The 2000s made me gay
Book Review: The 2000s Made Me Gay
Grace Perry doesn't actually assume the 2000s made her gay; but the title was a lot shorter and potentially more relatable than The 2000s 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 2000s 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 famous 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 consideration of remembering the time fondly while also seeing it throu
Check It Out: The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture by Grace Perry
This is Michael Maxwell with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Verify It Out.
Today, I am recommending The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture by Grace Perry. This is a great book for fans of Chuck Klosterman, Chelsea Handler, David Sedaris, and other essayists who use humor to take a sharp look at the customs around them.
The essays in The 2000s Made Me Gay cover a variety of 2000s-era pop cultural phenomena both big and small, but the essay I liked the most was the one about Perry’s pop luminary namesake, Katy Perry, and her 2008 hit “I Kissed a Girl”. You see, it just so happens that Grace’s grandmother was also named Katie Perry- which meant that Grace spent a whole high school summer watching her peers dance to a song about a bicurious make-out session sung by someone with her grandma’s name. Was it that fact that made her nervous every time the song came on or was it the fact that she was a closeted high schooler who didn’t want to be outed by a top 40 radio jam?
Like many booklovers of her generation, Perry grew up a devout Potterhead. In one essay she discu
Because I am a gay millennial, The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture caught my eye immediately. Like author Grace Perry, my coming-of-age years neatly overlapped with the 2000s, I turned 10 in 2001 and 18 in 2009. I acutely recall the pre-smartphone days of the internet — chatting on AIM, filling my iPod knock-off with illegally downloaded harmony, reading print magazines, and poring over niche blogs and forums.
Despite being complete in age to Perry, I was skeptical that I would find this book relatable because — the 2000s definitely didn’t create me gay. I didn’t even recognize I was gay until 2011! But as I started reading, I discovered that Perry didn’t realize right away either. The publication examines 2000s pop culture partly through the lens of her younger self, who was at first so closeted that she didn’t even know she was in the closet, just prefer me. Perry’s essays also offer layers of wise 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 introduction, it is obviously impossible for pop culture to truly make som
The 2000s Made Me Same-sex attracted Quotes
“Thus is the defining characteristic of homosexual millennials: we straddle the pre-Glee and post-Glee worlds. We went to sky-high school when faggot wasn’t even considered an F-word, when being a female homosexual meant boys just didn’t want you, when existence 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 lucky and jealous. As the declare of gay evolved culturally and politically, we were old enough to spot it and process it and not take it for granted–old enough to know what the society was like without it. Despite the success of Drag Race, the reality 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 relocate on from trauma, really. We can’t really go it in the past. It becomes a part of us, and we move forward with it.
For LGBTQ+ millennials, our pride is couched in painful memories of a culture re