Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

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Interesting insight about the evolution of gay bars and their role in LGBTQ culture — focusing mostly on London, Los Angeles and San Francisco, so the work is naturally of particular interest to readers with an interest in those cities. I found Gay Bar tiresome, mostly because of the style, but pushed on, because it was loaned to me by a friend. Why is his partner--whose identity is certainly not hidden in the acknowledgments--Famous Blue Raincoat, Famous for short?

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). You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

And some close or morph beyond recognition when the community shifts- either growing younger, older or less inclined towards a certain demographic.

As to the first, the author probably cannot help this; it's probably a rare thing to have a personal history worth putting to paper for others to consume, but I think that's all the more reason one would want to stick to telling others' stories--I think of The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. 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. Gay Bar: Why We Went Out" has a weird format: it's a bit of a memoir threaded through the author's monograph on gay bars through the ages. It wears its erudition with verve and grace, probing the past, the present, and the future of queer life while refusing easy binaries.Strobing lights and dark rooms; throbbing house and drag queens on counters; first kisses, last the gay bar has long been a place of solidarity and sexual expression—whatever your scene, whoever you’re seeking. Anyone spurred on to read this by the subtitle “Why We Went Out” may find themselves feeling slightly mislead (as I was) that this book doesn’t contain some kind of overarching social history or examination of the reasons why bars have and continue to mean so much to our group. 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). Gay Bar: Why We Went Out is a 2021 creative nonfiction book by Asian-American essayist Jeremy Atherton Lin published by Little, Brown in North America and Granta in the United Kingdom. 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.