How Sticky Shorts Was Born

And somehow…we are finally here.

Honestly I still can’t fully believe it.

Sticky Shorts is something I’m extremely proud of and grateful for, and I really wanted to write about how all of this started because the story feels so absurd that sometimes even I struggle to believe it actually happened.

I always loved singing, but mostly in a karaoke kind of way. Friends often told me I should try making actual music, but I was reluctant for years. Especially because my voice is damaged from heavy smoking and never sounded “technically correct” to me.

Then one day my friend Elina Chi-won — an insanely talented artist who now also helps us creatively with lyrics and concepts — told me something that completely changed how I viewed music.

Elina said:
“Indie musicians don’t need perfect voices. In fact your voice is perfect BECAUSE it sounds imperfect.”

That sentence genuinely changed something in my brain.

So eventually I released my first solo single, Glassball.

But even after that I still felt incomplete somehow. I realized I didn’t just want music. I wanted a band.

Now let’s rewind a little more because this is where things become ridiculous.

At that time I was going through a period of really extreme isolation and social withdrawal. Seunghoon had a very intense work schedule, I barely went outside, barely saw people, and honestly survived mostly through food delivery because I wouldn’t even go to supermarkets.

And then there was my delivery driver.

His name was Johnny.

He was ridiculously handsome, had cool earrings, good style, and one day I noticed a stamp on his wrist from a gay bar I knew. So immediately I thought:
“Oh. He’s one of us.”

After that I started ordering food suspiciously often.

Johnny was not very talkative, but I became weirdly determined. One day I even decided to answer the door wearing only a bathrobe to seduce him, except unfortunately that specific day a completely different delivery guy showed up and well...

But eventually I got the timing right.

One night I invited Johnny inside for beer and pizza and somehow convinced him to stay. Luckily for me, Johnny is not the kind of person who follows rules very closely, so he ignored his next delivery order, invented some excuse about a flat tire, and stayed with me instead.

At the time we had absolutely no idea this would eventually become the beginning of a band.

After that we kept meeting occasionally. Horror movies, drinking, hanging out, sex, emotional chaos. The usual.

Then one night this year we went bar-hopping together and both got extremely drunk.

On the way home, my bladder was bursting

,  I desperately needed a bathroom, but Johnny suddenly decided this was the perfect moment to attempt a handstand in the middle of the street.

He failed spectacularly.

I started laughing.
Then he started laughing.
Then an older man walked past us looking completely horrified and confused.

That destroyed me emotionally.

I laughed so hard that I literally peed on my shorts.

So now we had another problem.

Since Johnny lived closer than me, we walked around twenty minutes back to his apartment while I tried to psychologically survive the situation.

Except when we arrived, we discovered his roommate was having a birthday party packed with drunk guests that Johnny had completely forgotten about.

So naturally I had to walk into this party wearing what were essentially humiliation shorts.

At that point honestly nobody cared because everybody there was already drunk anyway.

So I went to shower.

And while I was singing inside the shower, this very tall drunk hunk suddenly walked into the bathroom to pee while casually talking to me about some fight he had apparently been involved in earlier that night.

Then completely out of nowhere he pulled the shower curtain aside and said:

“My name is Alexander. I’m looking for a singer for my band. I like your voice and I like your energy.”

At 3AM this felt less like a real conversation and more like a hallucination.

The next morning I told Johnny about it and he immediately recognized the name. Apparently he had played music before with Alexander and two cousins Seo-jun and Jin-ho.

Now this terrified me because according to Johnny they were all extremely talented and intimidating musicians and there was absolutely no way I was showing up to some formal audition like a normal functional person.

So instead we recorded a sample ourselves.

Johnny played.
I sang.
We sent it.

The next day Alexander called saying:
“We’re in.”

And honestly from there everything moved strangely fast.

We met, talked about our vision, shared ideas, started creating music together and somehow everything clicked naturally almost immediately.

And yes, the band name actually came from the sticky shorts incident.

At first it was just a joke while brainstorming names because most of the serious names we liked were already taken.

But somehow Sticky Shorts survived every discussion and became the final choice.

Which honestly feels appropriate because the entire existence of this band started through a chain of embarrassing, drunken, emotionally questionable accidents anyway.

