A decade ago, OutSFL’s 2023 Person of the Year lost her radio career, her home and nearly her life to alcoholism.

She now celebrates nine years in recovery, a happy marriage to a loving wife and streaming television fame as a leading voice in the South Florida LGBTQ community.

Exactly who is FayWhat?! – real name Fay Albernas – star news anchor and glamorous personality at Fort Lauderdale-based Happening Out Television Network. 

“She’s been with us 2½ years,” said Darren Loli, executive producer of Happening Out Television Network and VP of Hotspots/Happening Out Television Network. “What’s super important and unique about Fay is Fay acts like a bridge between the ‘L’ and the ‘G.’ That’s really important because when our community works together like that, we can accomplish so much more.”

Photos by Carina Mask

Growing up Fay

Albernas – once known in South Florida as radio host Fay Carmona and “Lady Fay” of FM stations Y100 and Party 93.1 – grew up in Passaic, New Jersey.

“My mom wasn't too keen on the fact that I was gay and I knew that I was gay early on,” Albernas said. “I was in love with my volleyball teacher. I knew Spanish and I took Spanish classes in high school just because the teacher was hot.”

She then began cutting school and taking 20-minute bus rides to Greenwich Village and Broadway. “The only place that I saw myself was maybe on a stage. Not as a singer, not as a dancer. I can't do any of those things. But I just loved musicals so much.”

Albernas, the Colombian-Puerto Rican daughter of Spanish Baptists, was less happy at home. 

“Unfortunately, I could not be my true authentic self around my mom and around my family, even though I lived 20 minutes away from the gayest place at that time.”

After graduating high school, Albernas at 17 left home and moved to Miami.

“I came down here for a weekend and was like, ‘Oh my God, this is where I need to be. I don't know what the hell I'm gonna do here, but this is where I need to be for sure.’

“I got a fake ID and I lived with some friends, what most people do when you move to Miami in the ‘90s and you're a pretty girl: I modeled and I bartended.

“I had [met] an incredible man. God rest his soul. … He was like, ‘Listen, if you want a job, here it is. If I ever see you consuming alcohol, you'll be out the door so quick that your head will spin.”

Her mentor had no idea she was already drinking. Albernas said that back then, there were “a lot of lost opportunities.”

“You know, I wasn't a good person. I know now that it was an addiction. When you are deep in your addiction, shame overcomes you and it makes you feel that it's all your fault and you're a horrible person. And I'm still working on that now.”

Always a smooth talker, Albernas in her early 20s got a job at Y100, working with DJ John “Footy” Kross on his morning show, Footy and the Chix @ Six. “They needed another chick,” Albernas said. “Now, in this woke concept, that wouldn’t be OK. But at the time it was OK, right?”

Despite her budding radio career, Albernas’ personal life led her to leave South Florida and eventually work in California and New York. 

“Initially, there were conversations about me being straight. Or maybe not disclosing my sexuality, better yet. It wasn’t done in a disrespectful way, but it was just alluded to. That was something I didn’t want to do anymore, either. And when I went to San Francisco and New York, I didn't have to. I got to be just Fay, dating women and having a great time.”

Before moving to San Francisco in 2007, Albernas said she kept separate “my gay world and my straight world.”

“To move to San Francisco and see those two worlds be one was so nurturing and wonderful and loving. But it's also where my alcoholism began to get kind of out of control, unfortunately. I was left to my own devices and having a lot of cash. And those are two things that are not great.”

Fay Hits Rock Bottom 

Albernas then worked a few years at Univision in New York. In 2011, she moved back to California with her partner at the time.

“By then, my alcoholism was full-blown and awful. We go to LA. I can’t even remember the radio station I worked for. It was so short-lived and it was a fog, unfortunately. I always say I missed Obama’s best years because I don’t remember.”

Soon after they arrived in Los Angeles, Albernas’ partner dumped her. 

“She had to think of herself. I know that now. Then I didn’t understand that. She left me in the middle of Hollywood, California,” Albernas said. “My friends from South Florida said, ‘Listen, you can’t stay here anymore. You’re going to die here. You don’t know many people here. You don’t even go out anymore. It came to the point that I would ask somebody, ‘Could you call my phone to see if it works’ because it wouldn’t ring or text for weeks. At that point, I had turned everybody away. It wasn’t that people abandoned me. It was just that I was no fun anymore.”

Albernas returned to South Florida in 2012. “My cousin and my friend went and packed up my shit, drove my car here at the time and offered me a job on Power 96, here, overnight. I said, ‘Look, it's a job and I get to come back home and I know people. Why not?’ she said. “My alcoholism is full-blown, way out of control, but I'm gonna come back home because I think that geographically that might change how bad my life is. 

“I took another two years of living on my brother's futon on South Beach before I hit rock bottom, face first,” she said. “I can't do this anymore. I wanna die. I wanna die. I wanna die. I would wake up mad because God woke me up. What a crazy dynamic I had going on by the end of it.

