Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

"Jeremy Atherton Lin’s genre-defying book includes elements of memoir, cultural criticism and history, and is a sharp-eyed and loving ode to the gay bar. Exploring the histories of both the gay bar as institution and specific establishments in both the U.S. and U.K., the book is a nuanced celebration and critique of these places so historically central to much – although not all – of gay life. Blending in his own coming-of-age as a gay man, Lin makes Gay Bar educational, nostalgic, critical and emotionally moving all at once."

"Oh, it’s really good. First of all, it’s very brave and candid. It has a lot of raw sex writing in it, which is attention-grabbing and very well handled. It’s a love story, really; he describes how he met his partner, whom he calls ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ or just ‘Famous’, in a bar when they were really very young. It’s the story of him and Famous, their coming of age, and their sex life over decades, threaded all through the book. So it’s the furthest thing from a dry history of gay bars. It’s very experiential, and takes you inside gay culture in a rare way. He evokes the settings so powerfully. It’s a great way of telling history. Do you remember the Alia Volz book we talked about last year , Home Baked ? About her mother selling hash brownies in San Francisco? So the cities featured in this book, London, Los Angeles and San Francisco, come to life in a similar way as in that book. You feel there’s a really vivid capturing of those cultural centers at certain times in their history. The author came of age in the 1990s, but Aids plays a smaller role in the book than I might have expected or feared. It’s put in its place by all that’s happened before and since. It’s put in a historical context, and that’s kind of liberating I think Jeremy Atherton Lin started out a blogger; he blogged about gay bars and his experiences in them. So his project kind of morphed from an online diary into this book. It contains substantial research about the story of each bar, the evolution of the cities and the neighbourhoods. But if someone else had written it, it might have been very different. It could have gone down the road of urban development and architecture . It could have been a history of homophobia, or a ‘discourse’ about liminal spaces and such. It has those angles, those vocabularies, and others, but it’s all enlivened by Lin’s persona and his experiences. I mean, they are quite in-your-face experiences."