The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

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

A Lambda Literary Award Finalist

Honest, funny, smart, and illuminating." --Anna Drezen, co-head writer of SNL

If you came of age at the intersection of Mean Girls and The L Word: Read this book." --Sarah Pappalardo, editor in chief and co-founder of Reductress

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.

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Published: 06/01/2021
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.5lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.30w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9781250760142


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 04/15/2021
Publishers Weekly 04/19/2021
Library Journal 05/01/2021 pg. 84
Booklist 05/15/2021 pg. 4
Shelf Awareness 06/25/2021

About the Author
GRACE PERRY's work has been published in a variety of outlets, including The New Yorker, New York magazine's The Cut, BuzzFeed, Outside, and Eater. She is also a longtime, regular contributor to The Onion and the feminist satire site Reductress. Most of her work, comedy and journalism alike, interrogates the intersection of queerness, pop culture and the internet. She lives in LA.