The SEXyLA columns were born when Los Angeles magazine's sister publication, Tu Ciudad, asked Ayn to create a monthly column about bicultural relationships in LA for upscale Latinos based on her life as an Asian-Latinx writer whose friends were a fabulously diverse, fun, hip group of young men and women making their way in film, music, fashion and politics.
It was a pre-Amazon Prime Pantry, pre-Tinder world. When you wanted food, you had to grow it or go to a grocery store and buy it and when you wanted to go out with someone, you actually had to ask them out.
Ayn wrote those columns for three years, republishing pieces in Elle UK, Latina and Cosmopolitan. The journey eventually evolved into writing a popular memoir, Pornology, about sex, porn and relationships that was adapted into the feature film, A Nice Girl Like You, produced by CaliWood Pictures, starring Lucy Hale in 2020. That film premiered as the number one romantic comedy on Apple and stayed in the top three for two months.
Ayn's life-changing epiphany from these journeys?
The spectrum of love can be as wide-ranging, beautiful and fluid as the spectrum of sexual orientation.
Layering on More Life.
The series uses the humor, relationships and distinct BIPOC POV of the columns as a leaping-off point, adding a layer of style and profoundness. The series also focuses on a significant part of Ayn’s life not covered in the columns: her time spent helping the first love of her life work through his growing attraction to men and her encouraging him through that exploration while they were both experiencing heartbreak over the end of their relationship. Through that journey, they upended hetero-normative expectations to remain in each other's lives. In the end, he found the man he was meant to be with and she found the man she was meant to be with.
Ayn’s Writing
Ayn is a graduate of UCLA (MFA in Screenwriting) & Harvard University and has ghostwritten NY Times bestsellers, as well as her own work for Fox, Showtime, Elle, Cosmo, Latina, and Kinfolk. She has won the Women in Film\Francis Ford Coppola\ABC Graduate Screenwriting fellowships and a Nautilus award for her non-fiction work. She writes from remote Orcas Island and LA.
Ayn’s Personal Story (in her own words)
I was born on the island of Taiwan to a Chinese mother and a Mexican-American father who fell in love with each other at an illegal gambling den. At the age of two, I moved to the United States, then moved again and again. I was a Navy brat and that's what life is like for Navy brats. By the time I was 8, I had lived in Taipei, Taiwan; Corpus Christi, Texas; Long Beach, then Hawthorne, California; and East San Diego. The latter was the first place I was called names. If a kid saw me with my mom, they might call me Chink. If they saw me with my dad, they might call me wetback. Yep, it was a lovely place. Miraculously it didn't damage my self-esteem. Not that it didn't affect me at all. When I had a crush on a guy, I always made sure he saw me from a 3/4 angle—that way my nose looked slimmer and less ethnic.
When I was in eighth grade my dad was assigned to a Nato base in Izmir, Turkey. My sister, brother and I did not want to go. Two years later when our tour was up—we'd lived with rationed water & electricity and without television, we survived a military coup d'etat and bombings, the death of Americans and one of our school buses held hostage by terrorists—we strangely did not want to come back. A sense of community is that powerful. But we did come back. After high school I went to college. At UCLA I got a bachelors in psychology, but what shaped me more was: tutoring youth incarcerated in maximum security prisons (I learned a lot about the effects of racism and circumstance and how to inspire people); and, working on a crisis intervention hotline, counseling depressed and suicidal callers plus the occasional loser who didn't want to pay for phone sex so used us instead; and, let's not forget the music. It was Los Angeles in the eighties and my friends were working as DJs, music supes, or in bands. I skipped class to see 10,000 Maniacs, X, The English Beat, Everything But The Girl.
I went to Harvard after that. I thought it would be cool to change the world, so I started studying education & social policy there. I visited my boyfriend Tim (back when Tim was dating girls) every other Friday thru Sunday in NYC while he was going to NYU graduate film school. I sat in his classes and thought People can go to school for something as fun as this? The writing bug kicked in then. The fact that I was reading Camus and Tom Wolfe and Anne Sexton helped, too. I finished my masters at Harvard, but I realized I didn't want to change the world as much as I wanted to just change my world. I got into UCLA graduate film school in screenwriting. I won a lot of awards. The most by a student ever. More importantly, I met the love of my life, novelist Samuel W. Gailey, and we started writing—among other things—together. (By the way I'm still best friends with my ex Tim and that relationship informs the storyline with Jared in LovedBY).
Over the next decade I did some extensive traveling to India, France & Spain, I wrote the column Sex Y LA for three years, Sam and I got married and had a baby girl, and on a whim, we moved to a remote and rural island where I am now finishing my second book, a novel I call Crazy Hungry Love; contemplating my next script; andhelping other writers see their dreams come true.