When I was younger I used to dream about being in a band constantly, but I never genuinely believed it would happen.

And yet somehow, against all logic, here we are.

 

Growing Up Gay Meant Learning Fear Very Early

 

After the recent hate comments I received, I started thinking about how strange it is that people still act as if homophobia is some old problem society has already solved.

For a while, it felt like things were improving. More freedom. More visibility. More safety. More space to exist openly.

But honestly? In many places it feels like we are moving backwards again.

And the weird thing is that I’ve actually been one of the lucky ones.

I grew up with an extremely supportive mother and siblings. And despite my parents never agreeing on much, they agreed on one thing very strongly: I should never feel ashamed for being gay.

My father especially raised me with this mindset that I should never bend myself to fit into a hateful world. He taught me that the problem was never my existence — it was other people’s intolerance.

So I grew up openly gay from a very young age.

And because of that openness, I also experienced homophobia very openly too.

Some of these incidents happened in South Korea. Some in Germany. Some in the US. Different countries, different people, same hatred.

And honestly, one thing that probably saved me and Seunghoon multiple times throughout our lives was the fact that we both trained in martial arts for years and had black belts in taekwondo. Without that, some situations could have ended much worse.

1. The Playground

One night when we were teenagers, me and Seunghoon were sitting at a playground talking and playing around when a group of older boys approached us.

At first it was insults and pushing. Then two of them grabbed sticks.

They cornered us inside one of those small wooden playground houses. They spat on us, threw lit matches and garbage at us, pulled our hair, kicked us, forcefully undressed us and left us there naked in the winter cold.

We had to wait there humiliated and freezing until Seunghoon’s father arrived to pick us up.

What stayed with me most was not even the pain. It was realizing how quickly a seemingly harmless situation can turn dangerous and how easily people can stop seeing you as human.

2. “You Turned Him Gay”

When I was 18, I introduced a guy I had hooked up with to the gay scene.

Apparently his family decided that meant I had somehow “made” him gay.

One night his father and brother waited for me outside my house and attacked me while I was walking home.

I ended up with bruises, a broken nose and stitches.

One thing I noticed a lot is how desperately some people need to believe gay people “corrupt” others, because accepting that those desires already existed naturally inside someone is somehow more terrifying to them.

It’s easier for them to invent a villain than accept that sexuality is not contagious and that nobody can “turn” someone gay.

3. The Bus

Me and Seunghoon were quietly sitting together on a bus sharing chips and listening to music when a group of young guys started circling around us.

At first they mocked us and kicked our seats. Then they started trying to grab our headphones, threatening us and calling us slurs.

Eventually it escalated into physical pushing.

At that moment Seunghoon started becoming overwhelmed and showing signs of sensory overload, which they immediately used as an excuse to become even more aggressive.

Nobody on the bus did anything.

The only person who stepped in was the bus driver, who stopped the bus and forced the doors open so we could get out safely while the group kept yelling behind us.

What I remember most is not even the fear. It was the silence of everyone else.

4. The Police Officer

One of the most disturbing experiences I ever had involved a police officer.

I was in an alley with another man after midnight. We were kissing. Fully dressed. Not bothering anyone.

A police officer approached us aggressively with a baton demanding IDs. Even though we complied immediately, he decided we were “suspicious.”

Then suddenly he claimed we were resisting and hit both of us repeatedly with the baton.

That night I ended up with broken ribs and a broken tooth.

Being treated like a criminal when you have done nothing wrong changes something inside you. It becomes very hard to trust authority when the people meant to protect you become the people hurting you.

5. The Pizza Night

One night me and Seunghoon were walking back to our car after buying pizza when a group of drunk men started shouting slurs and throwing beer bottles at us from a hill nearby.

We rushed into the car thinking it would end there.

Instead they followed us down the hill, surrounded the car, started shaking it, kicking it and punching the windows.

Thankfully Seunghoon managed to drive away before things escalated further.

But even after escaping, we noticed their car following us for a while. We drove around for nearly thirty minutes trying to make sure they were gone before finally heading home.

And honestly the saddest part is probably that after all that happened…we still just wanted to eat our pizza in peace.

So we ordered another one.

6. The Online Harassment

Hate online becomes so normalized that sometimes people forget how frightening it can become when it crosses into real life.

