The ‘Inspiration Porn’ That Will Release You From Your Horny Shame

This piece first ran on the Obsessed by Kevin Fallon Substack. Subscribe here to read more like it!

Ryan O’Connell is on a unique kind of celebrity mission.

“It’s like, be the change you wish to see in the world,” he tells me. “If you build it, they will come, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” Later in our conversation, he’s even more explicit: “I really hope that everyone reads this book and becomes a little bit sluttier.”

Inspiration Porn is O’Connell’s third book, following I’m Special and Just by Looking at Him, continuing his reputation for naked candor about his experience navigating cerebral palsy, discovering a satisfying and rich sex life as a disabled gay man, and breaking into a Hollywood system that had been notoriously close-minded to stories like his.

This latest collection of essays isn’t, of course, just about sex. Though, in many ways—like so much in life—it kind of is.

He writes with a kind of peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich combination of self-deprecation and impressive confidence that shouldn’t work together but is uniquely and surprisingly delicious. With his lacerating wit, he examines his life wishing to be different and figuring out as a person who is disabled and gay how to be accepted in a society that, let’s be real, struggles to lend dignity to just one of those things.

As bullet points, the list of experiences he parses reads as ideas from a pitch meeting for a ’90s-era trauma exploitation indie movie being submitted to Sundance: going through adolescence with CP, his mother’s alcoholism, getting hit by a truck, his own alcoholism, his pill addiction, his complicated relationship to sex. But that’s reductive. It would also be reductive to refer to the stories, written from a current place where O’Connell is professionally, personally, and sexually thriving, solely as “inspiration porn”: How uplifting that O’Connell is where he is, given all he’s been through! (Blech.)

The truth is, the book is O’Connell’s self-exploration of his life, told with the proper amount of interrogation, confusion, hindsight, anger, and humor. It’s dishy. It’s horny. As the marketing for the release proudly proclaims, it is O’Connell “bravely healing his soul through his hole.”

When we connect on Zoom, O’Connell is, in his words, “taking to bed.” It’s his off day, so, reclined like Kate Winslet waiting to be painted like one of the French girls, he’s “going to bed rot.” One of my most passionate life philosophies is that we should always be lying down, so I’m in full support of this. “That’s very disabled-friendly, Kevin!” he cheers.

The 39-year-old is currently working with Greg Berlanti on the virtuoso producer’s new show. It’s O’Connell’s latest screenwriting gig in a resume that includes Queer as Folk, The Baby-Sitters Club, Will & Grace, Awkward, and his own breakout series, Special—a steady Hollywood career he leveled up to after breaking out during the internet blogging Golden Age/cesspool (depending on your brand of nostalgia) of the 2010s.

Previously, “my self-worth was really tied into how my work was perceived…because my work was so personal,” O’Connell says, with the kind of relatability that makes reading Inspiration Porn feel like you’re in the audience of The Oprah Winfrey Show nodding along “yes!” to one of her “a-ha moments.”

But in the years since Special—in which he also starred as a version of himself and became, for lack of a better phrase, a gay hero, covering magazines and appearing on Out 100 lists—he’s tended the garden of his personal life. He’s been with his partner, Jonathan Parks-Ramage, since 2015, gotten sober, and seen a healthy sex life that works for him finally blossom.

Releasing a confessional work like Inspiration Porn, then, feels somewhat easier, especially given his (refreshingly) frank reason for writing it.

“Books to me, they need to be incredibly meaningful in order for me to do them, because I’m not in it for a payday,” he says. “If I were, I would be writing, like, Little Women Everywhere. You know what I mean? Like, Little Tiny Beautiful White Women by the Lake. That’s just not my journey. I don’t have to do that because that’s not my sole source of income. So writing this book, I just didn’t ever really think about how it would be perceived. I just needed to write something very candidly.”

Well, things don’t get much more candid than a chapter of an autobiographical book of essays titled “The Slut Diaries.”

“I learn something new each time I sleep with someone who’s not my boyfriend,” O’Connell begins the section. It chronicles what is essentially his sexual Rumspringa, detailing various rendezvous from 2021 to 2024 that occurred after he and Parks-Ramage opened up their relationship, with context of how they each changed how he felt about his body and his sexual energy—essentially, himself.

It’s the centerpiece of the book, he says, and the one he’s most excited for people to read.

