In Conversation with Hugh Ryan
When I think about the 90s, I remember my purple, teal, and magenta childhood, and I remember the big kids I envied. How lucky they were, I thought. Grunge was for them. Lilith Fair, for them. I turned thirteen in 2000, started high school the week before 9/11. I missed the 90s just in time for the worst of times. I couldn’t help but wonder: did the bad timeline start with TRL? The death of Aaliyah?
Hugh Ryan’s memoir, My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond, made me realize that I had more in common with the big kids than I realized. The queer ones, anyway. We shared analog childhoods only to risk it all to meet someone online, to try to find our community and our individuality at the same time. “When I talk to queer teens now,” Ryan writes, “and they tell me they long for the 90’s, I think, We’ve failed you. We’ve let the guilty erase themselves from history. And that includes us. Me. I think about all the mistakes I made, and the people I hurt, as I tried to untwist myself from the knot those years tied me into. We want the past without the pain.”
I talked to Ryan about how he brought back the past with the pain, and how writing the memoir helped to heal it. —Natalie Adler
NATALIE ADLER You call us a “limbo generation.” The first thing we learned about sex was AIDS; the first thing that we learned about being gay was AIDS, this culture of death. As you were writing this book, what did it help you unlearn?
HUGH RYAN I think I say this in the book, that AIDS at the time was sort of like Bloody Mary. If you bring it up too much, it’ll come into the room. I think I’ve felt that way about all of the 1990s subconsciously; you know, “it’s better not to talk about that.”
Honestly, so many versions of the 1990s on TV screens don’t feel real. And they feel fake in a pernicious way, where everything is papered over and cleaned up and everybody gets to have been good. There are nebulous bad homophobes outside the like purview of whatever book or movie you’re watching, but they are bad. Just plain bad. We need no complications about them. If I don’t bring these things back into my consciousness and address them directly, then it gets to stay like that. Everyone gets to be good. The truth is, everyone is bad, including us.
NA Also, congrats on writing perhaps the first gay memoir that doesn’t use the second person to alienate yourself from your own subject matter.
HR That’s all my brother, saving me from that. He’s a brilliant editor. I gave it to my parents once the text was locked. And they read it. And I know they read it because for the next couple times I saw my mom, she at some point during the evening would start crying and hug me and tell me how much they loved me. And they have supported it, as has my entire family, but still haven’t really talked deeply about it. It’s just not who we are.
NA On that note, I want to talk about Ireland. You write about your grandmother, who is 12 or 14, in a ditch with a gun. Do you think, in any way, that her family’s history in the Republic on the border gave them the possibility to understand that people could be oppressed?
HR Yes. I didn’t know of words like “postcolonial” when I was a kid, but that was absolutely the mindset my family approached the world through. Like, my mother’s first reaction to 9/11 was to say, this is the British’s fault — you know? My mother wrote her whole PhD dissertation on how the Catholic Church ruined education in Ireland. One of the hardest things for my parents now is that in the early 2000s, they were those boomers who went to all those big nostalgia rock concerts and felt that their generation was great. And now they’re in their 80s and they’re like, “we ruined the world.” I don’t want to make them feel bad, but they’re not wrong. And talking about it doesn’t make it worse. That’s the thing I have to keep reminding myself, that talking about things is not bad.
NA That’s the work of the book, I think. You know, looking at the stuff that we don’t really want to remember or think about so clearly. You take a hard eye on questions of visibility. For many queer people, the most important thing is visibility. But I think a lot of us also grew up thinking: “I don’t want them to see me.” And I still go back and forth. Like, do we have more freedom when we aren’t visible, when we’re only visible to each other? Is it better or worse that MasterCard is a queer ally? The more you get taken into that world, the more you have to live by its rules.
HR There’s also this thing that happens in the 90s, where it was so important to promote visibility when there really was none. The 90s were the last time where selling out was a concern, before you’re supposed to be a brand. When visibility stopped being “we want more roles in TV shows, we want to be able to be out and have a life” and became about surveillance, being constantly literally visible. You are watched at all times. And that’s happening to everyone, not just queer people.
NA You talk about life beyond the L, the G, the B, the T, perhaps not the Q. Have you ever seen the TikTok where this woman says, “as a member of the ’eligibility’ community” [read: LGBT community], and then looks up at an overhead light, and says, “I will never turn on that light.” Maybe one thing that social media has done is make queerness less about who you’re having sex with and more about whether or not you can endure the overhead lighting. We’re in this very Weimar moment where things are trending fascism, but we’re also the queerest and loosest we’ve ever been with all of it. Are you scared? How are you feeling?
