Joel Kim Booster is Them’s 2022 Now Awards honoree in Film & Television. The Now Awards honors 12 LGBTQ+ people who represent the cutting edge of queer culture today; read more here.
It’s June 2022, and Joel Kim Booster is drowning in champagne problems.
It hasn’t always been like this. Born in South Korea and adopted as an infant by a strict Evangelical Christian family from Plainfield, Illinois (a lily-white suburb outside Chicago), 34-year-old Booster spent much of his life feeling like an outcast. But today, things are different. As the comedian, actor, and writer rushes into Electric Lemon — an upscale bar inside the Equinox Hotel at Hudson Yards, where we are the youngest patrons by at least a decade — he can’t help but express his exasperation with the day he’s just had.
After traveling from his current homebase of Los Angeles to his old stomping grounds of New York (on the hottest day of the year, no less), Booster went to a fitting that went overlong and failed to produce any promising looks. With a film, a standup special, and a starring role in an Apple TV+ show coming out over the next month alone, he’s spent weeks flitting between press junkets, editing rooms, and interviews on both coasts. So it's understandable that he hadn't really eaten anything since waking up, leaving him feeling “especially famished.” And now, he’s just been informed that the wine he’s been craving is unavailable, leaving him to settle for a substitute. It’s a lot. But Booster is aware of how trivial these small grievances are in the grander scheme of life. “These are definitely champagne problems,” he lets off with a chuckle.
To his credit, this wasn’t just any fitting. Two days after we meet, Booster would attend the official premiere for Hulu and Searchlight Pictures’ Fire Island, a Pride and Prejudice-inspired gay rom-com about the love stories of two very different Asian men. Booster wrote, executive produced, and stars in the film as Noah, the story’s ostensible Elizabeth Bennet, and as he would go on to explain later, a lot was riding on the upcoming release — for him, for the gay community, for the Asian community, and for Fire Island itself.
Naturally, he’d want to look good.
Fire Island feels both familiar and novel. Its romcom beats hit all the expected notes, yet it also manages to give audiences an unfiltered look into the kinds of queer bacchanalia — underwear parties, tea dances, trips to the famed Meat Rack cruising grounds — that have become synonymous with the titular gay destination. It’s a film about queer men that doesn’t bother pandering to an implied straight audience; though Noah’s narration does include asides about the island’s vivid LGBTQ+ history, as well as brief explanations of some of its most sacred customs and traditions, the film never trips over itself trying to justify its own existence.
Then there’s the Andrew Ahn of it all. After releasing two superb but decidedly contemplative dramas (2016’s Spa Night and 2019’s Driveways), one would hardly expect this Spirit Award winner to venture into romcom territory. But to that end, his distinct style gives Fire Island a unique edge. The jokes are still plentiful; Booster’s witty script includes a bevy of references to queer cultural touchstones, from Marisa Tomei’s Oscar-winning turn in My Cousin Vinny to the hilarious insincerity of Instagay thirst trap “activism.” But the film really comes alive in its more meditative moments, with wordless sequences that focus more on the interiority of its characters than specific plot developments.
These moments are, of course, deliberate. While Fire Island is, indeed, an ode to its namesake, Booster’s interest in framing a film around this particular islet went deeper than clothing-optional beaches and underwear parties at the Ice Palace. Fire Island has functioned as a safe haven for queer people since the mid-1900s, but it also has a troubling reputation for only welcoming a specific type of gay man — one who is white, cisgender, financially comfortable, and more often than not, extremely fit. The phrase “Fire Island” has always conjured up an image of fair-skinned, chiseled, All-American Adonises, despite the existence of many other types of queer people on the island’s fringes. Booster found his inspiration in this dichotomy: “I wanted to honor the island and the people there. But I didn't want to shy away from the more toxic aspects of what you can experience if you don't go with the right people,” he explains.
Thus, Fire Island finds itself drifting into conversations about class and race. “As someone who doesn’t come from money, one thing I’ve always noticed is that, in a lot of our media and stories about gay men, there really isn’t a class consciousness. It's just not something that you see, gay men struggling,” he says. Noah, as well as his best friend Howie, navigate the inherent struggles of feeling desired as Asian men in predominantly white spaces; interactions range from passive disinterest to troubling fetishization by “some fucking rice queen.” Howie, who is played by Booster’s best friend, Saturday Night Live’s Emmy-nominated Bowen Yang, is the story’s Jane. The pair are bonded by the similarity in their experiences as gay Asian men, but diverge in their hopes for future relationships: while Noah eschews any notion of monogamy or “settling down,” Howie dreams of a fairytale romance.
To hear him tell it, Booster’s struggles with feeling desired as a gay Asian man came long after his initial brushes with racism as an Asian man living in America. “It’s so funny,” he starts to remember. “I came out when I was 16 and I went through college not really concerned with being desired. But then I graduated college, immediately downloaded Grindr, and it really was the first time I realized that, sexually, I was considered less desirable because I was Asian. It was only then that I started to internalize that.”
His standup comedy has often reflected that internalization. Though Fire Island is the first fully-realized narrative work Booster can take sole credit for (he’s written on other people’s shows, like The Other Two and Big Mouth), it’s far from his first time exploring the Asian American experience through his unique comedic lens. But as time has gone on, Booster has also realized that being a minority making jokes about what it means to be a minority is a double-edged sword. It’s why his new hour-long standup special, Psychosexual, flips the script, so to speak. Premiering June 21 on Netflix, Booster’s latest set goes slightly meta, delivering a routine that sneaks up on everyone in the audience, but particularly on the straight white men.
“I find standup that is primarily like, Isn't our culture so crazy compared to your culture, white people? to be very boring, so I try not to veer into that territory as much,” he tells me at one point. But Psychosexual’s appeal lies in its ability to surprise; when Booster does adhere to those tropes, it’s only to subvert them down the line. “I know exactly what you were thinking when I walked onto stage tonight… just another Gay Oriental Comedian,” he mockingly says to an unsuspecting audience member in one of the special’s most cutting moments. Psychosexual is Booster’s manifesto against that typecast.
In many ways, the special speaks to the kinds of tensions Booster has always navigated in his work, many of which have come to a head with his recent projects: between the need to represent the Asian and gay communities and the impossible weight those mandates bring; between wanting to meet others’ expectations and also wanting to subvert them; between creating art as an independent thinker and creating art as someone who will always be influenced, in one way or another, by outside perception.
For Booster, who has always been sensitive to the critical reception of his work, these discords came to a head one week in 2019, shortly after he did an interview for WNYC’s All Of It radio show. It was around the same time Dave Chappelle dropped Sticks & Stones, one of several specials that the controversial comedian has released in the past few years featuring an abundance of transphobic and anti-Asian jokes. When asked to comment on his feelings about the set, Booster made an innocuous comment about Chappelle’s newfound lack of interest in dismantling power structures now that he’s extremely wealthy. “That comment got pulled out and sent to every blog,” Booster recalls. “And all the headlines were Gay Asian Comedian Joel Kim Booster Slams Chappelle or Gay Asian Comedian Reads Chappelle.”
Legions of Chappelle’s notoriously outspoken fans soon followed, and before long, “all of my comments on every YouTube video I've ever done” were telling him that he was a bad comedian, that they were going to come to his performances, that he should kill himself. He was traveling at the time, in Toronto to perform a week’s worth of shows at the Canadian city’s edition of the Just For Laughs Festival, widely considered to be one of comedy’s most important gatherings. Instead of excitement, though, Booster found himself feeling “so shitty, so nervous.” Enough that, at one of those performances, he spontaneously threw out most of his prepared material, singled out a straight guy in the audience, and asked to have a dialogue.
“I was like, Let’s talk about my jokes,” he recalls. “I'm hearing from a lot of you right now that I don't have anything but gay jokes or Asian jokes, so let's explore that.” He wanted to engage with his critics — “someone who’s not my fan, who has never heard of me” — and really dig into how he was being perceived by the world.
