Hugh Ryan

Freelance writer

By Any Other Name

Originally published on Nerve.com, 4/2/2009. Read the original (w/ comments) here.
Every morning on my way in to work, Diamond passed judgment on me. She was tall and gorgeous, with long black hair, dark skin, and the best back-of-the-truck Louis Vuitton that Chinatown could fashion. Her breasts she’d also gotten on the cheap – hormones from [...]

Pixelated Pride

Published in The Advocate, 6/10/2009. Read the original (w/ comments) here.
When most people think about online video games, they think of teenage boys and Angelina Jolie dressed as Lara Croft from Tomb Raider. But a growing number of LGBT adults are taking to the (virtual) streets, carving out a home for themselves in what are [...]

Linday Lohan’s Fight for Marriage Equality

Originally published in The Advocate, 4/25/2009. Read the original (w/ comments) here.

Lindsay Lohan’s recently released faux eHarmony profile is perhaps the most brilliant 90 seconds in the young actor’s career. She simultaneously manages to poke fun at herself, her relationship with Sam Ronson, and eHarmony — a homophobic dating website that would never allow her to [...]

Three Questions for a Teacher and a Father

This profile, done through the StoryCorps project, followed a young man named Nick as he traced the history of his name, discovered his biological father was not the man he thought, and confronted his birth father. It was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition. It aired on June 29, 2007. Listen to it here.

Up In Smoke

Published in the New York Press, 11/14/2007. Read the original (w/comments) here.
I spent all week anxiously watching the news. On Sunday it was nothing—a blip on my scan of the morning papers. By Monday, the coverage had blown up like the fires themselves, moving fast and seemingly everywhere. I’m not well-versed in California geography, so [...]

A Yearning Sensation

Published in the New York Press, 7/2/2008. Read the original (w/comments) here.
I was somewhere in the middle of Tennessee when the burning started again. It wasn’t quite a burning, really. More of an itching. Like a caterpillar was crawling inside the shaft of my penis. It would stop for a little while, perhaps to explore [...]

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