‘Queer Eye’s’ Karamo Brown on the day he learned had a 10-year-old son from a high school hookup
Queer Eye’s Karamo Brown has an interesting road to parenthood that really is one for the books.
—Queer Eye star Karamo Brown is engaged to Ian Jordan—
Brown opened up to PEOPLE about his new memoir Karamo: My Story of Embracing Purpose, Healing, and Hope, and the life-changing day he learned that he was a daddy.
Brown explained that in 2006, he stumbled across an envelope on the doorstep of his LA digs one night after partying too hard and coming off a high from drugs. He opened it and was alarmed by what he read.
“On the front page was ‘Texas Attorney General’s Office.’ The second page read, ‘Subpoena for Back Child Support,’” he writes. “I thought, Ashton Kutcher is inside my house. I’m getting punked!”
Even more shocking was the fact that he was being asked to cough up $230,000 in back child support and his high school hookup Stephanie Brooks was the baby’s mother.
Brown said he had sex one time with Brooks when he was 15.
“I literally spit out the juice I was drinking,” he says. “Now I was fully freaking out.”
Brown agreed to a paternity test and soon found out that he had indeed fathered a son—10-year-old Jason. He said he was eager and anxious to meet his child for the first time.
“A little voice in my head was saying, Karamo, you don’t have to do this. You’re a child, and you’re supposed to go in there and raise a child? Run for your life. At the same time, I thought, What if he needs me?”
—911 call released in mysterious case of Black mother who died at a party with seven white women—
“I was scared,” Brown, now 38, told the outlet. “I realized that I created this child who I had no idea about that’s living there, that I now messed him up.”
He recalls the moment meeting his son.
“She called, ‘Jason! Come out here! Your dad’s here,’” Brown recalls. “Jason slowly walked around the corner. There’s something about the first moment of seeing your child. All the pieces of me that I felt were missing got sewn up the minute I saw his face. I looked at this little fourth-grade boy, and I thought, I can do this.”
The two went bowling and Brown said it wasn’t long before he made the decision to move from LA to Texas to fully tackle being a dad and went into “full daddy mode.”
“When I called my mother and told her the news, she said, ‘I always knew that would happen, We all saw that you had two sons. You just didn’t know,’ ” he continues.
Brown’s book is expected to be released March 5.
Season 3 of Queer Eye hits Netflix on March 15.
