The '90s transformed queer life. Hugh Ryan looks back with humor, heartbreak and clarity

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Set us as preferred Hugh Ryan is an absolute superstar of queer history.His first two books, “When Brooklyn Was Queer” and “The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison,” were magnets for awards and accolades.

After spending recent years immersed in cultural stories, he’s turned his investigative eye on his own coming of age with the rollicking, raw, funny and sharp memoir “My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond.” Pivoting from scholar of history to student of life, Ryan shares lessons learned from beloved but homophobic middle school teachers (“The nicest mother— I knew could accidentally curb-stomp my heart at any moment”) to ones acquired on the dance floor (“Dancing is sex on a communal level: an embodied ecstatic ritual of union”).Ryan swung through L.A.on his book tour, and what better place to host a paean to the ’90s than the ASU FIDM Museum, where the exhibit “Obsessed: Fashion and Nostalgia in the ’90s” is serving Westwood plaids, Calvin Klein’s minimalist silk parachute sheath and Donatella’s zipper-slashed, leather mourning dress.

A fellow survivor of the era, I interviewed Ryan and the evening was introduced by the exhibition’s sparkling curator, Christina Frank, who cheekily shared period photos of the author alongside images from the museum’s ’90s archives, asking: Who wore it best? Whether it was Ryan channeling designer inspo or fashion-snatching looks from the streets, the display — like the book that inspired it — was colorful and daring, inspired and eccentric and wholly unique.At a time when nostalgia for the ’90s is seemingly everywhere, “My Bad” places the decade into context, including its paradoxical freedoms and oppressions, with the intimate, funny rough language of your freakiest, funnest bestie.Eme...