Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

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Still, he knows that the complicated history of gay bars, and the issues that still exist today, aren't so easy to grapple with. “A lot of the banal and generic places that have these incredible histories are also problematic too, especially involving racism, sexism, ableism, and ageism," he notes. "But at the same time, they’re rich spots where political progress was made.”

Searching, erudite and sexy. With verve and grace, Gay Bar probes the past, present and future of gay life, while refusing easy binaries. It is about pleasure, but deeply serious too. One of the best books I have read in ages'But the ghosts in his book are also those who created gay San Francisco itself, where there were 18 gay bars in 1964 and “an estimated hundred and eighteen within a decade”. Atherton Lin registers the nostalgia that came with all this change, quoting Foucault: “I actually liked the scene before gay liberation, when everything was more covert. It was like an underground fraternity, exciting and a bit dangerous.” One group in San Francisco 'could be detected from a distance by the stink … Each seemed to have a magnificent ass and be writing a book' We go out to get some," writes Jeremy Atherton Lin in his new book, Gay Bar. "We go out because we're thirsty. We go out to return to the thrill of the chase ... We go out for the aroma. Some nights just smell like trouble."

Atherton Lin has a five-octave, Mariah Carey-esque range for discussing gay sex.” – New York Times Book ReviewThe prospect of losing gay bars leads him to reflect on their presence in his life. He writes beautifully about his college days in Los Angeles, where he went to his first one, though he can't recall the name, wryly noting, "Of course I can't remember my first gay bar — I was drunk." He's also inspired to dig into the past: "Enough time has passed that gay bars, once a scourge, have become monumental in their own way. But their vastly undocumented history requires transcribing." That history includes the famous 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York, but Atherton Lin also dives into other, lesser-known bars, including ones that endured police raids meant to put gay people in their place. Atherton Lin writes about gay culture as having been built on the idea of imitation, “the longing embedded in feeling real—on embracing that feeling, and refusing to accept realness as it’s been constructed for us.” And if the gay bar was once a place where we hoped we could find ourselves—to be someone different from who we’d been before—we did so with intention, building an identity from the ground up, playing the part until we’d memorized every line. Now these empty gay bars are “cast-off exoskeletons,” representative not of the promise of our future selves but of a time that has come and gone. And the gay bars in the larger city where I live now are often overrun by straight tourists and drunken bachelorette parties, appropriation being a natural consequence of being seen.