Reviews with content warning for Cancer - The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

Grace Perry's The 2000s Made Me Gay is a collection of short essays about the pop culture that shaped Perry as a queer millenial. Navigating identity through pop culture that is largely cis-gendered and heteronormative has an impact, and Perry does so with humour and a certain self-awareness that while somewhat depricating (in the best way possible), is enviable. Open and honest, 2000s Made Me Gay is open and honest in a way that feels like a celebration of not only the pop culture media that would be by modern standards 'problematic' but queer identity as well.

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criticalgayze's review

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funny informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

While the writing in this book was a little more mid-tier pop culture blog than is my personal taste, as a fellow Queer millennial, I found the subject matter Perry dove into to be VERY relatable. Finding someone spotlighting and validating so many of my own cultural touchstones, like "Glee!" and the "Dumbledore is gay" scandal of the aughts, was akin to the way cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib elevates "scene" music in his collection They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us. Even when Perry is talking about a property that I didn't engage with as a kid ("Gossip Girl" and "The L Word"), I was almost always able to substitute in my feelings for a similar property ("Degrassi: TNG," "90210," and "Queer as Folk").

I think this one is a must read for the rest of my Queer millennials with shit to unpack.

Quotes:
Pop culture might be an escape from real life, but I haven't been able to escape pop culture itself. It's glommed onto my psyche, it's shaped my view of myself, my reality, my body, my sexuality, as it has for most people: when we ride the subway in quiet hope for a meet cute, or we huff, frustrated at our hair for not flowing like Harry Styles's, or shame ourselves for not having a large group of hot friends with standing plans at the same bar every Friday night. (11 - 12)
But I think singling out my Catholic ethics class, or those all-school masses, or my CCD classes as the place where I inherited negative ideas about queerness lets the secular world of the 2000s off way too easy. (65)
There are moments when I feel so gay that I've been stripped of any nuance, my defining cracks smoothed such that I am a plastic Easter egg indistinguishable from any other pastel orb in the garden. (82)
That's the thing about being a queer millennial: it's not about things getting better in any linear fashion but holding a painful past and an optimistic future together, one in each hand, at the same time. (227)

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hmatt's review against another edition

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funny hopeful informative lighthearted reflective medium-paced

4.0

Did I, in fact, read two essay collections/memoirs in one month about how pop culture in the naughties intersected and impacted the queer (really, sapphic) coming-of-age of a white, American now-journalist? Why, yes I did, and it was a little confusing, but I think it was a good decision to read them together.

I'd say both this and Jill Gutowitz's Girls Can Kiss Now share similar highlights and pitfalls for me, though I personally enjoyed this one more. I appreciated the additional "academic" edge to these essays - that is, the author makes more space to explain the historical and culture context behind each pop culture phenomenon, and she cites her sources more clearly (I read Gutowitz's in audio, though, and some of that could have been omitted due to format). IMO, the added context makes more space in the work for folks who are reading outside of their own experience (i.e. it doesn't feel as much like the author is writing inside jokes for those "in the know"). I did still feel a bit alienated by some of the sweeping generalizations made in these essays, but I think that comes with the territory of reading such a narrow perspective.

One standout difference in the two collections is Perry's near-seamless weaving of her own personal experiences into the "theme" of each essay. I felt that almost all of the autobiographical portions of this essay collection served a purpose, and the collection itself was organized more masterfully than Gutowitz's.

I'm only a little sorry that this review is framed entirely as a comparison because, hello, they are literally the same book concept published within a year of one another.

Anyway here's the funniest line in the book (re: watching shady online streams of queer shows in the pre-Netflix era):

My thirst could weather all buffering.

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rorikae's review against another edition

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funny informative lighthearted reflective fast-paced

4.25

'The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture' by Grace Perry is a fun essay collection of Perry's reflections on her journey as a queer woman through the lens of 2000s pop culture. Perry goes through many popular pieces of culture from Glee and Taylor Swift to The L Word and The OC. As she investigates these different pieces of pop culture, she also recounts her own experience as a teenager exploring her sexuality and how these pieces of pop culture affected how she saw her identity.
I thoroughly enjoyed this collection and learning more about Perry. As someone who grew up during the early 2000s and is close in age to Perry, I knew most of the pieces of culture that Perry talks about in her essays. Contemporary culture is investigated less in essay collections than older pieces of culture and so it was refreshing to read about television shows, celebrities, and music that I have a personal connection with. I highly recommend this collection, especially if you are someone who grew up in the 2000s and has a personal connection to these pieces of popular culture.

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courtneyfalling's review

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emotional funny hopeful lighthearted fast-paced

4.0

This whole book felt like a comfy hug and gave me nostalgia for my freshman year of college, when I was first really coming into queer friendships, relationships, and community, and doing a lot of it through pop culture! I recognized some of the media discussed, I haven't seen others, and all of the chapters were enjoyable. The tone overall was very "it gets better" on an individual scale and "it's getting better" on a grand, societal scale, which... I agree that millennials have a distinct vantage point and queer representation is becoming quantitatively more common, but liberal rights discourses alone don't make me personally feel like I've had or am having any easier a time coming of age as a currently early-twenties lesbian, and I'm a white, highly femme-presenting person with a comfortable class and education background, this is so much materially worse for folks who experience heightened vulnerability and oppression based on their own multiple marginalizations, especially Black, Latinx, and Indigenous trans women. So.... idk. It was lighthearted, often funny, and cozy as a memoir, and I would recommend it to friends for that comfort, but the analytical frame and place within queer theory and criticism didn't really hold up.

Spoiler

Also, I do want to know if Claire okayed this story... like did she end up coming out years later? Even if not, did she proofread the chapter where she appears to make sure no heavy, unwanted identifying information was present? Did/does she even know this story including her is out there? This comes back to a larger discussion of the ethics of writing nonfiction, in the era of Kidney Girl, but I had to think about this.

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reading_between_the_trees's review

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emotional funny informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

This book got me. Perry put into words so many things that have shaped who I am without me even realizing it. The book covers a very specific set of media, but if you were consuming it at the time it came out, you were being influenced in a very specific way. It was like the puberty of queer media- when it was starting to become socially acceptable to portray queerness, but not so much that it was done overtly or correctly. Instead, it was done in a confusingly suppressed way that warped the brains of all the queer tweens watching.

Some highlights of the book were Perry's description of the layered closet, where she describes the various stages of coming out to yourself and then to others. Other great chapters were the one connecting the Taylor Swift songwriting framework to U-haul Dyke culture, the one absolutely calling out JKR for her half-assed admission of Dumbledore being gay, and the entire chapter on Disney's attempt to just take the parts they wanted from queerness for their characters.

But my favorite part of the book was where Perry flips the quintessential gay question "do I want to be them or be with them?" from a realization of your sexuality to a realization of your gender: "do I want to be with them or do I want to be them?". Reading that was a "aha moment" for me in understanding my own sexuality. I would definitely recommend this book for anyone who was conscious for even part of the 2000s. Whether you're queer or not, this will give you a whole new look at some very familiar media from that time.

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readalongwithnat's review

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lighthearted reflective medium-paced

4.0

I found this collection of essays to be very relatable as a white, Midwestern queer.

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sofiarmz13's review

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emotional funny hopeful inspiring lighthearted reflective medium-paced

5.0

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