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Inthe writer Jeremy Atherton Lin noticed a spate of media coverage mourning gay bars in London, more than half of which had closed within the last decade. From NBC News to the Guardiannearly all the coverage contained a similar slant, which played into a popular narrative: gay bars as beacons of liberation, central to the formation of queer identity and community.

Which caused Atherton Lin to wonder, For who? I walked around the corner because I couldn't bring myself to go in, but then the next night I did and everything was illuminated and the drag queen smiled at me and I was gay. He thought about that narrative in relation to his own experiences.

Throughout his life, gay bars offered solace and excitement, but they just as often disappointed, excluded, and baffled, providing Atherton Lin with more questions about his identity than answers. The popular story about the gay bar, it seemed, centered a dominant flavor of gay man: cis, white, conventionally masculine.

Hopscotching between California, where Atherton Lin grew up, and London, where he currently lives, the seven chapters are organized by city and place. But rarely is he comfortable staying put. Instead, each bar is a portal, allowing him to plunge down wormholes, excavating far-flung strands of queer history that he braids with strains of memoir.

The effect is destabilizing, a kinetic bar crawl through space and time and subculture. In lieu of cohesion he achieves something richer, if not more knotty: the gay bar in a state of irresolution, providing a hall of mirrors onto which his identity contracts, expands, and sometimes fractures.

Through grappling with the gay bars extinction, Atherton Lin, 46, ultimately ponders the extinction of gay identity. The word gay was intoned like a joke or an elegy. The kids have told me. In gay bars, I have been each of these things. Atherton Lin lives in the Brockley neighborhood of London with his partner, the artist Jamie Atherton.

They run a publishing project together called Failed Statesa journal founded by Jamie that investigates various ideas around place. Yelp review gay club the guardian Angeles — it seems the streets will stretch forever, all mirage.

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The way these places are made really does translate into structuring the writing. These sources accumulate without hierarchy; when it comes to gay history, and gay nightlife in particular, Atherton Lin knows that what gets whispered across bar stools at 2 a. Unlike a historian, or even a conventional memoirist, Atherton Lin is interested in blurring the distinctions between nonfiction and fiction.

But I make some allusion to the fact that I might not be that concerned with whether something is a bit of a myth or an apocryphal — I'm OK with that. This relationship to performing a self on the page feels biographical, somewhat intuitive. In a book about gay bars, that tension — between real and fake — is baked into the walls.

As much as the gay bar has been framed as the birthplace and bedrock of LGBTQ rights, it is also a site of indulgence, a place to be drunk and horny and feral. Gay Bar opens with Atherton Lin on his knees, a position of subordination he strikes throughout the book, if not sexually then socially.

That music is all meant to sound like poppers make you feel like— like very Rush. It makes you feel a bit ahead of yourself. Smell is another consistent tool. Through his nasal passages, Atherton Lin replaces the sanitized gay body with something more fleshy and human, making visceral a common taboo in popular culture: depicting gay sex, in all its tactile glory.

But then the coronavirus happened, turning an already faltering industry belly-up and forcing the average barfly into retirement.