Gay bar book review
AN ABSOLUTE TOUR DE FORCE –Maggie Nelson
A Book of the Year
THE Unused YORK TIMES • VOGUE • ARTFORUM • NPR • SPIN
THE SPECTATOR • GAY TIMES • THE WHITE REVIEW
ALOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER
ESSENTIAL
BEAUTIFULAND ORIGINAL
GLITTERY, MAGNETIC
STYLISHWITTY
LYRICAL
RESTLESS AND INTELLIGENT
EXCEPTIONALLY WELL-CRAFTEDSEAMLESS
AMBITIOUS AND INTELLECTUALLY PROMISCUOUS
UTTERLY UNIQUE
I can&#;t keep in mind the last time I&#;ve been so happily surprised and enchanted by a BAR is an absolute tour de force.
GAY BAR is searching, erudite a
GAY BAR is a work of genius.
Smooth and ferocious; tumescent and pounding;
sweet, awkward, occasionally shy.
Phenomenological social history at its most fuckable. Love.
Edward Behrens
Gay bars are, as anyone who tries to depart out in a homosexual fashion knows, disappearing for all sorts of reasons, most of which predate the pandemic: apps, rising rents, gender fluidity. For those who leave out in look for of them, the fact of their closing can be quite sad. They are a theatre of gay existence, drawing men to a place where they can fulfil a dream – not, says Jeremy Atherton Lin, ‘to be who they’d always been, but who they wanted to be’. Male lover bars also contain a hallowed place in gay history. As Atherton Lin notes, ‘The specify of a same-sex attracted bar, Stonewall, provides the metonym for gay liberation.’
The word ‘gay bar’ covers many sorts of establishment, from s hangouts like Rupert Street Bar in Soho (‘airy, glossy, continental. The style sent a evident message: In here you won’t collect a disease’), to big black boxes such as Probe in Los Angeles (host to ‘a weekly party of happy hardcore’), to dark rooms (places ‘full of penises wherein each contains the strong possibility that it is, to use that old-fashioned queer initialism, tbh – to be had’). Then there are leather bar
Gay Bars: Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Fresh Book Explores Why We Went Out
Design & LivingInterview
James Greig speaks to Jeremy Atherton Lin about his new book Gay Prevent, the cyclical nature of nostalgia, the benefits of dark rooms, and the pathologising of sex and drugs
TextJames Greig
We’re now almost a year into a situation where bars and clubs are banned, which is either an unfortunate or brilliant time to publish a book about nightlife. On the one hand, reading about all the fun we’re not having is a tempting form of nostalgic escapism. On the other, being immersed in a world that was already endangered – and risks organism lost entirely – could adv prove a painful experience. With real-life sociality restricted, many of us have retreated ever further into the internet, where the “queer community” (something which, to my mind, does not subsist as a coherent entity and least of all online) descends into rancorous and sanctimonious debates, of an intensity which is only really possible when you can’t see the person you’re shouting at. Many more own surrendered to the mund
A Leathery Mood: On Jeremy Atherton Lin’s &#;Gay Bar&#;
With few exceptions, the queer spaces I possess visited over the years vary wildly, but there is a slippery quality that unites my experiences in them: the heated bath of alterity. The queer DJ and journalist 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’. 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.
Jeremy Atherton Lin’s GAY BAR: WHY WE WENT OUT () is a declaration of the author’s love of male lover bars. 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 lgbtq+ bars. He does not evade the smells and the dirt and the fluids as a comparatively fusty historian might (see, say, Pe