The endless teen franchises that come out of Hollywood… more often than not, the central character doesn’t have any discernible character traits. They’re just the young, good-looking guy who goes on this journey. They’re always played by fantastic young actors, but ultimately, they’re not very interesting characters.
Guilty pleasure implies that it’s something that I feel guilty for watching… people tell me I should feel guilty for watching because I’m too old to watch it, but I don’t give a damn: I love everything on Cartoon Network from ‘Adventure Time’ to ‘The Adventures of Gumball’, ‘Teen Titans’… all those shows that are for my kids, I like those!
I have cystic acne, and sometimes when I have a breakout, it triggers me back to that time when I was a teen and I feel so self-conscious – like the whole world is looking at my bad skin. I’ve definitely not gone out of the house because of a breakout, which is horrible.
When I was a teenager I would lock myself in the bathroom for hours, bouffanting my hair like Patty Duke and trying to recreate Barbra Streisand’s flawless eyeliner, only to comb it all out and wash it all off before stepping out into the world a butchish bisexual teen.
Doesn’t matter whether it’s a teen girl who’s pregnant, hasn’t told her parents, or an elderly couple dealing with one of them being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Those are real people to me. Those are the people I dealt with every single day.
People ask me, ‘How’s ‘Teen Wolf?’ and I tell them it’s literally the best job I’ve ever had. It’s hard. Everybody wants to be a series regular. It’s something that a lot of actors would kill to have. That being said, it’s very demanding of you, in so many different ways.
I went down the creative path in my teen years, and when I was in high school, in my junior year, I would perform at this program that was very similar to ‘School of Rock.’ That was when I started writing and realized that’s what I wanted to do.
I grew up in a small town in Kansas, so I love meeting the fans. Those are the people who spend time out of their day to watch the things that I’ve done, and I’ve gotten to do some great supernatural stuff – ‘Teen Wolf’ and ‘The Gates’ before that – so it’s nice when I get to go to Comic-Con every year.
We grew up listening to so much hardcore: everything from the very early D.C. stuff – Teen Idols, Minor Threat, Dag Nasty, SOA, Government Issue – to bands who weren’t straight edge, like Negative Approach. I really feel they were one of the greatest punk bands ever.
I like having young assistants in my office; they have energy, and I spend time with them to make sure they understand what we’re doing. By investing in them, I’m investing in the magazine. All over ‘Vogue,’ ‘Teen Vogue,’ and ‘Men’s Vogue,’ there are people who have been through not only my office but also many other offices at ‘Vogue.’
‘Teen Vogue’ is so much more than just a magazine. It’s so much more than just a website. It’s so much more than social. It’s really about the audience, and so we’re going to continue to innovate and continue to find new ways of reaching this audience in meaningful ways.
I think I’m trouble-adjacent. I remember hearing once that good girls don’t get caught. I think that’s sort of a lot of what my teen years were like. I skirted the stuff that other kids were doing because the idea of actually getting in trouble was not appealing to me, but I still wanted to have adventures.
The Teen Challenge ministry was born out of those humble early days of ministry. It now includes over 500 drug and alcohol rehab centers around the world, even in Muslim countries. These include homes for girls and women addicts and alcoholics, all which are reaching many.
At the time I came along, Hollywood’s idea of teen movies meant there had to be a lot of nudity, usually involving boys in pursuit of sex, and pretty gross overall. Either that or a horror movie. And the last thing Hollywood wanted in their teen movies was teenagers!
The first time I got pregnant, I was a young girl – I was 17 years old. Although I knew right away that I wanted to keep my child, being a pregnant teen was an extremely scary experience for me. Luckily, my family and friends were very supportive and were there for me every step of the way.
I didn’t have a teen age at all. I didn’t even look at boys, never mind… then suddenly it was like, ‘Oh my god!’ So I made up for a lot of lost time very quickly. It was kind of bonkers. Working hard, partying hard – but also experiencing life, you know.
I actually worry that we’re so mindlessly following the herd on privacy and data being the principle concerns when the actual things that are affecting the felt sense of your life and where your time goes, where your attention goes, where democracy goes, where teen mental health goes, where outrage goes.
I’ve started ordering out of teen catalogues! T-shirts, little coats, and jackets for around $35 – they’re amazing. I’ve become a really big fan of Urban Outfitters, Alloy and Anthropologie. Because I’ll pay for quality, but I will not just pay for trend. Psychologically, I have trouble with that.
I used to aspire to being more of a traditional bass player, to be honest. People say I play it like a guitar – and I was a guitar player when I was growing up. I started learning when I was eight, and that’s what I was fascinated with in my teen years.
I think the feeling was that ‘Venture Brothers’ really has something to sell in terms of a feature. ‘Aqua Teen’ is an element minute cartoon, and its very subversive and non sequitur and weird. We were writing the one show where we were constantly like, ‘God, I wish we had another hour to tell this story.’ It seemed like a natural fit.
It’s important for Asian American kids to see themselves in stories and to feel seen. They need to know that their stories are universal, too, that they, too, can fall in love in a teen movie. They don’t have to be the sidekick; they can be the hero.
Ever since I was a little teen, I was told by my great-grandma that you’ve got to always have a good moisturizer. I use cocoa butter, and I use it for all things needing moisture – face, hair, throw it on those legs at the beach, get them all shiny. Cocoa butter is such a great product.
When I was doing my research for ‘Branded,’ I’d meet groups of teenagers and preteenagers or tweens, and they would laugh at a magazine spread in a women’s magazine or teen girl magazine and say, ‘I’d never buy this outfit. I know these girls are starving themselves.’ But they probably would go out and buy the thing eventually.
I knew that I wanted to intern at ‘Teen Vogue’ from the moment the first issue hit newsstands. Luckily, the team at Polo Ralph Lauren, where I interned during high school, really believed in me and arranged for an interview with the editors.
My writing books with positive gay characters has come more out of anger than anything else: anger at not having been able to find honest, accurate books about people like myself as a teen, books that show we’re as diverse as straight people and that we can lead happy, healthy, productive lives just as straight people can.
