That’s not entirely true: his book begins as he enters one such enclave with a companion who sniffs the musky fug and says: “It’s starting to smell like penis in here. Whilst there’s little information about the gay bar experience for POC this was a perfect memoir of the nights in my past. We all have fond memories of dingy bars filled with even dodgier people where, despite the tin foil serving as decoration on the bar shelves and the ever-present whiff of disinfectant from the toilets, we came together as some kind of a community. He values the bars as arenas of egalitarianism, even if the would-be skinheads he encounters in East End hangouts are often guilty of “homosexual chicanery”, passing for hooligans because they like the wardrobe; in a critique of the post-industrial economy, he blames consumer culture for redefining identity as a commodity and co-opting gay men as “experts in leisure and aesthetics”, prized because they have cash to spend on frippery. What’s to boot, even if you see two (or more) strangers snogging in such a situation, you have no idea if it is two straight guys just taking the piss, two real gay guys (whatever that means), or a gay guy and his straight friend taking the piss out of each other.

Through Jeremy's encounters and the experiences of his friends, lovers, acquaintances we get to see the seemingly ephemeral Gay Bar. This guy has vocabulary for days, and carries you with him across the bars of San Fransisco, London, and LA. But in urban centers around the world, they are closing, a cultural demolition that has Jeremy Atherton Lin What was the gay bar?Notice to Internet Explorer users Server security: Please note Internet Explorer users with versions 9 and 10 now need to enable TLS 1.

I am, of course, referring to ‘Famous’, Lin’s moniker for his partner, which apparently is derived from the Leonard Cohen song ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’. There is a sense of indifference that jars with my experience of ordinary, workaday gay London, where people dress casually and are fallible. Such a pleasure to "see" so many places I also love deeply through somebody else's eyes, memories, experiences.I nevertheless enjoyed running around the world from gay bar to gay bar with the narrator and his boyfriend “Famous”, and by the end landed on finding the overall uneventful and anecdotal nature of this story to be part of its charm. Gay bars and, on a parallel level, gayness, are not just notions defined by the prolific sexing Lin partakes in, which points a bit to his own tunnel vision and subsequent erasure of his periphery in these spaces. Anyone spurred on to read this by the subtitle “Why We Went Out” may find themselves feeling slightly mislead (as I was) that this book doesn’t contain some kind of overarching social history or examination of the reasons why bars have and continue to mean so much to our group. I didn’t understand some of the word choices and cultural references being made, which in turn brought me out of the book because I had no point of reference or had to look up the meaning of a word being used because there wasn’t enough context to decipher meaning. My debut Gay Bar (2021), an exploration of some places that informed my identity, received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography.

It is also the story of the author s own experiences as a mixed-race gay man, and the transatlantic romance that began one restless night in Soho. I really valued how candidly and explicitly he describes his experiences and what a positive example this gives of how sex is a part of Lin's own evolving sense of being a gay man and how an open long term relationship can work.

He invokes the term ‘homonormative’ to distinguish the fact that this is definitely not his POV: Lin is observant, critical, fun-loving, and literary (his writing has a wonderfully, knowingly pretentious flourish—some may find his voice irksome, I personally related. Jeremy Atherton Lin's Gay Bar: Why We Went Out is an interesting juxtaposition of sociology and personal memoir focused on gay bars. The subtitle of this book “why we went out” feels especially poignant when considering why he and his long term partner 'Famous' went to bars to make friends, view the “scene” and have sex with other men.