In my e-mail recently, the program for this year’s New Yorker Festival, with some of the interviewees in a display ad:
(#1) No, I don’t know why pink; Cumming, Maddow, and Torres are notably LGBT, but not the other five in this display (maybe 3 out of 8 exceeds some tipping point, but it’s more likely that pink’s just a random color choice, devoid of meaning)
Now, which of these 8 is not like the others? Well, that’s an odd photo of singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles, but it’s an atypical one. Otherwise, Julio Torres’s photo does stand, or leap, out, and for him it’s fairly restrained; his pictures show him with a wide variety of hair colors (sometimes involving henna red or bright blue) and bodily adornments, and sometimes in drag. Meanwhile, he’s young, adorable, outrageous, smart, and dead series about creating comedy in a variety of forms.
Here is as close as JT seems to have gotten to a p.r. photo:
(#2) Not your grandfather’s 8×10 glossy, but a fine character study in a face shot; plus a really big dangly earring (photo by Mega)
Briefly about JT, from Wikipedia:
Julio Torres (born February 11, 1987) is a Salvadoran-American writer, comedian, and actor. He is known as a writer for Saturday Night Live and as the co-creator, writer, and executive producer of the HBO [comedy] series Los Espookys. He previously wrote for The Chris Gethard Show on truTV. He directed, wrote, and starred in the surrealist comedy film Problemista.
… Torres is gay. He said in June 2020, “I never want to claim to speak for anybody else’s experience. I am not here representing immigrants. I am not here representing Salvadorians, or Hispanics, or gay people. I can only share what’s in me and that may or may not ring true with people, but I have never wanted to use any of those things as a calling card.”
In line with this stance, he doesn’t present himself as a spokesperson for any of the communities he belongs to. On the other hand, he does transform his experiences, attitudes, and concerns as a flamboyant gay male Hispanophone Salvadoran-American immigrant New Yorker with a New School degree in English literature into passionate performances that — he must realize — present him as a member of these communities and a highly visible exemplar of the identities associated with them. No doubt he sometimes finds being in that position uncomfortable; I certainly find my own much smaller role as a public person sometimes uncomfortable, because it sets me up, willy-nilly, as an exemplar to some large audience mostly unknown to me. But that comes with the territory.
(I note that my discomfort has played out in an unusually high level, for me, of abstract, distancing language in the paragraph I just wrote, only occasionally relieved by touches like flamboyant and willy-nilly. I could probably fix that, but that paragraph took about an hour to write, and I figure it would, alas, take several more hours to work it into something more direct, engaging, and personal. Right now I really need to get myself some dinner.)
Since 2022, JT’s been in a relationship with Fire Island tv-series star James Scully (who is comparably adorable but not as outrageous). So add same-sex-partnered to that long inventory.
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