At one point, three people became obsessed with harassing me online.

At first it was the usual insults: sinner, disgusting, abomination, mistake of nature.

Then came the death wishes.

Then the stalking.

Then threats about finding me and killing me.

Thankfully the situation never escalated physically because they were eventually stopped by private security my father had hired.

But it’s disturbing how comfortable people become threatening violence when they believe they are morally justified.

7. Losing My Friend

One of the worst incidents happened after leaving a gay bar with a friend late at night.

A group of drunk men — I think soccer fans after a match — started following us through an isolated area.

They blocked our path, insulted us and kept getting more aggressive. Some of them even had brass knuckles.

At one point one of them literally said:
“You’re gay. You should die.”

There were around seven of them and only two of us.

Me and Seunghoon had defended ourselves before in other situations because of our martial arts training, but this situation was different. They were drunk, armed and outnumbered us heavily.

I managed to escape because of a combination of panic, adrenaline, years of taekwondo training, and a random taxi driver passing nearby.

My friend didn’t survive.

And honestly, after something like that, you stop seeing homophobia as “just opinions.”

You understand very clearly that hatred can become violence very quickly.

That’s the strange thing about homophobia.

Most of the time, we are not attacked for doing anything extraordinary.

Not for hurting anyone.
Not for forcing anything onto anyone.
Not for existing loudly.

Sometimes all it takes is holding someone’s hand.
Looking “too gay.”
Kissing someone you love.
Refusing to hide.

And somehow, for certain people, that alone becomes enough reason for violence.

The bruises heal eventually.

But what stays with you is the realization that some people will genuinely hate you simply for existing honestly.

And that’s a very lonely thing to learn when you are still young.

Emotionally Unstable Things I’ve Done While in Love

 

First of all, I need to clarify something:

I’ve been in love with my current boyfriend Seunghoon since I was eight years old. Somehow instead of fading over time, it just became stronger and more psychologically concerning every year.

At the same time, unfortunately for everyone involved, I also tend to become emotionally obsessed with other men very easily.

Sometimes it’s attraction.
Sometimes it’s infatuation.
Sometimes it’s genuine emotional attachment.
Sometimes it’s apparently severe enough to qualify as a public incident.

Since it’s BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) awareness month, I guess this is the perfect time to admit that a lot of my emotional reactions throughout life have not exactly been…stable.

And before anyone asks:
yes, in retrospect a lot of these things sound irrational, embarrassing, manipulative, dramatic, or completely insane.

The weird thing about emotional impulsivity though is that when you are actually inside the emotion, it rarely feels irrational in the moment. At the time it feels urgent. Catastrophic. Like your entire world is collapsing in real time.

Only later do you look back at yourself and think:
“…what the hell was wrong with me?”

 

So here are some of the most emotionally unstable things I’ve done while in love.

1. Ruining an entire luxury vacation because I wanted to stare at Seunghoon through a webcam.

At the time Seunghoon and I were not dating yet, he was just my best friend.

Meanwhile I was on a two-week vacation in a luxury resort with my brother and sister. Objectively this should have been a good situation. Beautiful beach, expensive hotel, perfect weather, normal happy people enjoying themselves.

Instead I decided I no longer cared about the outside world because I wanted to stay online with Seunghoon 24/7.

So while my siblings wanted to go swimming, sightseeing, or leave the hotel like functioning humans, I refused to go anywhere because I needed to be in the room with my webcam open waiting for Seunghoon to appear online.

I stressed Seunghoon because I constantly wanted attention.
I stressed my siblings because I refused to participate in anything.
Then I called my father crying and begging him to cancel the final week of the trip so I could go home earlier.

You can imagine how much my siblings appreciated that.

2. The cake incident.

A lot of people asked me about this after the first blog post so here you go.

We were around eighteen and after years of emotional suffering I finally decided I would officially ask Seunghoon to be my boyfriend.

After an extremely serious thought process, I somehow concluded that the best idea would be to hide a handwritten confession inside his birthday cake so he would discover it dramatically while cutting the cake.

In my defense, it sounded romantic in my head.

So I bought the cake, hid the note inside, and brought it to karaoke where we were celebrating his birthday.

A slightly drunk and probably overwhelmed Seunghoon paid absolutely no attention to the note and accidentally ate it.

