Today’s gay youth have dozens of queer peer heroes, both fictional and real, but Grace Perry did not have that luxury. Instead, she had to search for queerness in the teen cultural phenomena that the early aughts had to offer: in Lindsay Lohan’s fall from grace, Gossip Girl, Katy Perry’s I Kissed A Girl, country-era Taylor Swift, and Seth Cohen jumping on a coffee cart. And, for better or worse, those touchpoints shaped her identity, and she came out on the other side, as she puts it, gay as hell.

Join Grace on a journey back through the pop culture moments of the early 2000’s, before the cataclysmic shift in LGBTQ representation and acceptance-a time not so long ago, that people seem to forget.

If you came of age at the intersection of Mean Girls and The L Word: Read this book. – Sarah Pappalardo, editor in chief and co-founder of Reductress