Ryan O’Connell’s Coming-of-Age Story, Told Through Polaroids

 

As far back as he can remember, the writer and actor Ryan O’Connell dreamed of being a teenager like the ones he grew up idolizing in magazines and on TV. When the time came, he both chronicled and curated his coming-of-age through cloudy Polaroid pictures of lazy afternoons, late nights, and love, both lost and found. When he was hit by a car at the age of 20, he mostly put down his camera. He had so much more to say through other mediums, such as his 2015 book I’m Special: And Other Lies We Tell Ourselves and his Emmy-nominated, largely biographical Netflix series, Special, about a young, gay man with cerebal palsy navigating life in Los Angeles. In advance of the show’s second and final season premiere, O’Connell dusted off his Polaroid-filled scrapbooks for an earnest, albeit unhinged trip down memory lane.— NICK HARAMIS

The whole thing is very much We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion. Ever since I can remember, as far back as being, like, 4 years old and secretly watching 90210, I have always wanted to be a teenager. And I had a very clear idea of what I wanted adolescence to look like. I wanted it to feel like a movie. And there was something about the medium of Polaroids that lent itself to this kind of dreamy, hazy adolescence.

Today, we’re so familiar with the art of curating our lives for social media. But back in 2004, which was when I started taking these Polaroids in high school, the idea of curating your life via pictures was very weird. I sound like an 80-year-old man by a campfire, but all I had back then was LiveJournal. The Polaroids were about making your life seem cooler than it really was. But now I look back at them and I’m like, ‘Wait, I really did have an amazing adolescence.’ I truly did love being a teenager and I had a lot of fun, even though my brain was a jar of rat poison. These pictures really commemorate that time of youthfulness and falling in love, and then they take kind of a dark turn when I got hit by a car when I was 20, which, to me,  symbolized the end of that. And then I moved to New York, and stopped taking Polaroids altogether, because it just felt like “The Thrill Is Gone” by Chet Baker. It just didn’t make sense.

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Maybe my first polaroid ever. This is me and my godsister. Remember godsisters? She and my older sister liked to dress me up as a woman. I didn’t protest. I mean, I did, but I didn’t. I think they could sense something in me, kind of like Mr. Hallorann does with Danny in The Shining. I lived in the world’s smallest closet. My closet wasn’t even a walk-in. It was a coffin.

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This is from one of my first rolls of Polaroid film from my junior year of high school. I wore these shoes when I was closeted, because I was like, “I’m not ready to tell the world that I’m gay, but I will tell telegraph my homosexuality through my mismatched Pumas.” That was my way of being like, “Please save me,” without actually saying it. And then ironically, when I came out, I fucking threw them in thea trash and was like, “I don’t need that anymore. I can just suck dick.”

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In my junior year, we used to go to this arcade by the harbor to play games or whatever. This was clearly before we discovered drugs and alcohol. This is a photograph of the friendship bracelet that me and my friends Kristy and Maura won.

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I always say that my life was like the show Party of Five, but my parents didn’t die in a car crash. They just got divorced and became selfish. I moved into this house with my mom after my parents split up when I was, like, 10, and I lived there until I left for college. We had this shed in the back where I lost my virginity. I think I smoked pot for the first time in that shed. If those walls could talk they’d be like, “Seriously, are these children orphans? I’m calling CPS!” When I moved to college, it was like skid marks on the driveway. I left for school in San Francisco in September, and my mom sold the house in October. You know that first year of college when you just want to go home to your family? I became so unhinged that I rented a room in a creepy-but-hot Scientologist’s house a block away. This happened twice, where I rented a room just to be there during breaks. There was a sense of comfort to being in proximity to my childhood home, but I also regretted it both times. It was very Disturbia, walking to my new house and passing my old house where the new owner was out on the lawn. Babe, I was unwell.

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When I was 17, I came out to all my first-tier friends in a week. I did it by appointment. Anyone else who was a second- or third-tier friend found out via a text I sent them saying, “Hey, guys, my mom’s out of town on Saturday. Why don’t you come over for a party that might change your life forever?” I went to Spencer’s and got penis-shaped pasta and made gift bags for everybody. And then I made this video with my friend Caitie, in which we’re slow-dancing. She goes in for a kiss, and she’s like, “Come on, don’t you like me?” And I’m like, “I do, it’s just—ugh, it’s so complicated.” And she’s like, “Why?” And then I turn to the camera and say, “Cuz I’m gay, bitches!” Everyone was obsessed.

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For my 18th birthday, which was in September at the start of my senior year, my first boyfriend made me this scrapbook. To this day, it’s one of the sweetest things anyone’s ever done for me. It’s so lit in its teen loviness. The high drama of a Polaroid of two boys holding hands next to the lyrics to “Maps”? That is my heroin. You can love someone so purely because no one’s ever hurt you before. The irony is, of course, that you’re giving your heart to a person who thinks monogamy is a type of wood.

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My parents sued the doctor who delivered me because, spoiler alert, he didn’t do a great job. When I turned 18, I got some settlement money. Keep in mind, I’d never been in possession of more than $100, and that was at Christmas. All of a sudden, I got this money and became such a nouveau-riche nightmare. I was like, “Oh my god, you guys, we’re going to rent a hotel room in L.A.!” We stayed at this place called the Bel Age on Sunset, because that’s where Dylan McKay stayed in 90210. We went to dinner at the Ivy, where we ordered a bottle of wine that we didn’t even drink. By the way, can you believe anyone sold us alcohol? Like, you gave wine to children.

