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But as a writer now compelled to recount that history, and asserting the value of his own personal experience, he doesn’t shy away from the darker elements of his subject. Having come out after the emergence of AZT, Atherton Lin acknowledges that he was once repelled by what the gay past represented. 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. 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.
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“Gay is an identity of longing,” Atherton Lin writes, as he looks back on years spent in those dark, crowded places, “and there is a wistfulness to beholding it in the form of a building, like how the sight of a theater stirs the imagination.” But what does it mean to the identity itself, he wonders, when the spaces that once defined it have begun to disappear? In this way, the book serves as both memorial and testament.Īn 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. The occasion for Atherton Lin’s shamelessly hybrid text is the realization that, just as queerness has graduated into the mainstream, and cruising now primarily exists in the digital sphere, so too has our quintessential gathering space-the gay bar-lost something of its urgency. Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar: Why We Went Out is a seamless combination of memoir and cultural history, orbiting the yesteryear of queer nightlife-a captivating exercise that hinges on the limitations of one genre proving the necessity of the other. In prose both playful and challenging, he immerses his reader in the unique experience of a life lived in and out of these spaces.įrom leather parties in the Castro to the Black Cat riots of Los Angeles, from glory holes and Crisco-slicked dungeons to Gay Liberation Front touch-ins, from disco at Studio One to Britpop at Popstarz, from irony to abandon, from hedonism to love, Gay Bar is an intimate, stylish and necessary celebration of the institution of the gay bar.Gay Bar: Why We Went Out by Jeremy Atherton Lin It is also the story of Jeremy Atherton Lin’s own experiences as a gay man, and the lifelong romance that began one restless night in Soho. Gay Bar is a sparkling, richly individual history of the gay bars of London, San Francisco and Los Angeles, focusing on the post-AIDs crisis years of the 1990s to the present day. With this cultural demolition, we must remember to ask: Who were the patrons? What did the bars mean to them? And where can we go now? But in urban centres around the world, they are closing. Neon lights and dark rooms pumping house and drag queens on counters first kisses, last orders the gay bar has long been a place of joy, solidarity and sexual expression, whatever your scene, whatever you’re seeking. ‘An absolute tour de force’ – Maggie Nelson ‘A brilliantly written and incisive account of gay life in Los Angeles, San Francisco and London’ – Colm Toibin