My Bad

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.

• "In My Bad, Hugh Ryan interweaves his knowledge of queer history with deeply personal and engaging storytelling, demonstrating how erasure and cruelty shaped not only the 90s but our collective sense of identity. As the LGBTQ+ community faces renewed threats and censorship spreads, this book is a powerful reminder of the enduring importance of preserving our history and sharing our stories."
  Elliot Page, actor and author of Pageboy
• 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
• "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, author of Boy Erased and All the World Beside
• "My Bad is a marvel of a book that twines a baby gay’s joyful hedonism with a historian’s breadth of vision. Hugh Ryan investigates the misadventures of his past selves with irresistible candor and enviable wit. It is a treat to follow Ryan as he rides the high highs and the low lows of the 90s and carves out his own, impossibly queer place in the world. And, by god, it’s simply hilarious—one of the memoirs that made me laugh out loud and wonder, did that really happen to him? Of course it did, and the rest is history."
  Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches
• "Hugh Ryan trains his historical eye on his personal life and reveals not only himself, but the journeys of so many queer Gen-X folks. A fascinating read!"
  Jeff Hiller, Emmy Award winner and author of Actress of a Certain Age
• "Hugh Ryan’s My Bad is so good, I never wanted it to end. Set against the cultural backdrop of the 90s, Ryan takes us from the AOL chat rooms where queers found each other at the brink of the new millennium, to reckoning with the AIDS crisis as life-saving medications entered the scene, and all the dancefloors, bedrooms, and Greyhounds where he came of age in between. More than just a time capsule, Ryan’s stories are deeply personal and at turns heartbreaking and hilarious. This book is a gift for anyone who grew up feeling lost and hoping that somewhere out there, there were people waiting."
  Edgar Gomez, author of Alligator Tears and High-Risk Homosexual
• "Blending his excellent historical writing with personal experience, Ryan’s newest is a delicious, complex look at the decade we love to idealize."
  them
• "Bracing...A clear-eyed reckoning with a decade that promised freedom and delivered transformation, unevenly and at a price."
  Kirkus