Ryan O’Connell Made a Career Out of Vulnerability. He Wouldn’t Recommend It These Days.
By By Adam Eli
It feels like everyone I know is trying to write and star in a TV show based vaguely on their lives. Making this dream a reality, however, has been reserved for a select few that include Larry David, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Michaela Coel, and of course Lena Dunham. In April 2019, Ryan O’Connell joined that chosen elite when Special, a semi-autobiographical Netflix series adapted from the former blogger’s memoir premiered. The show, which ran for two seasons, followed a gay man with cerebral palsy, played by O’Connell, who writes extremely personal essays for a website vaguely based on Thought Catalog, that bygone platform for millennial confessions.
Post-Special, O’Connell published a semi-autobiographical novel, Just By Looking at Him. His new collection of essays, Inspiration Porn, sees the actor drop the “semi” label and go full non-fiction. In the book, he talks about his family, his open relationship with fellow author Jonathan Parks-Ramage, and “healing through his hole.” Ahead of the book’s launch, I called O’Connell up to talk about the vulnerability industrial complex, not becoming a total sub for the algorithm, and why his first memoir was a scam.
You got your start by writing viral listicles, advising fellow millennials on how to conquer their 20s, etc. There are quite a few lists in your novel and this newest book—are lists just a part of your writing style now?
I’ve hired many exorcists to get it out of my bone marrow, but she’s sticking. I’ve been doing this since my 20s and it must be just fused into my DNA. I tried to be light on the list because I didn’t want this book to feel bloggy, but also my voice is so conversational so it’s tricky. At my heart, I’m a blogger.
What happens when a blogger becomes an author or a show runner?
A blogger is someone who has a very strong, very personal voice. People have described my writing as though someone’s just telling you a story over brunch. At first I was kind of offended by that, but it takes real skill to make something look easy. It’s actually incredibly hard to execute; if it feels like me gabbing with you over brunch, I’ll take it. God bless.
In Inspiration Porn, you say, “If a straight man is talking to me, they’d better be saying something gay.” For the 10 straight guys that end up reading this article, can you tell us what some good things for straight guys to talk about with gay guys are?
I would love for them to talk to me about their prostate because it’s not being engaged with enough. It’s crazy that there’s this whole pleasure center that they’ve been taught to not engage with, and in fact, be fearful of. I would love to open their mind to the orgasms that exist within. I would also love to talk to them about their own sexual experiences because part of being human is exploration, a fluidity that they’ve been indoctrinated not to explore. If I’m talking to a straight guy, we’re circling something gay. We’re not going to talk about fucking Ted Lasso.
There can sometimes be such cruelty and toxicity in gay male “friendships.” Can you talk about the character of Ryder? Could you maybe make a listicle of “How to Know if You’re in One of Those Toxic Gay Friendships and How to Get Out in One Piece”?
The people you let into your life before your clay has dried can really imprint on you. Ryder was basically a really, really beautiful boy who I felt so fucking lucky paid attention to me. By him wanting to hang out with me, I felt like my disability was erased. By him validating me or co-signing on my existence, I felt like I mattered. But looking back, he also used me as an ATM for his self-esteem. He looked really good next to me and I made him feel better about himself. There was weird kind of psychosexual warfare happening where he understood that I wanted to fuck him and a kind of subtext where he used that desire to his advantage when it behooved him. I have had multiple Ryders in my life and I’ve had a few gay people tell me they had a Ryder as well.
On the one hand, no, because I don’t think that what I went through was terribly unique, but when I was going through it, I thought I was crazy and pathetic. I had no point of reference for what I was experiencing. If I met a Ryder today, I would try and put a hex on them because I’m emotionally stable enough to understand who they are and what this is. I’m more boundaried as I get older.
Well, a hallmark of being young is learning about what you don’t want; you can’t necessarily bypass those experiences. In your 20s, when you let these emotional terrorists into your life, it’s important to listen to your gut and understand why you’re actually there. Try to be as honest with yourself as possible and really think about what’s drawing you to this person and how they actually make you feel. At the time, I knew what was happening intellectually, but emotionally I was still completely undercooked.
