Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

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Whilst there’s little information about the gay bar experience for POC this was a perfect memoir of the nights in my past.

I also agree with some other reviewers who were disappointed that there wasn't more of a social historical overview of the development of gay bars and their wane in the wake of apps and online dating and hook-up sites. There’s a camaraderie at bars that’s always fun to watch as an observer, as everyone goes to bars for different reasons, but the less enamored I became of crowds the less frequently I went.I enjoy reading books about LGBTQ history and culture, and I was interested in this particular book because I read an excellent article the author wrote for LitHub about gay bars. He values the bars as arenas of egalitarianism, even if the would-be skinheads he encounters in East End hangouts are often guilty of “homosexual chicanery”, passing for hooligans because they like the wardrobe; in a critique of the post-industrial economy, he blames consumer culture for redefining identity as a commodity and co-opting gay men as “experts in leisure and aesthetics”, prized because they have cash to spend on frippery. I'm surprised of the X-Rated actions in the gay bars dance floor the author and his companion attended. 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. I am, of course, referring to ‘Famous’, Lin’s moniker for his partner, which apparently is derived from the Leonard Cohen song ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’.

There also was not a lot of nuance and the author rarely spoke about trans people and people of colour and their experiences with gay clubs, instead focussing on the white cis gay male experience. No, I don’t get it either, but it is clearly a term of endearment, and after a while becomes an indelible part of the character. The dust is mostly shed skin, and Lin broods about a scene that is “mortal yet transcendent – not so much in a spiritual way, just that we are constantly escaping ourselves”.He invokes the term ‘homonormative’ to distinguish the fact that this is definitely not his POV: Lin is observant, critical, fun-loving, and literary (his writing has a wonderfully, knowingly pretentious flourish—some may find his voice irksome, I personally related. But to keep ourselves on our toes, we have a rule that author gender is alternated, girl-boy-girl-boy, and the continents always rotated (with occasional glitches). At the bar in London, the guys just shuffled him around and pushed him down onto his knees asking him to suck someone because his was the biggest one there while somebody commented that the place reeked of the smell of penis. It's a love story, a memoir, an observation of gay semiotics, an academic work, a queer psychogeography landmark.

An early boyfriend, discreetly wincing at Lin’s part-Asian ancestry, recommends lightening his complexion with Clinique face powder, and advises that a nose ring would give him an alluringly bestial look. There is a sense of indifference that jars with my experience of ordinary, workaday gay London, where people dress casually and are fallible. The text mixes historical details with descriptions of bars, scenes and atmospheres, it adds some Proust, Adorno, and Tillmans, and all is intertwined with the very personal experiences of the author. Such a pleasure to "see" so many places I also love deeply through somebody else's eyes, memories, experiences. Thanks to this cross continental adventure and Lin’s dense, detailed examination of the scene—those memories that shaped my life can live on more happily ever after.

Promotion for this book started late last year and when I read advanced reviews about it, I was excited. The way that Lin can give a sense of geography both literal and social to a bar is probably the strongest aspect of the book. One of the most disarming aspects of ‘Gay Bar’ though is one I only picked up on a fair way into the book.

Each chapter focuses on one particular gay bar (jumping from London to Los Angeles to San Francisco and back), its history and its place in the trajectory of Atherton Lin’s life. Nowhere is this perhaps truer than in a gay bar, where the dewy-eyed youngster wandering in from some rural idyll to ‘find himself’ is simply regarded by the lurking old predators as fresh meat, as opposed to an acolyte to which the Torch of Gay Knowledge™ can be, er, gaily passed. Gay bars and, on a parallel level, gayness, are not just notions defined by the prolific sexing Lin partakes in, which points a bit to his own tunnel vision and subsequent erasure of his periphery in these spaces.the United States of America by Eric Cervini and others that manage to convey important and underattended histories in engaging ways. At times fascinating, the queer and social history of these bars I particularly enjoyed, I was less absorbed by the author's own story, such as when he notices that the bar he frequents has a policy of not allowing any Black or Trans people in, yet he still goes there, even though he knows there are other more diverse bars such as Catch One (see below).