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.
