In the early chapter set in L.A., for example, where Lin went to college, he conjures the profound alienation of coming of age as a skinny mixed-race boy against the backdrop of muscular white West Hollywood gays. Across the book, Lin searches for his ‘category’ by trying on different preformed gay male identities, from clone to Britpop twink to fashion gay, while remaining aware this is prescriptive. The book focusses on mostly male spaces, yes – the author is a gay man – but it also asks bigger questions, like what ‘gay’ means in context, what makes a space ‘gay’ anyway, and how ‘gay spaces’ shape our own ideas about our sexualities. If the generalised ‘gay bar’ of Lin’s title sounds monolithic or limiting, Lin prods at the edges of the term. ‘Is the mark of my queerness attenuated when contrasted with others more flaming than me? Is it absorbed by the dimness – or more fully exposed, as if under ultraviolet?’ Here Lin seems to nod towards cultural theorist David Halperin, who contends that ‘gay’ is not just an orientation but a ‘cultural practice’ – performed or socially constructed. ‘But in a gay bar, do I become more or less gay?’ he asks, probing the question of whether gayness – otherness – dissolves in a gay space, or else becomes more visible than ever.
Lin’s dense and florid tone, a kind of intellectual gay flamboyance, has a tendency to provoke, then leave you pondering. GAY BAR is not just chronologically expansive, but endlessly questioning.
His prose does the same, smoothly winding its way from the eighteenth century to the modern day, transporting us into a pocket of gay history for a few pages then – snap (gay snap, naturally) – back to the present. ‘Our fingers intertwined like a ball of yarn that rolled from lap to lap’, Lin writes. Late one night, Lin is riding the bus back home from a club with a boy (later to become Lin’s long-term partner, dubbed Famous Blue Raincoat). While GAY BAR is brilliantly lurid, reading the book still feels like a fuzzy night out: you blink and you’re somewhere new, with no concern for how you got there. bar, Lin writes, ‘the purplish lights behind the bar were like mosquito zappers, making each drink iridescent’. ‘The playlist formed an arc that would build, swell, peak and release’, Lin writes flirtatiously, in a description of the marathon DJ sets at L.A.’s Probe in the 1980s, based on archival research. Scenes of bygone club dance floors are set out before us in palpable detail, from the disco song playing to the too-tight outfits worn. and San Francisco, using them as anchors through which to explore the history of queer life in the area, as well as vanished gay spaces that once existed in the neighbourhoods. The book’s structure revolves around venues Lin has known in London, L.A. GAY BAR is a kind of queer bildungsroman, in which Lin comes of age in the bars he writes about. In one memorable section, Lin describes an underground fisting club in 1970s San Francisco called the Catacombs, quoting the theorist Gayle Rubin’s memory of it: ‘Just walking into that room could put a person in a leathery mood’. It’s a space seething with desire, but one edged with violence too, as Lin’s body is tugged and grabbed by a circle of ‘benevolent bullies’ whose ‘bodies circumscribed a turf, as on a playground or prison yard’. GAY BAR opens in a dark room, which Lin describes as ‘crowded like a bumper car rink’. He does not evade the smells and the dirt and the fluids as a comparatively fusty historian might (see, say, Peter Ackroyd’s QUEER CITY, 2017) and instead embraces impropriety. It is, as far as I can tell, one of the only attempts at a cultural history of the gay bar, be it a cultural history that is sexier and messier, because Lin does not shy away from the visceral qualities of gay bars. Jeremy Atherton Lin’s GAY BAR: WHY WE WENT OUT (2021) is a declaration of the author’s love of gay bars. Through the gay bar as portal, we might enter places where we can be the majority not the minority, places where fantasy and debauchery are made possible, where identity and desire are heightened. The queer DJ and writer madison moore describes clubs as ‘portals’, for their ability to help us imagine a different way of doing things, to escape the capitalist and heteronormative logic of the ‘real world’. With few exceptions, the queer spaces I have visited over the years vary wildly, but there is a slippery quality that unites my experiences in them: the warm bath of alterity. A Leathery Mood: On Jeremy Atherton Lin’s ‘Gay Bar’