Grace Perry's debut essay collection skillfully balances memoir and pop culture ruminations to illustrate how music, TV shows and movies helped and hindered her budding queer identity. Perry, a frequent contributor to the Onion, celebrates and challenges Disney Channel movies, Mean Girls, Moulin Rouge!, MTV's The Real World and Road Rules Challenge, The L Word, The O.C., Glee, Taylor Swift, Lindsay Lohan and more. Pop culture, she writes, has "glommed onto my psyche, it's shaped my view of myself, my reality, my body, my sexuality."
The dozen essays in The 2000s Made Me Gay are smart, thought-provoking, funny and deep-diving. "Harry Potter and the Half-Assed Gay Character" examines J.K. Rowling's problematic outing of Albus Dumbledore as gay. Rowling announced this at a live q&a three months after the final book was published, but this detail never appears in any of her Potter novels. The chapter "Cherry ChapStick" details the havoc created when the song "I Kissed a Girl" was released. For the first time, the author's peers were openly discussing lesbianism. Unfortunately, Perry writes, "I was so disconnected from my body and my own wants that I couldn't even come out to myself." In another chapter, Perry looks at how TV and movies always link losing one's virginity to falling in love. "If I could huff 'I Love You' sex out of a paper bag, I would," she writes. "But love is not integral to good sex."
Perry is a self-aware, original thinker with an off-center sense of humor and keen appreciation of pop culture. Her essays will make readers laugh and think. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant