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About
From The Onion and Reductress contributor, this collection of essays is a hilarious nostalgic trip through beloved 2000s media, interweaving cultural criticism and personal narrative to examine how a very straight decade forged a very queer woman
Today's gay youth have dozens of queer peer heroes, both fictional and real, but former gay teenager Grace Perry did not have that luxury. Instead, she had to search for queerness in the (largely straight) teen cultural phenomena the aughts had to offer: in Lindsay Lohan's fall from grace, Gossip Girl, Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl," country-era Taylor Swift, and Seth Cohen jumping on a coffee cart. And, for better or worse, these touch points shaped her adult identity. She came out on the other side like many millennials did: in her words, gay as hell.
Throw on your Von Dutch hats and join Grace on a journey back through the pop culture moments of the aughts, before the cataclysmic shift in LGBTQ representation and acceptance-a time not so long ago, which many seem to forget.
Today's gay youth have dozens of queer peer heroes, both fictional and real, but former gay teenager Grace Perry did not have that luxury. Instead, she had to search for queerness in the (largely straight) teen cultural phenomena the aughts had to offer: in Lindsay Lohan's fall from grace, Gossip Girl, Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl," country-era Taylor Swift, and Seth Cohen jumping on a coffee cart. And, for better or worse, these touch points shaped her adult identity. She came out on the other side like many millennials did: in her words, gay as hell.
Throw on your Von Dutch hats and join Grace on a journey back through the pop culture moments of the aughts, before the cataclysmic shift in LGBTQ representation and acceptance-a time not so long ago, which many seem to forget.
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Reviews
"Laugh-out-loud… Perry's casual, off-the-cuff charm and astute analyses mark her as a talented new voice."
Publishers Weekly
"Millennials grew up in such a chaotic cultural moment but it all seemed inevitable and normal because we had nothing to compare it to, and Grace's witty and honest book helped me appreciate just how uniquely bizarre a time it was. It's mind-blowing to see that I wasn't the only weird teen girl who did the weird teen girl things I did. It's fun to look back with her guidance. Her writing is so hon
Anna Drezen, co-head writer of SNL, author of How May We Hate You?
"It's easy now, in hindsight, to conceive of early-aughts American pop culture as trashy, and unenlightened, and it definitely sometimes was, but with The 2000s Made Me Gay, Grace Perry reexamines the decade's offerings and identifies what made them so compelling and so fun"
and yes, so gay. Tender, funny, and as bingeable as its source material."