2000s made me gay
Because I am a gay millennial, The s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture caught my eye immediately. Like author Grace Perry, my coming-of-age years neatly overlapped with the s, I turned 10 in and 18 in I acutely remember the pre-smartphone days of the internet — chatting on AIM, filling my iPod knock-off with illegally downloaded music, reading reproduce magazines, and poring over niche blogs and forums.
Despite being close in age to Perry, I was skeptical that I would discover this book relatable because — the s definitely didn’t make me gay. I didn’t even realize I was queer until ! But as I started reading, I discovered that Perry didn’t realize right away either. The book examines s pop culture partly through the lens of her younger self, who was at first so closeted that she didn’t even understand she was in the closet, just like me. Perry’s essays also verb layers of astute hindsight, exploring how certain pop culture tropes contributed to how closeted so many gay millennials were — and how they influenced what kind of gays we would eventually grow up to be.
As Perry notes in the intro
Small screen, big ideas
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This week, I had the pleasure of inhaling the book The s Made me Gay, as well as interviewing its author, the essayist and humor writer Grace Perry. (I’m hoping to do more interviews for the newsletter going forward). Within its first pages, I felt a wave of bittersweet nostalgia about the cultural touchstones it covers that align exactly with my age group: Mean Girls, Harry Potter, MTV culture, “girl power,” The O.C., sadboys, Glee, and more.
“Sharing a common set of references and jokes and theories about a show or book or film series is the entire point of fandom,” she writes late in the book. “Whenever someone makes a deep-cut 30 Rock reference, I perk up and feel instantly connected to them, as though watching Tina Fey’s seminal sitcom fifty times over means we are, on some level, the same.” That’s how I felt throughout much of The s Made Me Gay.
The book is also, true to its title, about Perry’s own experience with coming out and owning her queer identity, despite the often homophobic nature
The s Made Me Gay Quotes
“Thus is the defining characteristic of gay millennials: we straddle the pre-Glee and post-Glee worlds. We went to upper school when faggot wasn’t even considered an F-word, when being a lesbian meant boys just didn’t want you, when being nonbinary wasn’t even a remote option. We grew up without queer characters in our cartoons or Nickelodeon or Disney or TGIF sitcoms. We were raised in homophobia, came of age as the world changed around us, and are raising children in an age where it’s never been easier to be same-sex parents. We’re both fortunate and jealous. As the state of gay evolved culturally and politically, we were old enough to see it and process it and not seize it for granted–old enough to understand what the world was like without it. Despite the success of Drag Race, the existence of lesbian Christmas rom-coms, and openly transgender Oscar nominees, we haven’t moved on from the trauma of growing up in a culture that hates us. We don’t move on from trauma, really. We can’t really abandon it in the past. It becomes a part of us, and we move forward w
Book Review: The s Made Me Gay
Grace Perry doesn't actually consider the s made her gay; but the title was a lot shorter and potentially more relatable than The s Are to Blame for the Specific Kind of Gay Person I Am Today, an alternative Perry mentions in the book's introduction.
A witty and intriguing debut, Perry's essay collection, The s Made Me Gay, is more than meets the eye. At a glance, it seems to be a farcical look at early aughts pop culture and the queer representation — or lack thereof — it possessed. But a further dive into the essays collected in this book reveals a critical examination of the well-liked culture that many millennials grew up with, recognizing and identifying problematic themes as well as explaining the potential reasoning for them.
Perry goes further, though, acknowledging that although we can — and have — moved away from these problematic representations, we can also appreciate them for what they meant to us at the time and why we possess so much nostalgia for them. Instead of completely disregarding our past, Perry allows for the consid