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Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

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With verve and grace, Gay Bar probes the past, present and future of gay life, while refusing easy binaries.

The author grew up in the Bay Area, went to college in LA, and seems to have spent the majority of his adulthood in London, three of the best known gay metropoles; New York makes a few cameos as well, but absent are other notable gay cities--Sydney, Tel Aviv, Berlin, dare I include DC? 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.The subtitle of this book “why we went out” feels especially poignant when considering why he and his long term partner 'Famous' went to bars to make friends, view the “scene” and have sex with other men. 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. 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 rare exceptions such as bank holidays, the book group meets on the first Wednesday of every month at 7. The ideal is not diversity but idiosyncrasy, flamingly on display in a San Francisco street party where the activist attenders are “fabulous, unsightly, sexy, fat, a total mess”.

It's very dry at times when he's talking about how he didn't fit in among the Castro crowd in San Francisco or Los Angeles and gets tiring when he talks about his cruising experiences in the bars of London. It felt like it didn't commit enough to either an interesting personal narrative or a comprehensive history to leave me with any lasting impression. I don’t go out much anymore since I got sober but once upon a time I was a party boy and went out every night of the week. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Despite his mercurial temperament, Lin’s aim is nobly humane: he urges habitués of the bars to look beyond the stereotypes that codify gay desire and “to see one another as multidimensional beings”. This book had not enough of either to keep me very interested, and our book club managed about 10 minutes of discussion before moving on to other topics. Obviously, such topics are more appropriate for an NYT article and might not be able to frame a whole book, but I still felt like I got more out of this one article than Lin's whole book. In Gay Bar, the author embarks upon a transatlantic tour of the hangouts that marked his life, with each club, pub, and dive revealing itself to be a palimpsest of queer history.

Gay Bar is a sparkling, richly individual history of enclaves in London, San Francisco and Los Angeles. He has contributed to the Times Literary Supplement, the Yale Review , the Guardian, the Face, the White Review and GQ Style.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. As this brand-conscious anecdote reveals, gay identity is a sartorial and existential minefield: before you go out, you have to decide what to wear, which will determine who you intend to be that evening. All of this is captured wonderfully in a quote from Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar: Why We Went Out: “I was under the impression I was always late to the party, but in fact, I may not have been invited. One need only look at the online discourse of “Gays Over Covid” or “Gays for Trump” to recognize that something is afoot.

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