Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

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Strobing lights and dark rooms; throbbing house and drag queens on counters; first kisses, last call: the gay bar has long been a place of solidarity and sexual expression — whatever your scene, whoever you’re seeking. But in urban centers around the world, they are closing, a cultural demolition that has Jeremy Atherton Lin wondering: What was the gay bar? How have they shaped him? And could this spell the end of gay identity as we know it?

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. 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. He charts police raids and riots, posing and passing out — and a chance encounter one restless night that would change his life forever.

The journey that emerges is a stylish and nuanced inquiry into the connection between place and identity — a tale of liberation, but one that invites us to go beyond the simplified Stonewall mythology and enter lesser-known battlefields in the struggle to carve out a territory. 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.

"Beautiful...Atherton Lin has a five-octave, Mariah Carey-esque range for discussing gay sex.” New York Times Book Review

“An indispensable, intimate, and stylish celebration. “Gay Bar is an absolute tour de force.” Maggie Nelson

“Lively and dirty, intellectual and gossipy, Gay Bar is the rare book that feels both like a guilty pleasure and like it is making you considerably smarter as you read. A super-exciting debut and an important document of queer lives.” Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave and Against Memoir

Jeremy Atherton Lin was raised in California and now lives in London, where he studied writing at the Royal College of Art. Jeremy’s work has been published in the White Review, Tinted Window and the Times Literary Supplement, and he has been short-listed for the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize. He is an editor at Failed States, a journal of art and writing on place.