My Bad : A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond by Hugh Ryan

Publishes 11 June 
 
A powerful and hilarious personal history that tells the true story of the queer ’90s and how it transformed queer life in the decades that followed.

The 1990s were a decade of transformation. Globalization reshaped geopolitics, and the rise of the World Wide Web revolutionized technology forever. As society shifted from the analog to the digital at the turn of the century, LGBTQ life changed profoundly. Increased visibility arrived, but at a heavy cost. 
 
In his most personal book yet, historian Hugh Ryan guides us through a pivotal decade for queer people and its aftershocks—from new breakthroughs in activism, to the early days of AOL chat rooms, and the eventual backlash to progress. Through the prism of his own experiences, Ryan maps how queer life transitioned from private to public in the late ’90s and early aughts, reshaping the challenges and possibilities LGBTQ people navigated in the new millennium. On a Greyhound bus headed to Burning Man and the glittery dance floors of clubs in Manhattan and Berlin, a timeless and all-too-common story emerges: how a young queer person chooses silence to protect himself—only to spend another beautiful, complicated decade undoing his shame. 
 
Funny, stylish, and deliciously nostalgic, My Bad reckons with the gains and setbacks of a decade that reshaped queer life forever. 
 
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“Deeply personal and engaging… A powerful reminder of the enduring importance of preserving our history and sharing our stories.” — Elliot Page
 
"How did any of us survive the 90s? In My Bad, Hugh Ryan shows us how he made it out, with writing so intimate and honest and punched-up, reading it is like cutting class with the coolest weirdo in school, becoming instant best friends as your tough complaints give way to tenderness and heart. Deeply inspiring and a joy to read." - Michelle Tea
 
Reading My Bad was my blessing. With prose as rigorous and inviting as bell hooks’s, Hugh Ryan is our generation’s gay Howard Zinn, a people’s historian of the queer nineties (and beyond). Melding a masterful synthesis of theory with a profound vulnerability, each of Ryan’s essays in this memoir is a gift. My Bad is both a guide for evaluating how we survived our homophobic youths and a map for how we decolonize “the rest of the story." -  Steven Thrasher
 
"Hugh Ryan — as a queer historian and storyteller — knows that we’re living in the present our past made possible, for better and worse. If we want a future, Ryan reminds us, we must realize that our ghosts aren’t ghosts; they’re a present that we must confront with what we’ve learned along the way." -  Saeed Jones
 
"Historian Hugh Ryan turns his powerful investigative attention to the queer self as shaped by the Nineties. My Bad is a fearless blend of memoir and history that treats mistakes as evidence: of desire, of survival, of how we got here. I saw my own life refracted through these pages, even as Ryan taught me to understand that history differently. Ryan joins the essential queer tradition of writers who turn memory, sex, and shame into a usable past." - Garrad Conley