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I wanted to recreate the cover of You Are Free by Cat Power in Ojai, and that’s what we did. We went to Ojai a lot. It was 10 minutes away from where I grew up, and it was where you would go to either hook up with someone, get high, or go swimming. The summer between senior year and college, me and my friend Kristy brought along this boy we each had a crush on. We had this weird plan to seduce him together. It didn’t work, thank god. I think we just got too scared. I did end up hooking up with him later… with my other best friend Becky. The whole thing was very The Dreamers: Ventura, California.

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Polaroids were the original selfies. This section was made by my best friend Caitie. We both had shitty boyfriends who clearly weren’t into us, so one day we were like, “Let’s have a depressed photo shoot, and then post these pictures on LiveJournal so our boyfriends know that we’re mad at them.” LiveJournal was where you went to let people know, either implicitly or explicitly, that you were furious at them.

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The cowboy boots.

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Right before we went away to college, we rented this bouncy castle for an end-of-summer party. The summer between your senior year and college is truly three months of emotional blue balls, because you’re really anxious to get to the next stage of your life, but you’re also stuck at home waiting for something to happen. I did a lot of drugs, and it was all very aimless and dark. This bouncy castle is a good representation of when everything kind of crashed.

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One highlight of that bleak summer: I went to New York for the first time, and the cliches are true. It changed my whole life. I went to CBGB, and got drunk for the first time on screwdrivers at a sushi place on St. Mark’s that didn’t card. This is a picture of a woman I saw in the West Village who was just leaning against a wall in her bathing suit. It was really hot that day and she just stayed there for maybe 45 minutes. I was like, “Wow, things really are different here!”

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At the beginning of college, I went to the Folsom Street Fair, which is this BDSM festival in San Francisco that I loved. I was really thrust into gayness there. Ironically, I was celibate almost the entire time I was in San Francisco. I truly thought I’d be chest-deep in dick, but I also had the self-esteem of, like, diet cheesecake, so I didn’t really have much luck.

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That’s college, baby! It was a badge of honor to vomit. So much of what you did was so that you could have something to talk about with your friends the next day.

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I moved in with this girl that I barely knew. The first week or two was a little stilted. To break the seal, I was like, “Okay, I think we just need to buy coke and then do it and then hang out.” As usually happens when you’re on coke, you feel like you’re Christy Fucking Turlington. We went into each other’s closets and picked out outfits for the other one to wear, and just took Polaroids all night. We look crazy, but it really did bond us and we’re friends to this day.

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Nylon was it for me. This was a different time. It was very Cobrasnake-y. Cory Kennedy had her own column. LOL. The Olsens were always on the cover. During summers, me and my friend Caitie would try to recreate their Denim Issue with our own wardrobe. Back then, every day was a present just waiting to be unwrapped.

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Yeah, this is when things shifted. As I was ending my sophomore year, I got hit by a car, and it was, um, not great. It clipped me going 45 miles per hour. I ended up getting compartment syndrome, which is something really only athletes and, I guess, me get, where, basically, you get hit by something with such force that it cuts off the oxygen supply to your muscles. The car clipped me on my elbow, so the muscles in my arm that make my hand move started to, like, die. I was in the hospital for a month and I had four surgeries. And then I had to get a skin graft, which is not fun. Zero out of 10 stars. Would not recommend. For a month and a half, I was never alone, which was hard for me, because I really value my independence. It was tough having people hover over me all the time, so the first thing I did when I got out of there was take nudes. The front of my body did not look like my body anymore, as you can see from that skin graft. It was really shocking to have this thing on my leg and have my arm be kind of mutilated.

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But the backside of my body was completely untouched. And I think I just wanted to see my body for what it used to be. This was the first thing I did when I was finally alone in this apartment I had rented in Venice Beach.

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Being born disabled, I was used to things being taken away from me. In a way, after the accident, it was like, “Okay, here’s another thing I have to adapt to.” But it was really difficult because I’d moved to New York, and my hand wasn’t fully working yet. I was in this new city and I was really focused on, I think like anyone at that age, being cool and fitting in. And you can’t expect other 20-year olds to understand what you’ve been through. I’d been dreading telling people about my cerebral palsy, so letting them think that it was all because of the accident became this amazing shortcut. Anyone can relate to getting hit by a car. But cerebral palsy, to this day, isn’t really understood. And I think that’s largely because it looks different on everybody. So I lied about that for many years.

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What does that quote even mean? This was one of the scrapbooks I had in New York that I didn’t quite finish. When I got older, like 21 or 22, my desire to sit in my bedroom with a glue gun was sort of diminished by my interest in getting drunk and making out with boys. Also, the accident had hardened me, in a way. I couldn’t pretend my life was some glam Sofia Coppola movie anymore. My tendons were shortening in my hand and I had to have four million more surgeries. Adulthood came calling and I finallyy had to pick up.

 

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I bought a pack of Polaroid film for a trip to Provincetown after years and years of not taking Polaroids. When I came out about my CP at the age of 28 and stopped blaming the way I walked on my accident, it was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I was fully-fully myself, no more secrets, and I got a boyfriend within three months. I had done the work on myself, so I was able to attract someone who was actually good and kind and evolved. Jonathan and I have been together for six years now. It’s funny, if you had told me I was going to be nominated for Emmys and have my own TV show, I would have been like, “Yeah, okay, I can kind of see that.” But I never ever imagined a relationship to be a part of that. The fact that I’m in this healthy, loving relationship, and that I’m able to accept that love, well, to me that’s everything.

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Grooming: Sonia Lee using Evelom at Exclusive Artists