Gay bar why we went out

Published on June 1, Like what you've read? Having come out after the emergence of AZT, Atherton Lin acknowledges that he was once repelled by what the gay past represented. Contributor Bio Richard Scott Larson. In this captivating debut, essayist Lin explores the gay bar as a cultural institution whose time may have passed.

A shaky camera moves through the darkness; it catches glimpses of wood scraps and cinderblocks haphazardly piled up, trash strewn everywhere. Share it! 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.

Its white cisgendered chronicler here acknowledges his own complicity in its history of exclusion. 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. Gay Bar: Why We Went Out is a creative nonfiction book by essayist Jeremy Atherton Lin published by Little, Brown in North America and Granta in the United Kingdom.

A TV appears, cracked open and lying on its side, which I remember had once hung high up on the wall, always playing vintage pornography. And in his delicate retelling of his own late nights, we come to recognize both the quaintness of ghettoization and mixed feelings about its transience, as well as the more intimate story of a youth spent in a lost time and place.

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 queer history. At the same time, he also revels delightfully in what amounts to an archive of sensory experience: neon lights and roaring pop music and the unmistakable smell of cock in a crowded room full of men.

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. Little, Brown and Company, In this way, the book serves as both memorial and testament.

For me at the time, the bar was aspirational, representative of a future I wanted for myself outside of the closet. And the gay bars in the larger city where I live now are often overrun by straight tourists and drunken bachelorette parties, appropriation being a natural consequence of being seen.

He describes his early experiences as a gay man in gay places with a tenderness for his younger self that never quite veers into sentimentality, presenting instead a hyper-contextualized nostalgia with well-curated dips into the historical record.