He Left Home at 17.
A Classmate
Saved His Life.

The Joel Kim Booster Story

The Person Who Believed In Me  ·  Hosted by David Begnaud

"When Sarah Casey offered Joel a place to stay, she probably didn't mean it. He showed up on her doorstep two days later anyway. He ended up living there for the rest of his senior year. And the rest is history."

— David Begnaud

The Ultimatum

Joel Kim Booster had been homeschooled until his junior year of high school. When his parents finally enrolled him in public school, everything that had been locked away came out at once. Within a month he came out, drank alcohol for the first time, smoked for the first time, and started building a life he had never been allowed to imagine. He was 16. He describes it plainly: when you keep a kid under lock and key for that long and give him a little freedom, he will explode.

His parents, Janet and Ken, found out the following year when they read his journal while he was at school. What followed was tumult, confrontation, and eventually an ultimatum: live the way they needed him to live, or leave. Joel called their bluff. He said okay, and he went. He wasn't entirely sure he could survive on his own. He wasn't sure he wouldn't eventually cave and go back. But he walked out the door.

What made it harder was what he was carrying underneath the defiance. Joel had been a nationally ranked Bible quizzer. He had read every book of the Bible, some many times over. He was so immersed in evangelical Christianity that months before he came out at school, he was telling people he planned to be a youth pastor. So when he finally stopped hiding, it didn't feel like liberation. It felt like a countdown. He was going to hell. He just figured he might as well enjoy the time he had left.

That was the kid who was couch-surfing around Plainfield, Illinois when a girl from his choir class turned around one day and said something that changed everything.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Joel describes the ultimatum — ~3:34

Remember When You Said That Thing?

Sarah Casey and Joel were not close. They shared one class together, choir, and ran in completely different circles. Sarah was a jock, a state champion pole vaulter. Joel was a theater kid. But she had heard what was happening to him, and at the end of class one day she turned around and said: if you ever need a place to stay, you can come stay with me and my family.

Joel doesn't think she fully meant it. He thinks she was just being kind, the way people say things when someone is in crisis. But it was getting colder outside, and two or three days later he showed up on her doorstep. He told her: I remember when you said that thing. I'm here to cash in. Her parents, understandably, were not immediately on board. Her father was a quadriplegic pastor with two younger sons in the house. It was a full household. They asked her to let the strange boy stay one night.

They told him to come back for dinner before he left the next day. He ended up living there for the rest of his senior year. Sarah's mom made him lunch. She started his car in the wintertime before school. Her family co-signed his student loans. At graduation, their church rallied together to buy him a car. The girl from choir had become chosen family.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Joel shows up at her door — ~13:16

What the Pastor Said

Sarah's father, Tim Casey, was a Methodist pastor known throughout his community for being exceptionally progressive. At some point, Sarah had told him what Joel was carrying: that he genuinely believed he was going to hell, and that the best he could do was try to enjoy life before the inevitable. Tim asked to speak with him.

He sat Joel down and said: there is no biblical basis for hell. You are not going to hell because hell does not exist. And God does not care what your sexuality is or who you love. Joel says he is not sure he would have believed those words from anyone else. But Tim was a pastor. He carried authority in exactly the world Joel had been so deeply formed by. And hearing it from him was a paradigm shift.

Joel says he does not think it is an exaggeration to say that conversation saved his life. The mindset he had been living in, that dark acceptance of a doomed future, was not a place that gets better on its own. It gets darker. What Tim gave him, in a single conversation, was permission to consider a future he had genuinely never allowed himself to imagine.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Pastor Tim's words — ~13:16

His Father Showed Up to Everything

Joel's relationship with his father, Ken, is more complicated than it first appears. He is honest about the difficult parts. But after Ken passed away in 2021, Joel posted something on Instagram that stopped me when I read it during my research. He wrote about how different they were, how his dad was painfully shy and quiet while Joel was loud and social and charismatic. And then he wrote that his dad showed up to everything. Every play. Every musical. Even a brief and terrible stint playing high school basketball.

Ken was often the only parent there. Joel doesn't know how much his father enjoyed those performances, or how proud he was, or what it actually cost him to be out in public spaces that way. But he came. And Joel admits now that in the years before his father died, they had repaired things enough to be in a better place than they had ever been. Two things were true at once. There was real pain. And there was a father who kept showing up.

His mother, Janet, has never seen any of his work as an adult. Not his movie. Not his stand-up. Not the TV shows. Joel says he is fine with that, and he means it. He stopped expecting certain emotional needs to be met by his family a long time ago. He has people in his life now who are proud of him in an unequivocal and uncomplicated way. He doesn't need it from them. But the question I asked him on tape, "Are you really fine with that?" hung in the air for a moment before he answered.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Joel talks about his father — ~20:24

The Industry No Hits Harder Than the Family No

Joel worked a day job until he was 28 or 29 years old. Fifty hours a week, then open mics at night. Six years in before he felt he could really call himself a success. And the rejection along the way was constant. Stand-up, writing, acting. No across every category. He describes it as a very different feeling from the rejection of his family, and in some ways much harder to absorb.

He was candid about why. His family's rejection, as painful as it was, feels unfounded to him now. It doesn't have standing. But when a casting director says no, it is his work, his craft, the thing that is most deeply him, being evaluated and found lacking. That kind of no lands in a different place. He handles it with humor in interviews. But in this conversation he was honest about the fact that he doesn't handle it well at all.

He was diagnosed with bipolar 2 about six months before the pandemic lockdown, and he says getting the diagnosis was more relief than anything. Suddenly so many moments in his life made sense. He worried at first that medication would dull his creativity. Some of his most generative periods had come during hypomanic episodes. But he has found the balance. And the last six months, he said at the time of taping, have been the most stable of his adult life.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Joel on rejection and the industry — ~37:30

What He Would Say to Sarah

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Joel what he wanted Sarah to know. He said she already knows most of it. They are still extraordinarily close, she will almost certainly listen to this episode, and they are, in his words, very free with gassing each other up. But he wanted her to know something specific: that she is a rock star. That she is doing real work in her community with real, tangible results. And that the work she is doing is, in his view, ten times more important than anything he will ever accomplish, even if it will never get the same attention.

He also talked about Sarah's daughter, the little girl in the photo he brought to the show. He grew up with nothing, he said. He now has more than he ever thought he would. And if he can give that child things he never had, he is going to do it. It is a quiet, specific form of paying it forward: not a foundation or a platform, just a man who wants to make sure the daughter of the person who saved him has a good life.

When I asked him what advice he would give to his younger self, the 27-year-old in the photo with the backwards hat and the timid look on his face, he said: you have everything figured out that you need to arrive at the place I am speaking to you from. You know nothing about anything else. And stop thinking you know the ending of a story before it has run its course. That last part, he said, has been his biggest mistake as an adult. Deciding a story is over before it actually is.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Joel's message to Sarah — ~54:43

Stories like Joel's are what we do.

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