My Bad – Hugh Ryan’s Book on the Transformation of Queer Life in the 1990s

In May 2026, Bold Type Books published My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond in English. Its author is American public historian and writer Hugh Ryan, a creative nonfiction instructor at the Bennington Writing Seminars and author of the award-winning study When Brooklyn Was Queer.

Ryan’s new work blends memoir with a historical exploration of the transformation of LGBT life in the 1990s. The author approaches the decade as a transitional period – a time when the LGBT community began moving from marginalized subcultures into the mainstream. Against the backdrop of globalization, the rise of the internet, and the HIV epidemic, American society was changing, and the living conditions for LGBT people were changing alongside it.

Through the lens of his own coming of age, Ryan details key phenomena of the era, from early AOL chat rooms to the club culture of New York and Berlin. He analyzes how the emergence of safe virtual and physical spaces helped people find one another, while also reflecting on the cost of this new visibility. The book addresses themes of activism, overcoming internalized shame, and the complex consequences of assimilation, which brought greater safety but simultaneously eroded independent subcultures.

My Bad does not simply romanticize the past; it offers a critical assessment of the decade that laid the groundwork for the modern state of the LGBT community. Ryan’s research helps illustrate how personal experience intersects with broader historical processes and how the decisions made in the nineties continue to influence culture today.