Youngsters just, well, live in the moment, with nary a care or interest in Culture or Heritage, those other Big Letter words that the Old Guard think they have sole proprietorship of. So it feels especially poignant to read Jeremy Atherton Lin's nonfiction/memoir “Gay Bar” now as he catalogues his personal experience going to gay bars and other historic examples of notable establishments where gay people congregated. That theatrical aura, he convincingly posits, has been reshaped, perhaps neutralized, by cultural shifts in the acceptance of gays, of mixed bars fostered by gentrification, of queer safe spaces where rules of conduct abound sometimes in a stifling manner.

Lin's telling is about sexual encounters, shocking sights and smells, and dynamics; Washington talks about the miracle of queer spaces, the way that queer people together are greater than the sum of their parts, the way we find each other through sex or substance abuse or niche cultural interest and from these unlikely origins create family; for all of Lin's baleful warning about apps, there's no replacing this lifegiving aspect of being a queer person, or the gay bar's role in facilitating these queer communities.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. With verve and grace, Gay Bar probes the past, present and future of gay life, while refusing easy binaries. This book manages to weave together vast stories of the changing nature of queer nightlife, the joys and sorrows that it can bring, and a truly wide sense of history, but never loses its sense of fun. Jeremy Atherton Lin's Gay Bar: Why We Went Out is an interesting juxtaposition of sociology and personal memoir focused on gay bars. But in urban centers around the world, they are closing, a cultural demolition that has Jeremy Atherton Lin What was the gay bar?

This public facing situation points to a loss of a nighttime aura and the magical, dirty smell of piss and beer that might bring an ambivalent reverie to any self-aware, and wistful gay. One need only look at the online discourse of “Gays Over Covid” or “Gays for Trump” to recognize that something is afoot. I came to this book through Parul Sehgal's NYT review where she notes, correctly, that at its best, this book finds profundity in the regular mundane descriptions of bars, drugs, lovers, sex, being in an open relationship, having younger men to fuck (loved the 20-something guy who refuses anal because of the "administrative work" involved). I'm glad that when gays became more exposed and less closeted, bars sprouted out all over to give people the place to feel acceptable and completely comfortable.

Atherton Lin draws from his experiences of clubs, pubs and dives in London, San Francisco and Los Angeles - and a transatlantic romance that began late one restless night - to trace queer histories.

Is the bar/club a symbol of the amorphous gay community we belong to by default due to our sexual orientation, or is it a convenient corral or ghetto that keeps the deviants and weirdos safely sequestered from ‘normal’ society? You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Lin inhabits a place of difference, identifying as gay, but coming at it with an edge, and with the book, he tracks his experience of negotiating a perspective, and sex, in bars in LA, San Francisco, and London (where he met his husband, with whom he often cruises for sex). Ages ago, they used to print candid snapshots of partygoers from various nights of the British club scene. Gay Bar, the debut of Jeremy Atherton Lin, won the National Book Critic's Circle award for autobiography.Indeed, it wasn’t until I started properly dating men that I realized that my race was an issue at all.