Book review: 'My Bad' by Hugh Ryan

My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond by Hugh Ryan is a raw reckoning with the painful reality of growing up closeted at the end of the last millennium. Moving beyond the sanitized nostalgia that media sold back to Gen X and Millennials, Ryan delivers an unfiltered balance sheet of a generation caught between the pre-digital gay ghettos and the hyper-connected post-AIDS mainstream community.

Ryan’s book comes with a healthy dose of nostalgia, but instead of romanticizing the decade, he offers a more grounded, realistic look at the last days of analog youth. He doesn’t shy away from the warts and bumps in favor of stories of young love and supportive friend groups so common in movies today.

From Spanish to survival

A seasoned queer historian, Ryan masterfully pivots from sociological shifts to deeply personal scars. He vividly recounts his “last analog childhood” in suburban New York, capturing how easily those he trusted could crush his spirit. In one searing memory from seventh grade, a teacher responds to a classmate’s homophobia not with a reprimand, but by delivering a textbook lesson on the global Spanish slang terms for “faggot.” It is this ubiquitous, structural cruelty that Ryan refuses to let history erase while also tying it into the unintended lesson he took from the classroom: gays and lesbians are everywhere.

The prose is witty and unapologetically feral. Ryan chronicles his path through a glass closet, an Ivy League awakening, and a period in his early twenties where sex work functioned as both a cash cow and a form of self-harm. My Bad is fundamentally a story of survival and evolution. He brilliantly recounts his days working at an LGBTQ+ youth center when management pushed out the “problem” kids in favor of “respectability” (and, therefore, more funding), and charts that trend in the modern movement from the 90s to today.

Ryan documents how the downstream effects of 1990s dial-up chat rooms laid the groundwork for Gen Z’s expansive, post-binary understanding of desire, while also waxing nostalgic for the days before everyone was terminally online, staring at a screen. This isn’t a history book; it’s a revealing look at the truth.