“I faced the possibility I was a degraded cliché.” We’re deeper into the ’90s now you can hear those sweet strains of Gen X disaffection. “Everything about being gay was so crowded: the ads for bars and escorts and waxing services rammed together, shallow and histrionic and imperious,” he writes. But his curiosity about West Hollywood is curdling into disappointment. Jump cut: He’s wearing stacked Adidas and dancing on the platforms of the club now. The design sent a clear message: In here you won’t catch a disease.”īut Atherton Lin is even more talented at seeing what no longer remains, of deciphering places as palimpsests of a kind, with their traces of fragile, fugitive queer history. Atherton Lin is a skilled reader of the signifiers of clothes and architecture, the fetishization of working-class fashion, for example, and how the rise of AIDS influenced design decisions: “A new type of gay bar began to appear in London’s Soho in the ’90s - airy, glossy, continental. The book is broken into sections, each devoted to a particular bar and city. “The question arises as to what distinguishes an enclave from a quarantine, and whether either is any longer necessary.” “The Latin root refugium positions a refuge as a place to which one flees back - indicating regression, withdrawal and retreat,” he notes. He describes the bars not as sanctuary but as refuge, a more complicated concept. In the opening scene, Atherton Lin and his partner (rather regrettably referred to as the Famous Blue Raincoat, after the Leonard Cohen song) go out to a London gay bar, looking for a little adventure, and enter a crowd: “With a kind of brutal elegance, the group spread apart like the blades of a pocketknife.” The bars both affirmed and challenged his sense of identity. “The gay bars of my life have consistently disappointed.”ĭisappointed - as well as welcomed, astonished, exasperated, intimidated. “I responded to the closures with an automatic, nearly filial sense of loss, followed by profound ambivalence,” Atherton Lin writes. What is being lost? If you’re expecting an elegy, think again “Gay Bar” has something knottier, more troubled, to offer. “In Britain, the steep decline came not long after civil partnerships were introduced in 2005.” There was an “upsurge in stay-at-home gays” and roving parties. “This was blamed on property developers, apps, assimilation,” he writes.
Atherton Lin began writing it in 2017 more than half of London’s gay bars had shuttered in the previous 10 years.
Jeremy Atherton Lin’s “Gay Bar” is a restless and intelligent cultural history of queer nightlife. What if I were to describe a book as plain-spoken or lucid? If you felt a twinge of boredom (bonus if you thrill to disheveled, elusive, gamy), then I have a book for you. I wonder if shared aversions aren’t an even stronger bond. The reason we love people, the writer and interviewer Paul Holdengräber has said, is that we find that we have these favorites in common.