That experience informed Psychosexual’s quasi-conversational structure; he still singles out a straight white guy in the audience, who he checks in on at several points throughout the hour. But on another level, this confrontational setup feels like Booster’s earnest attempt to unburden himself of the weight of his audience’s opinions. “It’s not even subconscious. It’s very conscious. It’s with me in every aspect of everything that I do,” he admits plainly at one point, the implied it referring to his pesky tendency to consider how anything he says will be received by others, even when he wants to make certain decisions for his sake and his sake alone. But if he can prove, once and for all and with absolute clarity, that he’s not just one thing — that he’s capable of telling jokes that are both specific and general, which he very much is — then maybe he can move beyond any natural inclination towards wanting to prove anything at all.
And this isn't limited to his detractors, either. People outside his immediate community may try to belittle his talents by claiming that he only talks about one thing. But as one of very few visible gay Asian comedians, he also knows that a certain subset of the population might feel betrayed if he ever tries to take these jokes out of his set. “I want to talk about other things,” he admits. “But it’s scary, because now I’m wondering, Will people be upset that I’m not necessarily talking about identity as much as before?”
“Because of scarcity, the stakes feel so high for everything I do,” he continues. “On one hand, they’re more grateful than ever to see me, but also, they’re more resentful if they don’t like me. Straight white guy comedians have the benefit that, if someone doesn’t like you, they just ignore you. But for us, it’s like I’m being packaged and presented as a representative by the industry writ large, which I never asked for. So if someone is sitting there being told by someone else, ‘You should like this guy because of x, y, and z,’ of course that’s going to breed resentment.”
As Booster nears the end of his glass of wine, a plate of polenta fries with creamy romesco sauce arrives at our table, alongside a tray of fresh vegetables with soybean dip. Starving, Booster dives in. A wave of relief immediately washes over his face as he lets out a quiet “mmm,” and I can’t help but notice how much chiller he is in person than his comedic persona would lead you to believe. It’s one that he’s mastered in his standup sets — the hot, sassy, self-obsessed gay man — and one that has now become his bread-and-butter as an actor. It reminds me of Sunnyside, the short-lived 2019 NBC sitcom in which Booster played one-half of a wealthy, bitchy brother-sister duo, chewing every bit of scenery as he laughed at people who thought $15,000 was “a lot of money.” Booster is terrific in the role, but his performance wasn’t enough to save the show, which failed with both critics and viewers, leading NBC to pull the entire series from its live broadcast schedule less than halfway through its first season.
“Sunnyside flopping as hard as it did was instructive in that it helped me set my expectations for everything,” Booster says now. “Everyone was blowing smoke up my ass about how this was my big break, how this was going to change my life. It was all, ‘You're going to be such a big star after this.’ But then, what happened, happened. Now, when people are saying, ‘This is going to be such a huge summer for you! You're going to blow up! This is the thing that's going to propel you into the stratosphere,’ blah-blah-blah, I'm just like, ‘Yeah. I've heard it before.’”
“It was really a lesson in setting expectations,” he says.
But these days, Booster’s expectations should be high; it’s hard not to imagine this summer as his true breakout. In addition to Fire Island and Psychosexual, the actor also has Loot on the horizon, an Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard-created AppleTV+ comedy in which the actor returns to his sassy gay persona — this time, as the assistant to the show’s multi-billionaire protagonist, played by the beloved Maya Rudolph. He expresses undeniable excitement for the show’s June 24 premiere, but even more exciting is the simple fact that responses to the show (whatever they may be) won’t necessarily be a direct reflection on his personal talents as a creator, only as an actor. “Acting is just the easiest job. It is so simple,” he jokes. “You just have to memorize lines. It’s like, you're drinking La Croix in a chair, and then you get up and go.”
But the thing is, Booster makes it all look easy — the acting, the writing, the standup. He’s a naturally gifted comic performer, one whose gregariousness oozes out as much in person as it does on screen. The unique pressures he feels as a gay Asian American in Hollywood probably won’t go away anytime soon, but the more work he gets, the easier it will be for him to create in spite of it. He doesn’t want to be known as “The Gay Destination Writer,” so don’t hold your breath for a Palm Springs or Provincetown. But he is interested in “being in a fucking Marvel movie,” probably playing Northstar or “one of the other canonically gay superheroes.” Either way, he has a promising future — and we can certainly drink some champagne to that.
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