Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

Product Information

Those pheromones entice Lin into the sweaty, congested darkness, and random couplings are soon under way as bodies agglomerate in corners. Jeremy Atherton Lin’s beautiful, lyrical memoir, “Gay Bar: Why We Went Out,” cloaks this lived history in that learned history, examining an objective subject — gay bars — to create a highly subjective object: a book about his life, flensed down to just the bits that made it past the bouncer. Elegiac, randy, and sparkling with wry wit, Gay Bar is at once a serious critical inquiry, a love story and an epic night out to remember.

This book is a journey through the author's experience of going to gay bars, starting with an introduction to the bar, its history and also a social exploration of its clientele. Sometimes the novels chosen are new, often they are from the backlist and occasionally re-issued from way back. One need only watch an episode of Pose or Ru Paul’s Drag Race to understand the community one can find in a gay bar. From leather parties in the Castro to Gay Liberation Front touch-ins; from disco at Studio One to dark rooms in Vauxhall railway arches, the gay bar has long been a place of joy, solidarity and sexual expression.Obviously, such topics are more appropriate for an NYT article and might not be able to frame a whole book, but I still felt like I got more out of this one article than Lin's whole book. Of course, any reader in enforced pandemic lockdown is likely to be both highly envious, not to mention rather appalled, at the goings-on here. An expansive and vivacious celebration of an institution, Gay Bar is also a stylish, intimate exploration of what these spaces mean, how they are changing and what we stand to lose when they close their doors. What an idea: Jeremy Atherton Lin tells his own coming-of-age story as a homosexual man through the lens of the history of the gay bar.

Or the documentary We came to Sweat about the oldest and longest running LGBT bar in Brooklyn also black owned. Lin’s initiation occurs in the snooty bars of West Hollywood, where everyone but him seems to be “auditioning for a toothpaste commercial”. Of which the number is startling, to say the least, and engaged in with a commitment to synaesthesia and general wanton abandonment that is, well, quite alluring.I really wish this would have been a more in-depth history instead of a memoir and there was a great opportunity to explore more issues surrounding the gay bars as many are disappearing during the pandemic. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. He talks about what it’s like to feel like you belong in a space, the furtive and sometimes shocking discoveries and encounters he had, and the connections he made—one in particular which changed his life. Focusing mostly on various spots in the UK and US, we trace the movement towards wider queer acceptance, and what this means for the clubs, bars and community spaces around them.