“This sounds very, very horny, like, truly arrest me, but I really do want people to walk away from reading ‘The Slut Diaries’ and think about their own relationship to sex and their own relationship to feeling worthy of sex,” he says. “Because I really did have the self-esteem of 409 cleaner, and I really didn’t think that I would ever have the sex life that I have today. And so much of it is fear. It really keeps you stuck in tar.”

In line with so much of his work, the chapter is a bit of a stick of dynamite, a provocative and rather renegade way to explode some of the most complicated conversations and feelings both within the gay community and in the society that relates to us. As far as people’s acceptance of gay culture has come, there’s still a perception that, oh, the gay men, they’re all obsessed with sex. They’re just f---ing all the time.

And, sure, that’s proudly true for some people. Others feel shame from that reputation, or don’t identify with it at all, or fervently fight against it. With “The Slut Diaries,” O’Connell is dragging that tension out of the closet and putting it on display on the front lawn, forcing everyone to recognize and reconcile with it.

“I think that because gay men have historically always been hypersexualized, there is a sort of allergy even coming from gay men to say, ‘I’m not that kind of gay. That’s not who I am,’” he says. “Sex is always BYOB, bring your own baggage. What I’m trying to boil it down to is, I’m not trying to tell anyone how to f---. I really am just trying to tell people to seek out pleasure in any form. And feel deserving of that pleasure.”

“The Slut Diaries” is O’Connell relating his journey to others. What worked for him as he worked on himself. His own history of how sex was always fraught, and how he broke that cycle.

“I have no prescription,” he says. “I’m not saying go out and get railed by 10 people a day. I’m just trying to say to approach things with less shame.”

It’s another example of how O’Connell’s specificity in relaying his own truly specific experience has forced consumers of work to reevaluate how they think of BIG topics—Disability! Gay sex! Representation in media!—without tropes, without kid gloves, without shame or political correctness, and, thanks to his wry, observational humor, without pretentiousness.

The result has been accolades and appreciation. A particular sex scene in Special completely blew my mind, and I certainly wasn’t alone. He was nominated for Emmy Awards for the series. Suddenly, when he’d walk down the streets of gay vacation mecca Provincetown, he was recognized, congratulated, and, more than that, even thanked.

It was a gay media miracle: The community actually supported and endorsed work about the gays.

“It’s like literally Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” he says. “Like, we are savage when it comes to gays producing work. And honey, that is a seven-layer dip as to why. I think it’s because there’s a scarcity mindset. It’s so rare that gay stuff gets made that when it does, it’s heavily scrutinized. I think that with gay men, uh, you know, it can be challenging to see our experiences reflected back at us. You know? It can be unsavory. We have to interrogate things that we don’t necessarily want to deal with.”

He feels lucky to have the acceptance of gay men, the hardest demographic to please, even as he’s self-aware enough that plenty of them will be scrolling right past this article.

“It means a lot to me because I really do make gay things for gay people,” he says. “I always have, and I always will. I don’t think about the commerciality of my work, much to the detriment, maybe, of my career.”

He laughs: “I think if I had cut out all the anal sex from Special, we could have been kind of Schitt’s Creek-adjacent and been a mainstream Top 10 hit.”

Reading Inspiration Porn is a bit like witnessing a person self-actualize in real time. For O’Connell, it’s a chance for his life story to become more than those aforementioned bullet points of trauma. Readers will finally have a full 360-degree portrait of him, but also what the experiences that often get tossed into a quick biographical paragraph in a story were actually like for him.

“I feel like I’ve always had a fake it till you make it mentality, because, to me, I think I was so underestimated,” he says. “I mean, people see a gay disabled person, and they’re like, ‘Well, I hope he finds a friend.’ Like, that’s the bar. There was no blueprint for someone like me to build the career that I have, and I don’t say that to give myself props. It just is the truth. So why doubt myself when I can just go outside and be doubted by the world? I already have a billion people when I walk out the door that are giving me a thumbs up for going on the StairMaster.”

“I’m very much like a shark,” he says. “I don’t stop moving. But as heavy as the things I talk about in the book are, I really hope people take away the levity and know that whatever they’re going through, there is a path forward for them. There is a way to rewrite their narrative and find their way out.”

You know what I’d call that? Inspiration.

Inspiration Porn will be published on May 26.