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Biographical Note: "Bracing...A clear-eyed reckoning with a decade that promised freedom and delivered transformation, unevenly and at a price." -- KirkusReview Quotes: "At a time when nostalgia for the '90s is seemingly everywhere, My Bad places the decade into context ... with the intimate, funny rough language of your freakiest, funnest bestie." -- Michelle Tea, Los Angeles TimesReview Quotes: "Blending his excellent historical writing with personal experience, Ryan's newest is a delicious, complex look at the decade we love to idealize." -- themReview Quotes: 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, author of The Viral Underclass and The Overseer Class Review Quotes: "My Bad thus proves an entertaining and sharp-eyed personal history capturing a time where queer identity underwent transformative social change." -- The ObserverReview Quotes: "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, author of Valencia Review Quotes: "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, author of How We Fight for Our LivesReview Quotes: "A fantastic nostalgic glimpse at a bygone era that continues to inspire the present and the future." -- Bay Area ReporterReview Quotes: "Ryan's book comes with a healthy dose of nostalgia, but instead of romanticizing the decade, he offers a more grounded, realistic look at the last days of analog youth." -- 1 Minute CriticPublisher Marketing: 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. "Deeply personal and engaging... A powerful reminder of the enduring importance of preserving our history and sharing our stories." -- Elliot Page, actor and New York Times bestselling author of Pageboy 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. Review Citations:
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