Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

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I went out to bars,” declares Jeremy Atherton Lin late in this florid, lurid, powerfully brainy memoir of gay gallivanting, “to be literary.” That’s not entirely true: his book begins as he enters one such enclave with a companion who sniffs the musky fug and says: “It’s starting to smell like penis in here.” 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.” Strobing lights and dark rooms; throbbing house and drag queens on counters; first kisses, last call: the gay bar has long been a place of solidarity and sexual expression—whatever your scene, whoever you’re seeking. But in urban centers around the world, they are closing, a cultural demolition that has Jeremy Atherton Lin wondering: What wasthe gay bar? How have they shaped him? And could this spell the end of gay identity as we know it? Strobing lights and dark rooms; throbbing house and drag queens on counters; first kisses, last call: the gay bar has long been a place of solidarity and sexual expression—whatever your scene, whoever you’re seeking. But in urban centers around the world, they are closing, a cultural demolition that has Jeremy Atherton Lin wondering: What was the gay bar? How have they shaped him? And could this spell the end of gay identity as we know it? The 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.

That kind of gay bar — all kinds of gay bars, really — are in danger of closing, Atherton Lin writes, due to the popularity of dating apps and rising property costs. He's ambivalent about the development, writing, "I had to consider whether gay bars promised a sense of belonging then lured us into a trap. In a gay bar, am I penned into minority status, swallowing drinks that nourish my oppression — have gay bars kept me in my place?" Along the way, Atherton Lin dips into other topics related to the gay community: the appropriation of gay culture by straight people, music, drinking, and the values of the younger generation of LGBTQ people. Each observation is sharp and phrased beautifully; he wastes no words, and the ones he chooses are carefully considered. It’s a tough world, constantly having to measure what we say or do in public. In a bar, we can let down some of that guard.” In Gay Bar, a brilliantly written and incisive account of gay life in Los Angeles, San Francisco and London, Jeremy Atherton Lin quotes the critic Ben Walters on gay history that is “fragile from fear and forgetting, too often written in whispers and saved in scraps”. While the Irish Queer Archive is housed in the National Library, it was hard not to feel on the day of the count that, with all the new freedom, much will be lost and forgotten.The arrival of the big, loud gay venues in Dublin came at the same time as other freedoms. In Barcelona in 1975, when Franco died, there was not a single bar that was clearly designated as gay in the city. In Buenos Aires, a decade later, as military rule ended, it was the same. The explosion of gay bars in both cities came with democracy. They were a sign of the times.

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. But around the world, gay bars are closing. In the wake of this cultural demolition, Jeremy Atherton Lin rediscovers the party boys and renegades who lived and loved in these spaces. Before I realized the importance of having a strong LGBTQ community around me, gay bars were an ominous mystery. Much like gender reveal parties today, they seemed both obnoxious and dangerous to a closeted me, ignorant of the mere idea of a gay community. The first time I reluctantly stepped inside a gay bar was at that effervescent spot around the corner from where I lived, because a friend had made it his mission to bring me. I mentally prepared myself ahead of time (a.k.a. got hammered), trying to muster courage as if I were about to storm the beaches of Normandy. Inside, I was intimidated. I had never seen so many gay people in one room before. After a half hour, I begged to leave. This was a facet of my gay evolution that I was only reminded of after reading Gay Bar. 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'

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The New York Times * NPR * Vogue * Gay Times * Artforum * Even before I ever went inside a gay bar, I was aware of the smell. A mixture of cologne and BO, it’d waft out of the open doors of the cavernous establishment down the street from where I lived, like man cake emanating from a queer bakery. I’d walk through that smell almost every day while still in the closet, holding a steadfast, soldierly resolve to stare straight ahead. Surely if some passerby saw me even casually glance in, they’d figure out I was gay. Not only that, but they'd also run and gossip to all my friends and family. The neuroticism of being closeted is like that stress of seeing a cop while you’re stoned, but 24/7, and also, you like gay sex. His book is also haunted by the dotted line in the gay story, the gaps in the narrative. He moved to LA in 1992, the year when “over four thousand new cases of Aids were diagnosed in the county … Men who slept with men constituted the vast majority of those cases.”

An epigraph from filmmaker and writer Derek Jarman, a major figure in gay rights activism at the height of the AIDS crisis, opens one chapter: “When I was young the absence of the past was a terror. That’s why I wrote autobiography.” The real histories of marginalized communities have often been made difficult to access, and Jarman sought to leave behind a record of his own life as a way of self-consciously contributing to the archive. Similarly, the act of remembering the way things once were becomes in Gay Bar a radical necessity—and a reminder that history, after all, is a privilege.

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Atherton Lin’s book is a history lesson, a travelogue, but it is also a display of a rich sensibility, a kind of autobiography using bars as its thread. Although we learn few facts about the author and his boyfriend, referred to throughout as Famous, they have a vivid presence. I can't remember the last time I've been so happily surprised and enchanted by a book. Gay Bar is an absolute tour de force' Atherton Lin has a five-octave, Mariah Carey-esque range for discussing gay sex.” – New York Times Book Review

He writes passionately about smells. One venue “smelled of all the places where a man’s body folds”. From a guy they took home, “we learned the distinctive scent of blonde males”. When they stop shaving, their beards “were perverted, their bristles perfumed with the sudor of scrotum”. He writes well about another haunting in these London years, the spectre of gay-bashing, quoting Neil Bartlett: “Those nights out were inspiring – but the solitary walks home were foolish. London, in 1986, was not a safe place for a visibly gay man like my twenty-eight-year-old self to be out alone after dark – or even by daylight for that matter.”

Gay Bar is a sparkling, richly individual history of enclaves in London, San Francisco and Los Angeles. It is also the story of the author's own experiences as a mixed-race gay man, and the transatlantic romance that began one restless night in Soho. Expansive, vivacious, curious, celebratory, Gay Bar asks: where shall we go tonight? 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' 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. Atherton Lin explores topics like architecture and urban geography, as they relate to gay bars, beautifully; he writes with a real knowledge that's more than just intellectual dilettantism. About the changing looks of bars before the turn of the century, he observes, "A new type of gay bar began to appear in London's Soho in the nineties — airy, glossy, continental. The design sent a clear message: In here you won't catch a disease. The new establishments were not circumspect, nor did they toy with their orientation gradually. These gay bars were born that way. They were conceived specifically to take gay men's money." One gay group, observed in San Francisco, “could be detected from a distance by the stink … Each of them seemed to have a magnificent ass and be writing a book.”