My Bad

“Hugh Ryan – as a queer historian and storyteller – knows that we’re living in the present our past made possible, for better and worse. If we want a future, Ryan reminds us, we must realize that our ghosts aren’t ghosts; they’re a present that we must confront with what we’ve learned along the way.”

–Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives
“How did any of us survive the 90s? In My Bad, Hugh Ryan shows us how he made it out, with writing so intimate and honest and punched-up, reading it is like cutting class with the coolest weirdo in school, becoming instant best friends as your tough complaints give way to tenderness and heart. Deeply inspiring and a joy to read.”–Michelle Tea, author of Valencia

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

–Kirkus
“My Bad is a marvel of a book that twines a baby gay’s joyful hedonism with a historian’s breadth of vision. Hugh Ryan investigates the misadventures of his past selves with irresistible candor and enviable wit. It is a treat to follow Ryan as he rides the high highs and the low lows of the 90s and carves out his own, impossibly queer place in the world. And, by god, it’s simply hilarious–one of the memoirs that made me laugh out loud and wonder, did that really happen to him? Of course it did, and the rest is history.”–Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches
“Historian Hugh Ryan turns his powerful investigative attention to the queer self as shaped by the Nineties. My Bad is a fearless blend of memoir and history that treats mistakes as evidence: of desire, of survival, of how we got here. I saw my own life refracted through these pages, even as Ryan taught me to understand that history differently. Ryan joins the essential queer tradition of writers who turn memory, sex, and shame into a usable past.”–Garrad Conley, author of Boy Erased and All the World Beside
“Hugh Ryan trains his historical eye on his personal life and reveals not only himself, but the journeys of so many queer Gen-X folks. A fascinating read!”–Jeff Hiller, Emmy Award winner and author of Actress of a Certain Age
“Hugh Ryan’s My Bad is so good, I never wanted it to end. Set against the cultural backdrop of the 90s, Ryan takes us from the AOL chat rooms where queers found each other at the brink of the new millennium, to reckoning with the AIDS crisis as life-saving medications entered the scene, and all the dancefloors, bedrooms, and Greyhounds where he came of age in between. More than just a time capsule, Ryan’s stories are deeply personal and at turns heartbreaking and hilarious. This book is a gift for anyone who grew up feeling lost and hoping that somewhere out there, there were people waiting.”–Edgar Gomez, author of Alligator Tears and High-Risk Homosexual
“In My Bad, Hugh Ryan interweaves his knowledge of queer history with deeply personal and engaging storytelling, demonstrating how erasure and cruelty shaped not only the 90s but our collective sense of identity. As the LGBTQ+ community faces renewed threats and censorship spreads, this book is a powerful reminder of the enduring importance of preserving our history and sharing our stories.”–Elliot Page, actor and author of Pageboy
Reading My Bad was my blessing. With prose as rigorous and inviting as bell hooks’s, Hugh Ryan is our generation’s gay Howard Zinn, a people’s historian of the queer nineties (and beyond). Melding a masterful synthesis of theory with a profound vulnerability, each of Ryan’s essays in this memoir is a gift. My Bad is both a guide for evaluating how we survived our homophobic youths and a map for how we decolonize “the rest of the story.”–Steven Thrasher, author of The Viral Underclass and The Overseer Class

“Blending his excellent historical writing with personal experience, Ryan’s newest is a delicious, complex look at the decade we love to idealize.”

–them