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

Reviews tagging 'Homophobia'

The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture by Grace Perry

34 reviews

melaniekarin's review

emotional funny informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

3.5

Funny and touching memoir about growing up queer in the 2000s, all connected to queer and queer adjacent pop culture of the time. Especially enjoyed the essay on Katy Perry’s I Kissed A Girl.

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rileyharrell's review

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emotional funny informative lighthearted reflective fast-paced

4.0

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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.

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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autozone's review

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emotional funny informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.25

Overall, this book is a delight. So funny, nostalgic, and heartfelt. The only reason it’s a 4.25 and not a 5 is because I was disappointed that Perry did not bring up Ellen Degeneres’s rampant racism and classism that systemically harmed her previous employees when discussing her cultural and societal impact. Additionally, though Glee and its creator Ryan Murphy, is referenced frequently throughout the book, it is never mentioned that Murphy abused his employees - writing in storylines and plot points personal to the actors of Glee meant to humiliate and embarrass them.

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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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leahlovesloslibros's review

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emotional funny lighthearted reflective fast-paced

4.0

This book had the perfect amount of nostalgia for a millennial. I loved hearing about all of the different things that that the author felt were "gay coded" (or that were actually gay) in a time where I was growing up watching and listening to them as well. There were a few chapters I couldn't personally relate to because I didn't interact with the discussed media, but I was still at least aware of the basics surrounding those topics - enough that I could still enjoy that section of the book. The 2000s Made Me Gay was a fairly lighthearted read that I could easily listen to or read again.

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