Mean Boys: A Personal History

For readers of Minor Feelings, Girlhood, and Gay Bar, an incisive memoir-in-essays about art and desire, style and politics, madness and salvation, and coming of age in the image-obsessed culture of the 2010s.

You recognize a mean boy when you see one. Mean boys take up space. They dominate the high school cafeteria of life, wielding cruelty to claim their place in the pecking order. Some mean boys make art or music or fashion; others make memes. Some mean boys are girls. Mean boys stomp the runways in Milan and Paris; mean boys marched at Charlottesville. One mean boy became president.

For art critic Geoffrey Mak, mean boys are the emblem of a society so ravenous for novelty, so skilled at discovering and exploiting the next edgy thing, that it can even sell itself the unthinkable. In these eight pyrotechnic essays, Mak ranges widely over the landscape of art and fashion in our era of paranoia, crisis, and frenetic, clickable consumption. He grants readers an inside pass to the spaces where culture was made and unmade over the past decade, from the antiseptic glare of white-walled galleries to the darkest corners of Berlin techno clubs. As the gay son of an evangelical minister, Mak fled to those spaces, hoping to cut himself off from family and join a rootless, influential elite. But when calamity struck, it forced Mak to confront the costs of mistaking status for belonging. Through searingly intimate memoir, Mean Boys investigates exile and return, transgression and forgiveness, and the value of faith, empathy, and friendship in a world designed to make us want what is bad for us.