HR Absolutely terrified. Can I give you a long answer that goes back to the 19th century? I think we’re in a pretty unprecedented moment, but not in a unique one. It’s happened once before in American history. I think that the way in which we live in a fundamental way has changed a little rapidly, not just queer people, but, like, the way that we as a society live. In the 19th century, America urbanizes. As urbanization happens, we start getting a mass culture. The folks who we would call gender normative homosexuals today start to become a lot more visible to one another. And we start to think differently. We start to have marriages that are meant to be compassionate, not economic. We start to have newspapers and mass cultures that poke fun at everyone. You know, they make fun of the drunken Irish paddy. That becomes a stereotype, travels the world. It happens with the gays, too, and the lesbians. But as that happens… all the anti-urban forces (it’s always anti urbanism, isn’t it?) are growing. They’re also against immigration; they’re anti-Semitic; they’re against the gays; they’re against miscegenation; they’re against education for women. They’re against all of these social networks that are enabled by cities. And that kind of grows and grows and grows as we’re getting the growth of what it means to be gay. Eugenics is basically the antithesis of urbanization. It’s against immigration, it’s against all this stuff.
World War II is kind of the moment where this all gets settled. In the lead up to World War II, there are all these groups around the country trying to decide what it means to be gay. Is your body physically different or are you different in your head? World War II happens. We put eugenics on the Nazis. We say eugenics is bad. We say biological determinism is bad. We spread the idea of homosexuality as being in your mind and through your experiences. And we have this new way of thinking. This continues throughout the 20th century. These are the rules you and I grew up under.
The internet comes in the late ’90s — and cell phone technology — and reimagines how we live, again. We are living in the moment where the first children who never knew the pre-internet world are becoming adults. This is the moment where the clash happens again. Conservatives are out there thinking “Oh my God, we can smash and get rid of all the trans people.” But it’s actually the change in our world and our broader culture that is creating those ways we identify. Kids today need to define what it is they’re experiencing in order to find other people online. You don’t just go to a gay bar and run into a whole bunch of people who are all doing different things. You can type in, “I don’t feel like a boy” — or whatever else. It’s not that they’re being indoctrinated into being trans; they have a different way of accessing information, a different prism on themself. They think they can cut queer people out of the world, that we’re unnatural, and that we have convinced ourselves that things that aren’t true, that we’re encouraging social contagion, all of that stuff. But it’s the world that has changed and has changed queer people with it. These people can make our lives miserable, which they will, and they can kill a lot of people, which they will. They’ll lose in the end, because they don’t understand the fight they’re having. They’re fighting us when what has changed is the world.
NA There’s sort of a liberal urge to quote the arc of the moral universe swinging towards justice. The liberal understanding is that this is naturally what happens, as opposed to endangered people fighting really hard for their right to survive.
You start off the book with an assessment of these kids who came of age with the internet, who were able to Google “Am I gay?” or literally take a quiz. There’s the lesbian master doc. Do we envy them? Has it gotten better? Well, no, because look at the world that we’ve handed to them.
HR What we have done, I think, is hit that note of visibility. There is visibility in essential ways, not just surface ways. But we didn’t provide a world in which they had job security or a planet they could live on. Capitalism is a smart monster. It recalibrates itself to everything, right? And the revolutionary instincts in queerness, which are there, and are undeniable — capitalism has figured out a way to morph itself to live within that. What is it that we actually want in the world? That’s a question that most of the movement stopped asking. I think the movement stopped asking because the people who were asking were very busy.
NA You describe a common experience for the young queer left, which is doing direct service and then getting burned out. We all have our moment where we’re like: I don’t even know if I’m helping anymore, I don’t know if it’s possible to improve this world that we’re living in. What do you want the youth to take away from this book?
HR I think so much of what they are denied is possibility. Oh, your world is ending, right? And you’re never gonna have a job. You have no security, right? And anything you do will be put online and you’ll be judged for it. So much of my life was lived in spaces where no one cared what happened to me and that was bad in its own way, but it meant that I had the freedom to fuck up and return from it and figure out what I wanted or meant. That’s what I want kids to walk away with: Actually, you could fuck up really badly, and it could be okay. You can apologize and really mean it. You can apologize and let other people apologize to you; you can decide that relationships are worth it or not worth it. I am not a role model in any sense, except that I fucked up a lot and kept going.