“By the end of my alcoholism, I was stuttering. I was having three seizures a week. Sometimes less, sometimes more. … I wasn't eating by that point, by the end of it. I would have coffee and some fruit and I would wake up to five shots of vodka with my coffee.”

Desperate, Albernas turned to Alcoholics Anonymous. 

“I wish I could tell you that right then and there I got sober. I picked up about 45 white chips. A white chip is something that you pick up the first time that you go and you start your sobriety journey. You pick up a white chip to denote your surrender,” Albernas said.

“I would get three days and relapse. I would get five days and relapse. I would get four weeks and relapse. I would get a couple of months and relapse. It just took time and tenacity. These people hold you accountable. … It caught on. Some people say I drank the Kool-Aid and that might be so, but my alcoholism got me into the AA rooms, but the fellowship kept me there.

“For a couple of years I had to change only one thing: everything. So I got rid of people, places and things. I stopped talking to people that were toxic and that meant a lot of my gay boys, unfortunately. A lot of my gay boys I did drugs and alcohol with. That was part of our love for each other. And when I was getting sober, I said I would never get on a stage again. I would never get in front of a microphone again because I was never going to be funny again. Right? I was probably never gonna hang out with gay boys again because, you know, right, they all do drugs, right?” 

Albernas says she hasn’t had a drink in nearly a decade.

“My sober date is 11-28-2014,” she said. “Here at nine years of sobriety, I sit with you a completely different person than I was year one.”

In the months after she stopped drinking, Albernas “needed to focus on my sobriety.”

“That came first. Everything has to come secondary when you’re working on your sobriety. I know it sounds selfish, but it has to be.”

She regularly attended AA meetings and became active at Unity on the Bay church near downtown Miami. “I’m [still] very, very, very committed to them. I host their Sunday Celebration Services.”

Fay Finds Love 

In 2015, “after a lot of prodding,” a friend convinced her to attend a house party. There, she met Teresa Albernas, a nurse practitioner at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami.

“She was with somebody else, interestingly enough. … We crossed paths there and she thought I was funny and I thought she was fun. That was that,” Albernas said. “Soon after, a friend put together a group of women that were going to start doing day things. Stay away from clubs and stuff like that. They wanted to do art exhibits and go to movies. I said, ‘Oh wow, this is totally up my alley.’ And some of the women were sober. Not through AA, they were just people that didn’t drink. I wanted to be a part of that group and Teresa was part of that group, as well.”

Fay and Teresa became good friends. 

“And we made each other laugh. And we texted. I loved that she was a mom. Her kids were grown. I loved that she was a nurse and had so many different degrees. The woman has 10 degrees! She loves school. She’s back in school right now. We couldn’t be more different. I love musicals, she hates them. I love crowded places, she hates crowded places. I love Italian food. Guess what? She hates Italian food.”

Albernas said one day while showering she thought to herself, “Why can’t I meet someone like Teresa?”

“At that moment, I looked up at the sky and said, ‘Oh, my God, is it Teresa?’”

Teresa Albernas was equally smitten with Fay.

“My very first impression, I have to admit, I was intimidated because she was just an intimidating presence. And she's just gorgeous,” Teresa said.

Teresa recalls their early times together a bit differently, that the women they socialized with did like to drink.

“At the time [Fay] was very newly sober. I don't think she had been sober for maybe four or five months. So she was hesitant about going out herself,” Teresa said. “We're talking about a group of girls that everybody was drinking and we were out partying and having fun. It was just that kind of setting.”

Teresa said she marveled at how Fay managed to stay the course.

“She was not drinking. She was keeping to her program,” Teresa said. “And as I got to know that about her, it even impressed me more because you’ve got to have some special kind of willpower to be around this and not want to drink or resisting the urge to give into that.”

The women moved in together and fell in love. About three years later, Teresa proposed marriage.

“We took one of those little mini weekend cruises and I was just a mess,” Teresa said. “I've never asked anybody to marry me. I asked her to marry me on the cruise ship. She was eating bread pudding and she dropped her bread pudding. She said she never expected to get married, but she said yes.”

Fay became “a second mom” to Teresa’s children, daughter Alli, now 25, and son Mark, 23.

Fay, Teresa and fur family on their way to Miami Shores Pride. Photo via Facebook.

Fay Opens Up 

Two years ago, the couple faced another crisis together: Fay learned she had breast cancer.

Fay is as fierce and open about that illness as she is about alcoholism.

“I lost my boobs, a double mastectomy,” she said. “I don't want to be a poster child for breast cancer, either. But guess what? If that's what the universe wants me to do, I'm gonna do it and I'm gonna do it looking good.”

Despite her public bravado, Fay suffered greatly in private, according to Teresa.