It is so frustrating being young and knowing what’s actually going on, knowing the dynamic is unhealthy, but not being strong enough to change it. And that is a painful emotional blueball-y place to live, but it kind of defines your later 20s and early 30s, or at least it did for me. Getting attention from these beautiful boys when personally I felt like a troll under a bridge, that stuff is heroin. It just feels so good. But I personally believe that once you see, you can’t unsee. I think about these people that dominated so much of my life; if I met them today, I would run away screaming.
I relate so much to this entire experience and I’m glad you put it in print. Which leads to the next thing I want to discuss: the vulnerability industrial complex. And by that I mean, people who started their career by making work that was very exposing of their identity and personal life. You’re a pioneer in this arena! How does it translate to 2026?
When I was being vulnerable online in 2011, the personal essay industrial complex was sort of taking off. I think overall it was accepted and embraced because it was coming from an honest place. It didn’t feel, quite yet, that people were making their pain a part of their personal brand. Now people don’t trust what people tell them. There’s such jadedness because people have commodified their identity to such an aggressive extent that everything weirdly feels like a calculation, a chess move. I no longer trust what anyone says. I hate even saying that because I love personal writing, but being vulnerable online in 2026 is a really hard feat to pull off.
For the first time in my life, I don’t know what the cultural temperature is. I don’t know how anyone feels about anything. We have more access to people than ever before and somehow know less about them than ever before. By becoming a total sub for this almighty algorithm, we are losing out on such unique, interesting and forward-thinking storytelling. The proof is Heated Rivalry! You could never have talked to Daddy Algorithm and said, “You know what people want? They want to see these two hockey players get railed and yearn for each other starring completely unknown actors.” It’s like, no, they could never have formulated that. As a culture, nobody really knows what they want until it’s given to them.
Writing about yourself gives you a platform and avenue of self expression. What are the downsides or limits about creating work that is so personal?
When I started, it truly was an act of survival. I was so depressed, addicted to drugs, and friends with the Ryders of the world. I hadn’t had my dick touched in five or six years and I felt like such a fucking loser so I wrote out of a place of pain. At the time Thought Catalog was very supportive, and when I saw people relate to what I was going through I was like, Oh wow, maybe I’m not so inept. Maybe I’m not so strange for feeling like I’m always seven paces behind everybody else. Then that morphed into something else where it became this act of defiance. Being gay and disabled, I saw the world, in real time, try to relegate me to the margins and that really, really, really pissed me off. That became this sort of motivation, this feeling of like, I will not be erased. You cannot erase me. That was very powerful but also very exhausting because you always feel like you’re triumphing against something. You always see the world as adversarial, which is not necessarily the healthiest place to be, but it was like nature’s Adderall—it got me to where I needed to go.
I wrote my first book, Special, when I was 26; that should have been illegal. That book is a scam. I hadn’t learned anything; I was an imposter trying to pass myself as this weird twentysomething guru when I was still popping Percocet like they were Flintstone Vitamins. Inspiration Porn was my chance to do a redo. It’s like, “Oh, actually I have learned things. I do have some things to impart.” This time it felt like I was writing from a more empowered place, whereas before I was just bleeding for the blog.
Do you think there’s anything that you’ll look back on and wish you hadn’t included in this book?
I think writing about my open relationship and the lover I took in San Francisco really did cause real ripples in my relationship.
Not necessarily writing about it because my boyfriend, Jonathan, is also a writer. He understands that this is my life and would never censor me. But it did feel revealing in a different kind of way. People are very judgmental about open relationships. When you have complications that arise from a relationship being open, people have this sort of sick satisfaction in the perceived failure, like, “Yeah, I told you so. You should have stuck to your heteronormative, whatever. This is what happens when you want too much.” Admitting that my openness had ended up creating problems in my relationship felt very vulnerable and almost embarrassing.
At the end of the day, that’s not going to stop me from writing about something. It might inform the way I write about it and how much I choose to share, but again, it’s kind of like that prickle of defiance that says, If I am scared about something, it means I need to run towards it, not away from it.
Lastly, you wrote that the only criteria for a successful book was if it made you hard or made you cry. Do you have anything you want to add to that statement?
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This article was originally published by Cultured Magazine.