Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

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But the overall impression is a world that is careless and easy, irreverent, and in itself a clichee of gay masculinity: here we are, we're ready to get dirty, we don't need to feel, we're teenagers high on rebellion and sex. It’s no surprise that the death of the Gay Bar is happening in a time where the traditional gay community, (white, cisgender, masculine) find themselves at an inflection point. Lin’s tone tends to be high-pitched, but he can tune it down to a baleful, haunted whisper, as when he studies a video installation by Wolfgang Tillmans in which shards of light from a disco ball merge with dust clouds stirred up by a scrum of unseen dancers. As to the first, the author probably cannot help this; it's probably a rare thing to have a personal history worth putting to paper for others to consume, but I think that's all the more reason one would want to stick to telling others' stories--I think of The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs.

The Gay Bar as a location for people to gather and express themselves, as as the location of queer history-both where it occurs and where it is passed on.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.

Gay is an identity of longing and there is a wistfulness to be holding it in a building", "Identity is not just inscribed in our bodies, but articulated in places we inhabit. No, I don’t get it either, but it is clearly a term of endearment, and after a while becomes an indelible part of the character. There is a description towards the end of … someplace (names and locations do tend to blur after a while) where Jeremy Atherton Lin describes how the blocked toilets caused piss and spilled drink to flow together onto the dance floor. Gay spaces are a live issue and Lin's writing respects the current realities and future aspirations of the various communities. Lin's book is an attempt to piece together the past, present, and future of spaces that have - for better or worse - been gay.

Of course, any reader in enforced pandemic lockdown is likely to be both highly envious, not to mention rather appalled, at the goings-on here. A book of rare dream-like power, an exacting anthropology of queer life through the lenses of London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Blackpool. I remember stepping inside and feeling the beat of the music vibrating on my skin, and the energy of the people around me vibrate in my soul.

An indispensable, intimate and stylish celebration of the institution of the gay bar, from 1990s post-AIDS crisis to today s fluid queer spaces. One need only watch an episode of Pose or Ru Paul’s Drag Race to understand the community one can find in a gay bar. Gay Bar memorializes raunch, sex, friendship, and adventure; it tells the story of a shifting identity trying to find grounding in physical spaces that are themselves equally as shifting.I also wish Lin had touched on the role gay bars play in small communities—it’s much different than the meccas he touched on.