“Mom, I think I’m dying.” Those five words stopped a packed Barnes & Noble dead silent last week.
Joshua Bassett – the former Disney+ star who came out as queer in 2021 – was reading from the opening chapter of his new memoir when his voice broke, his eyes filled with tears, and he had to pause before he could continue.
The moment was captured on video by a fan, and it’s as raw as anything you’ll see a public figure do this year.
But the real gut punch isn’t the tears. It’s what came before them – and the story Joshua had been carrying for five years before he could finally put it into words.
Who is Joshua Bassett?
If you’re not immediately placing the name, here’s the short version: Joshua is a 25-year-old actor, singer, and songwriter who shot to fame as the lead of Disney+’s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.
Tall, dark-haired, ridiculously handsome – the kind of guy who’d stop you mid-scroll even without a headline attached.
But the reason most people first heard his name had nothing to do with his talent. In early 2021, Joshua became the centerpiece of one of pop culture’s messiest public dramas – a love triangle involving his co-star Olivia Rodrigo and singer Sabrina Carpenter that spawned chart-topping songs, TikTok conspiracy theories, and a level of online hate that would break most adults, let alone a 20-year-old.
Then, in May 2021, he came out as queer – casually, charmingly, and in the middle of the chaos. He’s since identified openly as part of the LGBTQ+ community, telling GQ: “There are plenty of letters in the alphabet… why bother rushing to a conclusion?”
More recently, Joshua starred as Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors Off-Broadway – joining a lineage that includes Jonathan Groff and Darren Criss – and won a Children’s and Family Emmy. He’s the real deal. And what he’s been through to get here is staggering.
What happened to Joshua Bassett in 2021
Here’s the part most people don’t know. In January 2021, while the entire internet was consumed by the Olivia Rodrigo/Sabrina Carpenter love triangle drama – with Joshua squarely at the center of it – he wasn’t paying attention to any of it. He couldn’t. He was fighting for his life.
At just 20 years old, fresh off his birthday, Joshua was hospitalized with septic shock and heart failure. His condition deteriorated so fast it was almost incomprehensible.
“Seven days prior, I was perfectly happy and pretty healthy,” he read at the Barnes & Noble event in Union Square. “Before I could blink, I lost 20 pounds, went septic and my heart failed as I was surrounded by doctors telling me I had 12 hours to live – all this fresh off my 20th birthday.”
Twelve hours. That’s what the doctors gave him. They later told him he had a 30 percent chance of survival – and that if he’d waited just one more day to check into the hospital, he would have been found dead in his apartment.
The day he was admitted? January 14, 2021 – the same day he released his single Lie Lie Lie, the same week Olivia’s Drivers License was breaking records.
While millions of strangers were dragging his name through the mud online, his doctors were calling him the “sickest patient in the hospital.”
The moment that broke him at Barnes & Noble
The video from the reading, posted to X by a fan, shows Joshua sitting with his memoir Rookie: My Public, Private, and Secret Life open in front of him.
He reads the passage about calling his mom, and then he just – stops. His eyes go glassy. His jaw tightens. The room holds its breath.
When he finally gathered himself, what he said next landed even harder: “When you come within an inch of death, nothing you thought matters, matters anymore.”
Then, with his voice still trembling, he added: “By the world’s metrics, I was at the top of my game. Starring in a hit Disney show.”
While the world was eaten Joshua Bassett alive for the whole love triangle between Him, Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter he was fucking fighting for his life bro 😭😭 pic.twitter.com/qRILxIKuIc
— zɪn (@baeeizn) May 7, 2026
And because he’s still Joshua Bassett – a guy who’s never quite lost the ability to lighten a heavy moment – he ended with a quiet little “woop” that somehow made the whole thing more affecting, not less. The audience laughed through tears. He did too.
What the memoir reveals about the aftermath
Rookie, which hit shelves on May 5, goes far beyond the health crisis itself. It’s a memoir in verse – poetry and prose – that traces what happened to Joshua after he left the hospital. And what happened was not a recovery story with a neat, upward arc.
He turned to drugs to cope with the pain. Specifically, ketamine.
“My reckless addictions rapidly spiraled, relentlessly growing worse and worse and worse,” he writes. “The high highs and oh-so-low lows eventually caught up to me in New York.”
The details are stark. Joshua describes consuming six bags of ketamine every single night, by himself. Instead of measured doses, he’d inhale entire bags in one go. Some mornings, he wouldn’t even make it to the bathroom before reaching for more. It was never enough.
All of this was happening while he was one of the most talked-about young men in pop culture – a guy whose every move was dissected by fans and haters alike. Nobody knew.
Coming out in the middle of falling apart
Here’s what makes Joshua’s coming out so striking in hindsight. When he sat down for that Clevver News interview in May 2021 and casually called Harry Styles hot – then paused, laughed nervously, and said “I guess this is my coming out video” – it looked effortless. Charming, even.
The clip went viral. Millions of views. The internet mostly celebrated.
But nobody watching that clip knew what was actually happening behind it. This was a 20-year-old who had nearly died four months earlier, was in the early stages of a drug addiction nobody around him fully understood, and was being torn apart daily by internet strangers – choosing, in the middle of all that chaos, to be honest about who he was anyway.
That’s not a planned PR moment. That’s someone deciding that if they almost died once already, they’re not going to spend whatever comes next hiding.
Where Joshua Bassett is now
The Joshua who stood in that Barnes & Noble last week is a very different person from the kid who called his mom from a hospital bed in 2021.
He released his debut album, The Golden Years, in 2024 and toured it across North America and Europe. His Off-Broadway run as Seymour earlier this year was met with warm reviews.
And he’s been open about the work it took to get here – therapy, sobriety, and learning to separate his sense of self from what strangers online think of him.
Perhaps the most remarkable detail is his physical recovery. In an interview earlier this year, Joshua described how doctors initially told him he’d have health issues for the rest of his life – dietary and exercise restrictions that would have made performing in a demanding show like Little Shop unlikely.
But scans at the end of his treatment showed his heart as if the damage had never happened. His medical team called it “unheard of.”
“Every day has been a bit of a dream,” he said.
Why this matters
There’s a version of this story that’s just celebrity memoir promotion. Famous person cries at book event, internet reacts, everyone moves on.
But the video from that Barnes & Noble hits different when you know the full picture.
This is a queer young man who was publicly humiliated during the worst health crisis of his life, who turned to drugs to survive the pain of almost dying, who came out to the world while quietly falling apart, and who somehow – five years later – is standing in a bookstore in New York reading those words out loud to a room full of strangers.
Not performing them. Living them again. And choosing to do it anyway.
- Get Rookie: My Public, Private, and Secret Life on Amazon US
- Get Rookie: My Public, Private, and Secret Life on Amazon UK