an entirely appropriate moniker. Sweaty. Domestic. Most advice these days relies on established etiquette with contemporary progressive twists. Voice is the distinguishing factor. That all seemed great for me. I could do voice. It was great for a while. But even back then, I had quiet issues. They got louder over time.

¡Hola Papi! was perfect for the internet landscape in which it was born. Advice columns thrived in 2017. We live in a different era now. In media-industry terms, we’re in the immediate aftermath of the dinosaur-ending asteroid. The giants are dying off. The nimble mammals emerge from their underground tunnels to fill the unoccupied niches, eager to evolve into what already was.

I’ll carry fond memories of our doomed Eden, back when a queer outlet sponsored by a pharmaceutical company would throw money at me to evaluate the revolutionary potential of a reality TV program. All things in their time. Like any time, there was good and bad.

In 2017, authority was everything. The chaos of the early Trump years unnerved people. A premium was placed on moral clarity. I saw advice-column hallmarks in writing from people who were not advice columnists. Didactic. Preachy. Intentions were named and announced. Ambiguity was hunted and despised. There was an unspoken mandate to obviousness. I would go so far as to say that the ethnic dimension of ¡Hola Papi! was influenced by this. Ethnicity was one of many tools to locate individuals on an axis of goodness, a way to distinguish between who should speak, and who should listen; who should be uplifted, and who should sit down; who was the victim, and who was the villain.

I don’t think this was all rooted in malice. There were grifters and opportunists, sure. There were sadists wearing halos. But a good deal of it was a failed moral technology against uncertainty. I recognize here the familiar anxious impulse that brought me to the advice column. People who’ve been harmed have a tendency to reduce the scope of human relationships to an economy of harm. We might become obsessive over patrolling and naming harm in an attempt to prevent it. Miserable as social media often felt, this was still the waning days of techno-optimism. Before Twitter became an apparatus of the state for a cabal of powerful perverts, it felt like a useful tool for naming things, for separating good from bad, right from wrong: clarity.

Pressure followed. This pressure resulted in some wackiness. I was called a “queer Latinx voice” a lot, which always sounded rather disembodied. To have worked in that environment was to be called all sorts of things other than your name, to be flattened so that you were easier to identify. It didn’t feel violent so much as unserious and condescending, like being an adult bowling with the foam bumpers.

The 2017 advice column boom seems to me now to be just another column (pardon the pun) in a rapidly constructed online emotional infrastructure erected in the wake of a world turning upside-down. That this paranoid, surveillant era dovetailed so neatly with my own neuroses seems now both fortuitous and depressing. In my efforts to be harmless, and in my efforts to be helpful, I mirrored my time quite well, even if today I see that in many ways we were misguided. I think in most of the columns I wrote, save for the one where I ignored the letter writer’s question and interviewed a bee expert instead, I dutifully defeated myself. I told myself there were easy answers.

My aim here isn’t to disavow my previous work, or to indulge the banal bitterness writers nurse for their old writing that so rudely continues speaking for them well after they no longer feel represented by it. I have precious little to complain about. I had a lovely run. I connected to total strangers. I was trusted. I got to crack jokes. I traveled. Doors opened. I met some total hunks. I published a book. I was offered unique and intimate insights into world-defining events: elections, the pandemic, cultural shifts, and so on. I built a platform. I’m incredibly lucky. If you got something out of the column, I consider that an honor of a lifetime.

What I hope instead is that I’ve articulated here a lucid explanation for why I can’t return to my advice column, why it feels so wholly of its time, and why, while I’m proud of what I’ve built, I no longer wish to be associated with it. Of course, that last bit is out of my control. It will be very much up to me to make new things. I look forward to that. I feel braver now.

There’s still plenty to fear out there. It’s not lost on me that some of the people who have the most to fear are precisely the people who read my column. I still believe in writing as a way to combat authoritarianism and bigotry. I also believe that as our world becomes cruder, as it becomes ever more incurious, our work should deepen. I believe we should embrace ambiguity. We should create things that are more challenging. We should question easy answers.

In parting, I have some last advice for myself, and for you. To me: Take a risk. Bet on yourself. Trust people, as they have trusted you. It will be fine. It might even be fun. To my cherished readers: Develop a powerful kick.

Goodbye, and hello, and con mucho amor,

John Paul