“She came home and was kind of a mess for a while. Obviously, it was not an easy thing,” Teresa said. “You know, there's a sense of loss. But I told her that at the end of the day, you have to remember you didn't lose your life. You didn't have to go through major treatment. Some follow up with doctors and aside from your boobs, you're alive and well.”

Albernas is candid about almost everything in her life. Almost. There’s one topic she’s not very comfortable talking about. Her age.

“Agism is real. And no one beats themselves up more about that than women. That’s something I can’t say I’ve completely won over,” said Albernas, who turned 49 on Dec. 19. “I don’t tell people that. It’s not part of the conversation because of the agist platform that we live in, especially gay men. A man wants to stay a twink forever and he can’t past 30. Why not?”

Another thing Fay’s fans don’t know about her: “How cheap she is,” according to Teresa.

“I think people would be surprised,” Teresa said. “She’ll tell you that her dress is from Goodwill and she paid $8 for it. She’s very frugal. I think it comes from her having been homeless at one time when she was drinking. It comes from that feeling of lack, of not having.”

These days, Teresa and Fay keep hectic schedules. That includes running their dog boarding and rescue business called Fay’s Fur Family. 

“That’s what I did when I got sober. That’s how I fed myself. That’s how I paid my bills,” Fay said. “The business is still active, but now it’s just the most spoiled [animals]. Our pups have become family. Today, I woke up to a lot of dogs around me. I have to make sure they’re all fed and clean.”

Teresa said Fay cares deeply for animals.

“We have two cats and we have two dogs, a Pomeranian and a little mixed German shepherd that we rescued,” Teresa said. “He was next door and the people left him in the yard. He’s a super, super anxious dog. He didn't like anybody. He's come around. And when she had her breast cancer, he didn't leave her side. That dog was right next to her the whole time. So she's super bonded with him.”


Photo by Carina Mask; Design by Julie Palmer 

Fay Embraces Activism 

Recently, Fay has become very outspoken about queer politics and trans-rights issues. Until late 2016, she didn’t pay much attention.

Then, she said, “Trump happened.”

“Listen, I'm a bit shameful to tell you this, but I wasn't an avid voter. I wasn't an avid person that knew about politics. I honestly never thought we'd be able to get married, right? I was the people that I scream at today. I was that person,” Albernas said. “All of a sudden, we get Trump. And all of a sudden our rights are threatened. And all of a sudden our black and brown trans sisters are fucking getting killed every day. And it's like, ‘Oh my God, was this all happening when I was drunk?’ I didn't know and I felt like I had to make up for lost time.”

She met and got to know Herb Sosa, director and CEO of Miami’s Hispanic LGBTQ-equality group Unity Coalition|Coalición Unida.

During the early days of Covid, Unity Coalition launched UCTV, “a community bridge for programming and connecting with our community during an unimagine time during a world pandemic,” Sosa said.

Albernas helped him start UCTV, which streamed on YouTube and Facebook Live.

“She was instrumental, one of our initials hosts with UCTV during the pandemic,” Sosa said. “She also served on our board for a brief time. She was energetic, effervescent and liked by many in our community.”

Two-and-a-half years ago, producers at the fledgling Happening Out Television Network took notice and hired Albernas.

“We’re a nonprofit organization, so for her that means 60 hours a week,” said Loli, the network’s vice president.

She is a regular anchor on Happening Out’s Queer News Tonight, which streams nightly from a studio at Sunshine Cathedral in Fort Lauderdale. It was during one broadcast that Albernas bonded with Tony Lima, CEO and executive director of SunServe, a Wilton Manors-based organization that provides support and mental health services for LGBTQ+ people in South Florida.

“We had a lot of chemistry on air,” Lima said. "We started to build this great friendship.”

Lima, the onetime executive director of queer-rights group SAVE LGBTQ, said Albernas believes in second chances and that they often attend late-night community events together.

“I don’t wake up before 10 [a.m.],” Albernas said. “I’m sorry. I don’t feel the need to, unless there’s a meeting or something I need to do. But I’m also out, usually, until midnight. So I give myself that pass.”

Albernas, who on social media often hashtags posts with #GayBoysGiveMeLife, also hosts her own daily show on Happening Out Television.

“The FayWhat?! Show is done completely in her bed,” Loli said. “The joke is that if you want gay boys to interact with you in the morning, they’re still asleep, so she gets into bed with them.”

Her recent bedmates include gay porn director Chi Chi LaRue. (Among the topics: their sobrieties, LaRue’s drag career and dead porn stars.)

Last year, readers of the old South Florida Gay News named Albernas their Favorite Television Personality.

“The more successful that Fay becomes, the more successful the network becomes and the more successful Fay becomes,” Loli said.

Journalist Steve Rothaus covered LGBTQ issues for 22 years at the Miami Herald. @steve.rothaus on Threads.