THE 2000S MADE ME GAY

Essays that incorporate elements of 2000s pop culture to examine broader themes of queer identity and sexuality.

Longtime Onion and Reductress contributor Perry revisits the songs, movies, and TV shows she was drawn to as a closeted, Catholic adolescent in the Midwest. She examines them in order to explain her coming-out process, interspersing personal anecdotes with recaps of the plotlines and characters involved in the media that informed them. Her knowledge is extensive, running from The Real World to Harry Potter, Dawson’s Creek, The O.C., the Disney Channel, The L Word, Taylor Swift, and Glee—and beyond. Perry isn’t interested in dissecting 2000s pop culture or passing judgment. Rather, she analyzes how it shaped a generation of queer people despite the scarcity of actual LGBTQ+ representation. Perry deploys specific pop-culture phenomena to open up larger conversations about a variety of relevant topics—e.g., MTV’s programming and gender essentialism, Dumbledore’s sexuality and the problem of disingenuous representation, singer King Princess and the etymology of “coming out of the closet” and whether it is still a relevant framework. The author also turns her critical eye toward the ways in which queer viewers were drawn to queer-coded characters because of what they saw in themselves but also modeled themselves after those characters, in a long game of chicken or the egg. As sexuality and gender became better understood and celebrated in the late 2000s, pop culture reacted to the trend, but millennials straddle the divide. “We grew up without queer characters in our cartoons or Nickelodeon or Disney or TGIF sitcoms. We were raised in homophobia, came of age as the world changed around us, and are raising children in an age where it’s never been easier to be same-sex parents. We’re both lucky and jealous,” Perry writes, hopeful for the future in this post-Glee world.

A humorous and reflective journey of self-discovery via pop culture.