MY BAD

A bracing memoir-history of the queer 1990s.

Historian Ryan (When Brooklyn Was Queer, 2019) returns to the decade that shaped him, less to reclaim than to audit it. The 1990s, he argues, will be remembered as a hinge moment: the last era of gay ghettos and the first in which marriage and the mainstreaming of queer culture came into view. Ryan is a skeptic. Although he compares his memories to a pair of “well-worn pajamas,” nostalgia, here, is less a glow than a pressure system. Ryan’s early chapters trace a childhood shaped by the AIDS panic and casual cruelty, where classmates taught him that light blue sneakers and limp wrists were “gay,” and a beloved Spanish teacher institutionalized homophobia by cataloging gay slurs across the Latin world. When he comes out to his parents, his mother, all too predictably, frets that he’s chosen a life of loneliness. But the book widens steadily, following Ryan into the early internet with its safe queer spaces, and into New York’s glittering ’90s club culture, where superclubs like the 80,000-square foot Tunnel and cafés like the Big Cup in Chelsea helped forge a sense of community before queer people came “flooding into the mainstream.” What distinguishes Ryan’s account is his refusal to sanctify the world he describes. Queerness emerges here as a “fickle blessing,” offering access and exposure in equal measure. The later chapters reckon with bad sex, blurred consent, and class precarity, tracing the moral improvisation required of a generation that learned intimacy without a script. Assimilation brings safety, but at the cost of hollowed-out subcultures.

A clear-eyed reckoning with a decade that promised freedom and delivered transformation, unevenly and at a price.