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Bookseller recommendation
“Part memoir, part history, this book gives us an intimate look at gay bars and gay culture. It speaks about the importance of gay bars, but also the problems that they perpetuated. Melancholic, and I can only describe the writing as erotic but in an incredibly non-sexual way. It speaks to the feelings of missing out. Like the best days happened before you were born or maybe they never even existed at all. Oftentimes queer history has been erased, or heavily white washed. Jeremy Atherton Lin breathes new life into history and shows us that queer life continues everywhere, and I’ll drink to that. ”
— Ruthie • Underground Books
As gay bars continue to close at an alarming rate, a writer looks back to find out what’s being lost in this indispensable, intimate, and stylish celebration of history. In the era of Grindr and same-sex marriage, gay bars are closing down at an alarming rate. What, then, was the gay bar? Set between Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London, Gay Bar takes us on a time-traveling, transatlantic bar hop through pulsing nightclubs, after-work dives, hardcore leather bars, gay cafes, and saunas, asking what these places meant to their original clientele, what they meant to the author as a younger man, and what they mean now.
In prose as exuberant as a hit of poppers and as dazzling as a disco ball, Atherton Lin conjures the strobing lights and the throbbing music, the smell and taste of tangles of male bodies, the rough and tender anonymous encounters, the costumes and categories--twink, top, masc, queen, tweaker, tourist, voyeur, exhibitionist--all the while tracking the protean aesthetics of masculinity and gayness. Along the way, he invites us to go beyond the simplified gay bar liberation mythology of Stonewall and enter the many other battlefields in the war to carve out space in which to exist, express, and love as a gay man.
Elegiac, sexy, and sparkling with wry wit, Gay Bar is at once a serious critical inquiry into how we construct ourselves through the spaces we inhabit and an epic night out to remember.
Jeremy Atherton Lin is a writer, editor and critic. He's previously written essays about moths, phones, searchlights, swimming pools, closets, major museums, and minor injuries. Originally from California, he currently resides in London, where he teaches criticism at universities and holds a position as associate lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts. He recently helped launch Failed States, a new journal of writing and image about place. He was shortlisted for the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for an excerpt of Gay Bar.
Jeremy Atherton Lin is a writer, editor and critic. He's previously written essays about moths, phones, searchlights, swimming pools, closets, major museums, and minor injuries. Originally from California, he currently resides in London, where he teaches criticism at universities and holds a position as associate lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts. He recently helped launch Failed States, a new journal of writing and image about place. He was shortlisted for the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for an excerpt of Gay Bar.