At that moment I genuinely believed my life was over.

Not “oh this is awkward.”
No.
I mean complete emotional apocalypse.

I became convinced he did it on purpose, hated me secretly, and that our fate together was doomed forever.

So after the party I went home, cried the entire night, made dramatic plans about disappearing and avoiding him forever, drank too much, spiraled completely, and eventually ended up in the hospital with a nervous breakdown.

Meanwhile Seunghoon had no idea any of this was happening.

3. Throwing a tantrum because a cashier called Seunghoon cute.

We were around ten years old.

A cashier complimented Seunghoon because he helped her carry a bag and said he was “cute” and would become “a real catch someday.”

This information destroyed me emotionally.

I became irrationally jealous, threw a complete tantrum, locked myself in my room crying, and refused to come out during our planned movie night.

So instead of watching the movie with me, Seunghoon ended up watching it with my siblings while I emotionally collapsed alone in the dark.

4. Going with a group of semi-aggressive guys because I felt ignored by Seunghoon.

I spent THREE HOURS getting ready because I wanted Seunghoon to notice me. The outfit was carefully calculated. The hair was calculated. The suffering was calculated.

Meanwhile Seunghoon did not notice any of this because he was too busy admiring the sunset and talking about how pretty the hills of Busan looked.

So naturally I took this extremely personally.

Later that night we met a group of guys who were half flirting with me and half insulting both of us. They kept implying Seunghoon was weird and that I was a slut while acting weirdly aggressive the entire time.

For some reason my emotionally unstable brain decided:
“Yes. These are the people I should follow.”

Things escalated into an actual physical fight with Seunghoon and despite being deeply in love with him, I still went with those guys afterward and slept with them even though I knew they had hurt him.

Honestly writing this now makes me realize how self-destructive I could become whenever I felt ignored, jealous, unwanted, or emotionally abandoned.

The next morning I was sitting there quietly taking care of Seunghoon’s bruises while feeling like the worst person alive.

He forgave me anyway.

5. Hiding inside a gym overnight for a gym instructor.

This man was a gym instructor and former rapper, which normally would not even be my type because I don’t really listen to rap.

But one day something shifted psychologically after watching him quietly eat a protein snack in the corner of the gym after leg day.

Suddenly I became convinced he meant something important to me.

So instead of behaving like a normal person, I decided the best possible course of action would be hiding inside the gym toilets overnight until the gym closed.

I slept there.

Then the next morning when he arrived to open the gym, he found me waiting for him inside like some emotionally unstable cryptid.

Surprisingly this strategy worked much better than it should have.

6. Locking my cousin’s friend inside his own apartment so he would spend more time with me.

This one is genuinely insane in retrospect.

He was sweet, kind, very well-built, and I liked him a lot. We already had something going on, but I wanted more attention and more time together.

So one day before he left for work I hid his keys so he physically could not leave the apartment.

At the time my brain genuinely categorized this as “romantic.”

He protested initially but eventually gave up and spent the day with me instead.

Honestly the plan worked surprisingly smoothly until his mother came home later that night and ruined the hostage situation.

7. Painting a picture of Seunghoon and me together when I was eight years old and treating it like a sacred object.

When I was a child I painted a picture of me and Seunghoon together and kept it above my bed because I genuinely believed if I prayed hard enough God would eventually make us end up together.

I became completely emotionally attached to this painting.

We had to take it with us on every single trip.
Every vacation.
Every hotel.

If somebody forgot it, I threw full tantrums because I believed something terrible would happen to our future together if the painting stayed behind.

At one point we actually missed a plane because somebody forgot the painting and we had to go back for it.

Then when everyone blamed me for the situation, I got angry, refused to leave, and stayed behind with my dad instead while the rest of them continued the trip.

Honestly it became less of a painting and more of a psychological support artifact for my obsession.

And somehow after all these years, we still have it hanging on our wall now.

 

Being in a Relationship with a Man Who Has Autism

 

First of all, when I met Seunghoon we were really young, and back then good information about autism online was honestly not great. So I had to figure out most things through first-hand experience, emotional breakdowns, confusion, trial and error, and accidentally making situations way more dramatic than they needed to be.

Also this is not going to be one of those posts written from a neurotypical perspective because I am very much not neurotypical.

