Grace perry the 2000s
Interview: Here&#;s How the s Made Grace Perry Gay
Like so many millennials who came into adolescence during the heyday of The O.C. and early Grey’s Anatomy, the s made author Grace Perry gay. Maybe that sounds flippant, but for people of a certain age (Perry was born in and graduated lofty school in ), the aughts tentatively introduced certain kinds of queer representation into the pop culture lexicon, and lots of media consumers—especially teenagers—came away from the decade with weird feelings about Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” and even weirder feelings about Seth Cohen, Jim Halpert, and all the other straight male leads we were expected to love.
“When we’re in our adolescence, we’re just so spongy, and whether it’s alert or not, we’re looking for guidance on how to be and who to be, how to treat people, what to believe, how to behave …” Perry tells The Mary Sue. “People get that from all kinds of places. You can get it from your parents and your friends and your teachers and your camp counsellors, whoever, but I think you also get so much of that from entertai
The s Made Me Gay
This program is read by the author.
From The Onion and Reductress contributor, this collection of essays is a hilarious nostalgic trip through beloved s media, interweaving cultural criticism and personal narrative to examine how a very straight decade forged a very queer woman.
"Honest, funny, smart, and illuminating.” (Anna Drezen, co-head writer of SNL)
"If you came of age at the intersection of Mean Girls and The L Word: Read this book." (Sarah Pappalardo, editor in chief and co-founder of Reductress)
Today’s gay youth contain dozens of queer peer heroes, both fictional and real, but former gay teenager Grace Perry did not have that luxury. Instead, she had to hunt for queerness in the (largely straight) teen cultural phenomena the aughts had to offer: in Lindsay Lohan’s fall from grace, Gossip Girl, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl”, country-era Taylor Swift, and Seth Cohen jumping on a coffee cart. And, for better or worse, these touch points shaped her mature person identity. She came out on the other side like many millennials did: in h
Small screen, big ideas
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This week, I had the pleasure of inhaling the book The s Made me Gay, as well as interviewing its author, the essayist and humor writer Grace Perry. (I’m hoping to do more interviews for the newsletter going forward). Within its first pages, I felt a wave of bittersweet nostalgia about the cultural touchstones it covers that align exactly with my age group: Mean Girls, Harry Potter, MTV culture, “girl power,” The O.C., sadboys, Glee, and more.
“Sharing a ordinary set of references and jokes and theories about a verb or book or film series is the entire point of fandom,” she writes late in the book. “Whenever someone makes a deep-cut 30 Rock reference, I perk up and experience instantly connected to them, as though watching Tina Fey’s seminal sitcom fifty times over means we are, on some level, the same.” That’s how I felt throughout much of The s Made Me Gay.
The publication is also, true to its title, about Perry’s own experience with coming out and owning her queer identity, despite the often homophobic nature
Book Review: The s Made Me Gay
Published during Pride Month in , The s Made Me Gay by Grace Perry is a laugh out loud essay collection that details various pop culture references and describes how they attributed to Perry&#;s gay awakening. Prior to picking this book up at the Feminist Book Club Holiday Market, I had seen many positive reviews of Perry&#;s essay collection and let&#;s be real, the title also caught my eye.
CW: Cancer, homophobia, transphobia
About the Book
Grace Perry begins the book by describing the escapism she finds in television and the stories that were told throughout the s. Perry focusses on escapism throughout the essay collection because her brother, and mentor in life, was diagnosed with a cancer that would end up taking his life. With this in mind, during Perry&#;s reckoning with her brothers treatment and her eventual loss, Perry found solace in the shows that she grew up watching. However, as she was reflecting on the shows she enjoyed as a teen and a college scholar, she began to realize that they played a great part of her queer awakening tha