Hugh Ryan + Sabrina Imbler: My Bad

Moderating this discussion is staff writer at Defector Sabrina Imbler. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

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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 profoundly changed too. 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.

Photo credit: M. Sharkey

Hugh Ryan is the award-winning author of When Brooklyn Was Queer (2019) and The Women’s House of Detention (2022). He teaches creative nonfiction in the MFA program at the Bennington Writing Seminars and runs the Queer History 101 Book Club with world-famous performer Peppermint.

Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Sabrina Imbler is a staff writer at Defector, a worker-owned site, where they cover creatures and the natural world. Their memoir How Far the Light Reaches, won a Los Angeles Times book prize in science and technology, and their chapbook Dyke (geology) was selected for the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Program. They live in Brooklyn.

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