So this is basically:

“How to date a guy with autism from the perspective of another mentally unstable neurodivergent gay man.”

1. Avoiding eye contact does not mean they are not interested in you.

Do not catastrophize immediately.

I learned this the very, very hard way because catastrophizing is basically my part-time job. If Seunghoon looked away while I was talking, stared at a lamp for too long, or focused on something else entirely, my brain immediately went:
“He hates me. It’s over. I’ve ruined everything.”

Meanwhile he was literally just processing things differently.

2. If they don’t laugh at your jokes or miss subtle hints, it does not mean they dislike you or think you’re weird.

At first this drove me insane because my subtle hints would completely fail to register. I didn’t want to pressure him, but at the same time I was emotionally imploding because NOTHING was landing.

I would spend hours carefully constructing some subtle emotional message in my head only for him to respond with something completely unrelated or just continue eating snacks peacefully while my soul left my body.

Eventually I realized:
you have to say things directly.

Which brings me to the next point.

3. Spell things out completely.

No matter how absurd it feels.

If I’m sad, insecure, anxious, jealous, depressed, overwhelmed, happy, or if I want affection, reassurance, or sex — I say it directly now.

Honestly this helped both of us a lot.

I have anxiety symptoms, phobias, attachment issues, borderline disorder, the deluxe collector’s edition of emotional instability, so learning to communicate openly actually made our relationship much healthier for both sides.

Now he understands my panic spirals better too.

And honestly direct communication removed so many unnecessary fights because neither of us is sitting there trying to decode mysterious emotional riddles anymore.

4. Respect comfort items and routines.

For Seunghoon it’s headphones, videogames, and scribbling in notebooks.

We never leave the house without his headphones and notebook. And if he forgets them because he feels calm or brave that day, I usually carry them for him anyway because you never know when things might suddenly become overwhelming.

And honestly at this point all those little “weird” things became some of my favorite things about him.

The way he repeats certain songs for weeks.
The way he scribbles while thinking.
The way he always needs specific objects with him.
The routines.
The small rituals.

After enough time they stop feeling like “autism behaviors” and just become part of the person you love.

If all those little strange things disappeared tomorrow, he genuinely would not feel like Seunghoon anymore.

5. If they get overwhelmed, don’t panic with them.

Give them space. Reassure them. Stay calm.

And if people stare in public? Ignore them completely.

The more focused you are on helping them feel safe again, the faster things usually settle down.

6. Avoid sudden changes, loud spaces, and overcrowded places if possible.

Ironically I also struggle with social anxiety and sensory overload unless it’s my own music or a dark room full of attractive men.

So honestly we both get overwhelmed sometimes.

One time I got trapped in a crowded underground station and started spiraling really badly because there was too much noise, too many people touching me, too much movement all at once.

Meanwhile Seunghoon — the man who normally avoids eye contact and wants to disappear into walls — suddenly switched into full emergency mode, grabbed my hand, pulled me outside, and sat with me quietly until I calmed down.

So ironically we kind of take turns malfunctioning.

Imagine both of us collapsing mentally at the same time though. Absolutely disastrous.

7. The first move was hell.

I wanted this man for YEARS and he just… did not get it.

And the problem is that I’m extremely impatient. 

So while I was overthinking every interaction, spiraling, craving reassurance, and convincing myself he secretly hated me, he genuinely had no idea what was happening.

At one point I literally hid a note inside his birthday cake asking him to be my boyfriend because apparently my brain thought that was romantic and subtle at the same time.

He ate the paper.

Not metaphorically.
Actually ate it.

I remember sitting there staring in absolute horror while he calmly kept eating cake completely unaware that my emotional confession had just been digested.

Honestly that should have prepared me for the communication style adjustments I would later need to make.

You really need to say things clearly. Not emotionally telepathically. Clearly.

Honestly, dating someone with autism taught me to stop expecting people to communicate love in the exact way I imagined they should.

A lot of things I once interpreted as distance were actually just different ways of processing the world.

And meanwhile he had to learn how to survive my emotional chaos too, so really this relationship has mostly been two neurodivergent men accidentally learning teamwork through confusion, panic attacks, emotional disasters, aggressive honesty, and occasional public malfunctioning.

But somehow it works.