Read This, Listen to That: The 2000s Made Me Gay by Grace Perry and You’re Wrong About
When making my list of favorite books I read in 2021, Grace Perry’s The 2000s Made Me Gay made the cut. I really enjoyed the collection of essays. Before I go any further, I am older than Perry. I am not the same gender as Perry. I am not gay. I really enjoyed the collection of essays. I’m only pointing this out because I do not think your enjoyment from the books is contingent on your gender, age or sexuality. In other words, you could have successfully avoided The O.C. until reading this book and still enjoy this book.
According to the publisher the book is, “a hilarious nostalgic trip through beloved 2000s media, interweaving cultural criticism and personal narrative to examine how a very straight decade forged a very queer woman.” I understand why that’s the selling point. But the book illustrates how 2000s media evolved into what we see today. Reading this book in the early 2020s, it’s somewhat difficult to remember just how progressive and popular Glee appeared not that long ago. It’s almost laughable how Katy Perry’s first hit has aged. The collection isn’t a series of “Hey, remember when this wacky thing happened?” type of essays.
The book is funny. The book acknowledges nostalgia. But it’s way more than just, “a hilarious nostalgic trip.” It made me want to ask Perry what helped her write the book. I like it and wanted to know what she likes. For this entry of Read This, Listen to That, she wrote about a podcast that’s most likely going to please any readers of her book.
Grace Perry: I spent the first half of 2020 alternately writing my book and binging You’re Wrong About. The latter is a podcast hosted by Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes (though, now it’s just Marshall), two journalists with a knack for reexamining major news stories of the past few decades. (Think: Tonya Harding, Iran-Contra, the Duke Lacrosse rape case, and yes, a dozen-plus episodes on O.J. Simpson.) Marshall and Hobbes’ debunking superpowers are rooted primarily in a) LexisNexis and b) empathy.
My book isn’t all that similar to this podcast. It’s an excavation of my own closeted, teenage psyche vis-à-vis aughts pop culture. But YWA’s thorough, compassionate reexamination of the not-so-distant past guided my own attempts at the same. Mainlining YWA reminded me to be kind to teenage me, to extend the empathy Marshall does to say, Amy Fisher or Tammy Faye Bakker, to my confused, babygay self. The show is a necessary reminder that humans are only capable of behaving based on available information (and needs, and norms, and values).