Hugh Ryan has made himself an invaluable repository of queer community history with his books When Brooklyn Was Queer and Women’s House of Detention. For his third act, he has turned his attention to another valuable story — his own. My Bad (Bold Type Books) is indeed everything the subtitle declares: “A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond.” Yes, we’re already historicizing the ’90s! There was a lot that was corny and cringey about that decade, but Ryan walked a particular path through those years. Growing up in a suburban Irish-American clan with parents who responded badly to his coming out, Ryan struggled his way through shame, bullying, and fear of AIDS to find his place among the gender-questioning freak-adjacent rebel-rebels.
This entertaining memoir establishes Ryan as a beguiling storyteller with a journalist’s eye for the telling detail and the historian’s knack for providing context. I’m a couple of generations older than he, and yet I recognized and shared many of the landmarks along his formative journey. In the absence of mainstream-media representation, searching for gay identity in the card catalogue of the library — check! (Ryan calls that activity “Dungeons & Dragons for one.”) Exploring anonymous sex in campus tearooms — check! The Big Cup as the hub for sober socializing in pre-internet Chelsea — yes! HX, Next, Tunnel, Limelight — yes! Short Mountain and other Radical Faerie sanctuaries as “laboratories for the future” — yes! Getting playa dust in every crevice at Burning Man — yup! Rose’s bar in Kreuzberg, Berlin’s hip and groovy neighborhood back in the day — yaaaas kween! There’s a particular pleasure to be had seeing a familiar landscape through someone else’s eyes.
Ryan is not exactly a stranger to me. He and I have met, we have friends in common, and he provided a warm endorsement for my own memoir (Daddy Lover God: a sacred intimate journey). But his perspective is quite different from mine — his initiation into gay life more turbulent, his gender dance more complicated, his education more hardcore academic (at Cornell, you couldn’t “have a conversation without citing Foucault”) — so I learned a lot. The book begins as a chatty chronology, and then some of the later chapters evolve into more formal, free-standing personal essays. “The Center Cannot Hold” covers the post-collegiate year Ryan spent working for a non-profit program for queer youth (he doesn’t name it but I assume he’s referring to the Hetrick-Martin Institute) where he learned all about ballroom culture and the ways race, class, and liberal politics intersected in those kids’ lives. And after many honest, hilarious/harrowing episodes of romantic and sexual exploits, the last chapter, “A Home at the Beginning of the Apocalypse” brings us into the present with a fascinating account of how he found himself in an enduring three-way relationship with two other men, sharing a Brooklyn tenement with three queer women and umpteen pets in the kind of co-housing situation many dream of but few sustain.
Readers younger than I will undoubtedly appreciate this “catalog of ‘90s anger” differently. You’ll catch GenX references that went over my head and moan/cheer over foibles and frolics outside of my experience. That’s really what we want from a memoir, isn’t it? A deep-dive into one person’s remarkable story that also allows us to pleasurably run our own home movies.
Reprinted with permission from https://donshewey.substack.com?utm_source=navbar&utm_medium=web
