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Judd is identified by Muñoz as "a Jewish cartoonist from Long Island," which is not necessarily incorrect, but is certainly limiting, an inference for which Muñoz provides a quick rationalization: "I am aware that the preceding descriptions seem to be somewhat stock, but these were the primary identity accounts that the program offered" (155). That caveat saves his essay, "Pedro Zamora's Real World of Counterpublicity: Performing an Ethics of the Self", from blatant hypocrisy, but does hint at the incongruities of analyzing Pedro's ethnicity without doing so, and perhaps starting with, Judd's as well.

In their reviews of Pedro and Me, both Ricardo Ortiz, Web Behrens, and Richard Brower comment on Judd's unique placement: "It's not often that a 30-year-old heterosexual man commands the rapt attention of a queer youth group" (Behrens 33). "We also see a healthy friendship between a straight man and a gay man, which cannot be stressed enough in our still homophobic society" (Brower). "The balance he strikes is indeed delicate," agrees Ortiz (33). Winick engages in several balancing acts, mediating between the comic book genre and biographical memoir, between his television Real World personae and his real-life personality (and, even, his textual characterization), between a furthering Pedro's cause and using Pedro's popularity, et cetera. But, the balance between him and Pedro as minorities begins early in the book, as "Winick smartly contrasts his own childhood with Zamora's in the early chapters, then brings them both together in their MTV house" (Behrens 34). In fact, the dual biographies that open the book can be seen as parallel lines — two vastly different origins for two young men who will later be strongly linked to one and another. "It also establishes that this is the story of how one (sensitive, thoughtful, and creative, but otherwise apparently conventional) young straight man from suburban America come not only to accept and to tolerate, but to embrace in friendship, and in love, a young Gay man with AIDS" (Ortiz 33). At certain moments — such as in the book's title, during moments of friendly banter, or in these reviews — Judd and Pedro are practically equated. "Like Zamora before him, Winick emplores young people to learn how to talk about sex with their friends and partners — but most importantly, to value themselves" (Behrens 34, my emphasis). And, there seems to be a fair amount of support from both the text and cultural theorists that to read Judd as transcending his own ethnicity and/or crossing over into Pedro's has certain merit.

To paraphrase Norman Mailer, is Judd a 'white Pedro'? Or even a 'straight Pedro'? Both these phrases play on the title of Mailer's essay, "The White Negro", wherein the elements of 1950s Hip-ness are investigated. One key element of the hypothetical hipster, says Mailer, is his language: "I have jotted down perhaps a dozen words, the Hip perhaps most in use and most likely to last with the minimum of variation. The words are man, go, put down, make, beat, cool, swing, with it, crazy, dig, flip, creep, hip, square" (595). There are other terms both employed and chronicled in Mailer's essay, such as gig, cat, bag, and "goof (the ugliest word in Hip), if you lapse back into being a frightened stupid child, or if you flip, if you lose your control, reveal the buried weaker more feminine part of your nature" (597). Judd, when not engaged in his role as narrator, utilizes some of this same language, suggesting a relationship between him and Mailer's hipster. Even in formal interviews, traces of Hip remain: "I was hiding behind goofy little stories rather than talking about Pedro having shingles'" (Behrens 34, my emphasis). These excised "goofy little stories" — stories which, as Mailer suggests, may cause fear or anxiety — include the one acknowledgment by Judd that he is not Pedro; in his encounter with a new and frightened gay youth group, he says, "I can't do what Pedro did. I can't be who Pedro was. I can't be a role model for gay youth […] I'm out of my depth." For whatever reason, this scene was not included in the final draft of Pedro and Me, thereby upholding a potential equation between Judd and Pedro, between the Caucasian and the Latino. Even Pedro is credited as saying, "I promised the schools I'd come and speak…They'll get a straight boy cartoonist instead. They'll manage" (Winick 134).

Mailer's essay and Judd's thin connections to Hip can only take us so far, though. Judd's vocation as a cartoonist could be read as another link — that this razor's edge, high/low pop culture, artistic/capitalistic occupation is in some way connected to "the source of Hip [that] is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries" (Mailer 585). Judd relates a low ebb just before auditioning for The Real World where his comic strip Nuts and Bolts is canceled by syndicators — "It was out of nowhere. I didn't see it coming. Killing me would have been easier […] I was miserable" (Winick 18). This is the hell of the hipster, says Mailer, where "one is beat, one has lost one's confidence, one has lost one's will, one is impotent in the world of action and so closer to the demeaning flip of becoming a queer, or indeed closer to dying" (598, my emphasis). This is where Mailer and his biases become too far removed from a more enlightened, contemporary reading. As Eric Lott says, "The White Nego" is "a text whose mythologies are as telling as its analysis" (248). That is, I doubt Judd was in great fear of feeling like "a queer" nor did he relate that potential feeling with death (which may have more accurately been the case for the scared youths Judd visits in the cut scene). However, part of Mailer's analysis is valuable in guiding us towards a viewing of Judd that traverses ethnic barriers.

Instead of Mailer — or, perhaps, to evolve beyond him — the words of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Lott are helpful. In her essay, "Axiomatic", Sedgwick says:

To paraphrase that runs the serious chance of misinterpretation and oversimplification, but one thread that we can draw from her verbal tapestry is that identity is sticky; one cannot befriend it, be against it, or remain entirely parallel to it without taking some of it upon one's self. In fact, the construction of "self" is largely dependent on such interactions — certainly, the construction of "whiteness" is, says Lott:

But Judd, at least as he is portrayed in the story, does not seem to fear this transgression, whether it is a line between his heterosexuality and Pedro's homosexuality or his whiteness and Pedro's race. Lott says that "one result of all this is that whiteness itself ultimately becomes an impersonation. The subterranean components of whiteness that so often threaten it require an edgy, constant patrolling" (254). Judd, it seems, does little of that patrolling, and, when he does, it is only to the degree of deferential as an outsider; he does not claim to be gay or Latino, but, as his later relationship to Pam might suggest, he does not claim to be or adhere to being strictly white in a strictly white world, either. It is worth noting that Judd and Pam's interracial relationship blossomed, "but only after the show stopped filming" even though his feelings for her began during their cohabitation (Muñoz 215, note 25). All this could be too easy an explanation — one that discards ethnicity as only those who are not oppressed by their ethnic labeling could do. At the same time, it could explain Judd's relative ease in bonding with Pedro and assuming his cause. In talking about Cory, Pam, Pedro, and himself, Judd embraces Sedgwick and chastises Muñoz: "We weren't really the stereotypes our backgrounds or TV made us out to be. We were more. And we saw that in each other" (Winick 112).