For this Hollywood Personality it’s Time for a Fresh Start After Breakups, Fires, and Tears

Written by | Entertainment

The New Year started off with the world witnessing headlines about the fires in Los Angeles that have decimated over 50,000 acres and killed at least 27 people, becoming one of the worst natural disasters in the state’s history. And, at the exact moment of this writing, the Hughes Fire broke out consuming over 9,200 acres in just a matter of hours. It is one thing to read the headlines, it is another thing entirely to be a direct victim of this tragedy, losing everything in a place you called home. Max Emerson, YouTuber, actor, author, director, and LGBTQ personality, received the news that the home that he and his fiancé Andrés restored and meant to grow their family in was burning to the ground. Max would lose more than just the house and its belongings, not even having been given the opportunity to evacuate properly. But surprisingly, he is moving forward and focusing on the future rather than his losses.

I experienced it entirely online. I still haven’t seen the house. I just got back to LA last night. I was flying from Switzerland to Utah for a job, and Andrés was coming up from Chile to meet me there. I had heard about the fires when leaving Switzerland, and by the time I was in Utah, the house was long gone. After that, it was just about picking up the pieces and putting things together. We had some neighbors that stayed behind and they managed to get footage of the house burning down. That gives me a huge sense of closure. I don’t think everybody has the experience of watching their house in full inferno mode. For me, there’s something at work here with all of that. The most tragic part about our house burning down is that Andrés quit his job to become a visual artist and had four years’ worth of paintings in a closet downstairs. I could cry right now just thinking about it. He had just booked his first solo show, an international show in Chile, and was literally on the way back to the States to pick up the art to go to the show. Fortunately, he was able to photograph a lot of that stuff. I’m sure on some weird, deep, cosmic level, it is a lesson in permanence, but this is the part of that lesson that just sucks. And that’s just what it is.

Max posted footage of his house burning down on Instagram. It is devastating. Mere days after the couple posted a moving video sharing that they were safe and stable, Max and Andrés made a loving statement, sharing that after nine years, they were separating. As they put it, they “still love each other fully, deeply, and unconditionally. That love doesn’t end; it evolves.” The media went crazy sharing headlines of their breakup. Max has continued to post to his over 1 million followers on social media, showing that he is returning to some semblance of normality. Single and without a home.

I’ve always just posted compulsively to social media. Even though social media has put a lot of pressure on my relationship, which is now on pause, I know that there are a lot of people invested and connected, and there are people who care about us, and me, who want to know that we’re okay. The fact of the matter is, we are okay. For me at least, there’s no point in sharing this big sad, sob story. Our house burned down. It’s sad, it sucks, but it is just stuff at the end of the day.

Max didn’t have time to grieve. Work and the need to focus on the future of his solo career brought him to a branded two-week influencer stint in the heart of the Colorado mountains. Even while focusing on continuing to work, he is trying to give himself some grace to focus on his mental health.

That was not a response to my house burning down. Those were just jobs and things that I already had confirmed, and I could not think of a better place to be. As much as I wanted to be here for and with my community and help, I felt like I would just be in the way. I’m just one more displaced person to jack up the real estate market. I’m from Florida and have a lot of experience with hurricanes, but fires are really, really scary to me. I very much feel like I’m on the other side of the grief in a lot of ways. Of course, it comes in waves and is not linear, but for about the first week, I just had to budget an hour and a half a day to not be okay. And if I thought I was going to get away with it one day and be like, “Oh, I didn’t cry today!” No, it’d catch me. My body’s nice to me though, it gets it out of the way at times when it’s not inconvenient or embarrassing. Like I’ll just randomly wake up at three in the morning and start crying, and then I’m good. I feel like the endorphins from the crying kick in, and I look at all the love and opportunities that are just being hurled at me and then it’s all right. That being said, my social battery is about 50% of what it normally is.

Max has become a highlighted name in the queer community. His film projects like DipSpit, Earwig, and Hooked solidified his work as an actor, producer, writer, and director. His autobiography, Hot Sissy – Life Before Flashbulbs, detailed his “redneck” teenage years growing up in Florida and was well received. On YouTube, he has become extremely popular for his diverse collection of videos that include unfiltered thoughts on life, thirst traps, and his ongoing series Stuff Every Queer Kid Should Know. On social media, he continues to gain followers because of his appreciation and promotion of the LGBTQ community and, let’s be honest, his shirtless and underwear pics. His relationship ended up being a big part of his social media. The two announced their relationship, would film content together, announced their engagement, talked about going through the adoption process, and posted their breakup on social media. Does Max have any regrets about sharing so much about his relationship with the public?

