Grace Perry > Quotes

“That’s the thing about being a queer millennial: it’s not about things getting better in any linear fashion but holding a painful past and an optimistic future together, one in each hand, at the same time.”
― Grace Perry, The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

“Thus is the defining characteristic of gay millennials: we straddle the pre-Glee and post-Glee worlds. We went to high school when faggot wasn’t even considered an F-word, when being a lesbian meant boys just didn’t want you, when being nonbinary wasn’t even a remote option. 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. As the state of gay evolved culturally and politically, we were old enough to see it and process it and not take it for granted–old enough to know what the world was like without it. Despite the success of Drag Race, the existence of lesbian Christmas rom-coms, and openly transgender Oscar nominees, we haven’t moved on from the trauma of growing up in a culture that hates us. We don’t move on from trauma, really. We can’t really leave it in the past. It becomes a part of us, and we move forward with it.

For LGBTQ+ millennials, our pride is couched in painful memories of a culture repulsed and frightened by queerness. That makes us skittish. It makes us loud. It makes us fear that all this progress, all this tolerance , all of Billy Porter's red carpet looks can vanish as quickly as it all appeared.”
― Grace Perry, The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

“Dressing femme to the nines and then hanging on the arm of another woman all night—a fuck-you to straight men—can feel electrifying. And butch confidence, the grit to invert every traditional way a woman is supposed to look is wholly contagious.”
― Grace Perry, The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

“The classic queer way of working through a problem: just get into a new relationship and forget all about it.”
― Grace Perry, The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

“This is happening.”
― Grace Perry, The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

“The closet implies a literal, physical boundary dividing one’s life before publicly declaring queerness, and after. It’s a threshold impossible to recross, two distinct places to live: in the darkness, or in the light of one’s self-truth. It doesn’t promise stepping into the light will be easy, but it does imply a fundamentally altered human experience.”
― Grace Perry, The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

“Not because she read my name on an anonymous posting board, but because I was in Paris and had seen Moulin Rouge far too many times to let such an opportunity go to waste.”
― Grace Perry, The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

“I regret to report I let my barely legal self down.”
― Grace Perry, The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

“Bless.”
― Grace Perry, The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

“God, how much easier it would be, I felt, if coming out were something that just happened to me. For queerness to seek me out, and not the other way around. To be a passive observer in my personal journey than to participate in my own life.”
― Grace Perry, The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

“Then I got out of the bubble.”
― Grace Perry, The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

“Thanks to J. K. Rowling’s post-Deathly Hallows media existence, I’d like to add another quip to the pile of Potter wisdom: Don’t ever trust half-baked gay characters.”
― Grace Perry, The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture