Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

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Whilst there’s little information about the gay bar experience for POC this was a perfect memoir of the nights in my past.

Of which the number is startling, to say the least, and engaged in with a commitment to synaesthesia and general wanton abandonment that is, well, quite alluring.

There is a description towards the end of … someplace (names and locations do tend to blur after a while) where Jeremy Atherton Lin describes how the blocked toilets caused piss and spilled drink to flow together onto the dance floor. Certain "profundities" are so cloyingly sentimental in their performed intellectualism that I have to laugh, and the motif of Proust references make me want to vomit out of their abundant pretention. 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.

The biggest flux this book is trying to put its finger on is what it means to be gay today after legislations protecting certain aspects of queer life like marriage, market, and military (what the radical queers fought against assimilating towards), even as it threatens other parts of queer life, like the ongoing legal tussles over trans people's rights. In prose as exuberant as a hit of poppers and dazzling as a disco ball, he time-travels from Hollywood nights in the 1970s to a warren of cruising tunnels built beneath London in the 1770s; from chichi bars in the aftermath of AIDS to today’s fluid queer spaces; through glory holes, into Crisco-slicked dungeons and down San Francisco alleys. Lin explores how the bars have evolved, due to changing demands of younger queer communities and the rising overhead costs that place bars in a position of precarity. Even as I was having more than my share of fun, I daydreamed of drinking, drugging and dancing at Horse Meat Disco or Popstarz.This means that not only do they feel equally at home in a ‘straight’ venue, but have no compunction to engage in gratuitous PDAs outside the (mythical) protection of a bona fide gay space. Elegiac, randy, and sparkling with wry wit, Gay Bar is at once a serious critical inquiry, a love story and an epic night out to remember.

In the wake of this cultural demolition, Jeremy Atherton Lin rediscovers the party boys and renegades who lived and loved in these spaces. It’s no surprise that the death of the Gay Bar is happening in a time where the traditional gay community, (white, cisgender, masculine) find themselves at an inflection point. And if we still think that gay clubs and bars are a ‘safe space’ to retreat to from an increasingly hostile and dangerous world, we should never forget the Pulse shooting, or the numerous people who have been beaten up or assaulted simply for the socially stigmatising crime of attending a ‘gay venue’.

Furthermore, the author frequently came across as very pretentious (and at times a bit creepy, especially when he talks about not being able to follow the 'rules' of not being lecherous in a club), particularly when talking about young queer people today and their identities and safe spaces - it often sounded a lot like the right-wing 'snowflake' rhetoric that I'm sure we're all familiar with. In Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, Lin traces the history of the gay bar through time, from truly secret places where discovery could be deadly, to places where joy could reign unfettered, even for a few hours, from places where people gathered to mourn, to spots that have their own places in their neighborhoods. But this home - from before his birth until today - has always been fluid, recast as a space as reflective of the outside world as of the gays then queers then others who congregate inside its walls.

This book is a journey through the author's experience of going to gay bars, starting with an introduction to the bar, its history and also a social exploration of its clientele. Windows users should also consider upgrading to Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft Edge, or switching to Firefox or Chrome. 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.There are decent points, valid arguments, and interesting insights, but sometimes it just didn’t work for me personally. In one particularly disappointing chapter, Lin begins to explore the relationship that has evolved in London between anti-Muslim skinheads, the Brexit movement, and gay culture. I'm glad that when gays became more exposed and less closeted, bars sprouted out all over to give people the place to feel acceptable and completely comfortable. Thanks to this cross continental adventure and Lin’s dense, detailed examination of the scene—those memories that shaped my life can live on more happily ever after. 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.