Absolutely not. There’s nothing about my relationship that I regret. Part of the issue with what was happening is that I became the spokesperson for the entity that is us. And that’s not fair to him. That’s too much responsibility for me and it was just causing problems. Right now, everything that’s happening to us is a sign that it’s time for a break. We had a failed adoption that failed for a reason. Our house literally burned to the ground. That happened for a reason. We’ve had a lot of communication issues in the last few months, and we’ve decided to just take some time apart. So having something like this, simplified things for us so we can just make a full, clean break early while we still like each other. That is huge.

There is a level of grief and maybe even embarrassment to admit online that your very public relationship isn’t working out. But I think it’s also just a part of relationships. Not everyone wants to be around each other all the time. We have huge opportunities coming up for both of us, but they’re literally on different continents. I think the lesson for us right now, as a relationship, is to find ways to care about each other and love each other without the same sort of attachment that we were putting on ourselves, that we were having put on us by a bunch of strangers randomly weighing in on our relationship. After nine years, I think it’s time to reestablish ourselves as individuals because as fun as it is, doing happy couple content, there’s nothing more miserable than doing happy couple content when you’re fighting. It feels so inauthentic. When there’s just all these great offers and jobs and opportunities for us to go be a happy couple, we’re going to take them because it’s fun. But then that takes up the real estate and opportunity for me to be an actual filmmaker and for Andrés to be a visual artist. It’s everything in the universe that’s telling us to go be individuals and develop the lives and careers that we want independent of each other. It’s not to say that this may not work out in the future, but just definitely not right now.

Social media, especially in the queer community, can be smoke and mirrors with content creators always putting their best foot forward. With Max losing his house, the reality of his relationship being public news, and now having to start fresh, does he feel less pressure to present the glossy version of his life?

I am first and foremost a cheugy millennial. My job through college was a model during the toxic Abercrombie era. My first impulse is usually to make it look good before I put it out there. But I feel like that’s in anything I do, I always want something to be aesthetically pleasing, whether it’s how I’ve designed and laid out my home, or if I’m going to plate a dinner. I like things to have an aesthetic balance to them. But I actually don’t think that I was super successful with social media until I started learning how to be vulnerable.

My first large crowdsource project was for a film I wrote, a narrative about homeless youth called Hooked. It was a reaction to all the predatory behavior I’d been experiencing from people within our own community. One of the big arcs of that fundraising is that I had a whole fake relationship with Kyle Krieger. We fake dated for a month and we fake broke up. It’s all very meta and it’s all happening again. But through the course of that month of fundraising, I had these celebrity cameos that functioned as mentors, helping me channel that vulnerability and authenticity and acknowledgment that not everything is awesome all of the time. So again, I think when it comes to regret and sharing your relationship on social media, yes, people need role models, as pretentious as that sounds, for how to go on vacation with your partner and not just fight in the hotel room the whole time. Yes, there needs to be examples of ways to celebrate your love and do it in a healthy capacity, but there also needs to be role models on how to break up and how to still care about each other. It’s not my first choice of a storyline, but that’s the truth right now.

Max is moving forward and taking his followers with him for the ride, bumps and all. He has some big international projects happening and hinted at a major project he can’t talk about right now. Even with everything he has gone through in less than a month, he is oddly optimistic and does consider the fires a type of personal cleansing. That is not to say there is no grief. Many people, and many from the queer community, have lost everything in the Los Angeles fires. Some are moving to different states, some are staying and trying to rebuild their lives, and many are displaced with no actionable plan in sight. From his own dealing with grief, Max offers his advice.

I think my arc with grief has been to not just plow through, but actually let yourself feel the feelings and allow yourself to not be okay. Don’t run from those feelings. Feel them because you’re going to feel them whether you want to or not. And the harder you fight it, the more it’s going to hurt. So do that, feel those feelings, but then when you’re done, get to work, get off your ass, and keep going.

You can follow Max on IG: @Maxisms

Last modified: February 1, 2025

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