“Lively and dirty, intellectual and gossipy, Gay Bar is the rare book that feels both like a guilty pleasure and like it is making you considerably smarter as you read. “An essential read in 2021.”- VOGUE, Best Books of the Year “This book of creative nonfiction links theory, geography, and romantic memoir via the knowledge made available through the erotic…We peep the emergence of nonbinary gender identities as they come to be claimed, and behold the finitude of gay identity-itself a nineteenth-century construction-from inside the pissoirs and cabarets where it was conceived and continues to unravel… The essays’ lyrical prose gives pleasure through the space it builds for paradox, deferring conclusions in much the same way one might desire to stay for one more song.”- ARTFORUM (Best Books of 2021) A must-read for all.”- CATHY PARK HONG, author of MINOR FEELINGS “Jeremy Atherton Lin's personal history of queer nightlife is shot with vibrant intellectual adrenaline. With keen original insight, he celebrates the gay bar as a site of ribald, sensuous, and urgent resistance. Gay Bar is an absolute tour de force.”- MAGGIE NELSON “I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so happily surprised and enchanted by a book. “A detailed, frank and brilliantly personal account…Already, Gay Bar reads like a cult classic.” And feels especially vital right now when we’re all stuck inside.” Atherton Lin’s stylish debut explores the history and cultural resonance of gay bars…It’s a wistful exploration of queer life, history, liberation, and identity. “For when you really miss going out… This book will make you miss it even more. With gusto and a sense of abandon he describes his own hunger for excitement, with scenes that are gloriously locked in the present moment.” Atherton Lin writes as though he himself is a sign of the times. a rich tapestry of history, theory, and criticism.”
“A beautiful amble through the world of gay bars. Throughout there is a feeling of simultaneity, of queer lives and histories moving in parallel, of nightlife as a site of pleasure, play and resistance…How movingly he replicates it here, with his wide, strobing intellect, enlivening skepticism, rascally allure.” "The treatment of time in the book - the way the present is peeled back to reveal the past - is beautiful, and original. Gay Bar is a book that’s beyond impressive, and Atherton Lin’s writing is both extremely intelligent and refreshingly unpretentious.” Each observation is sharp and phrased beautifully Atherton Lin wastes no words, and the ones he chooses are carefully considered. it’s a difficult book to pin down, but that’s what makes it so readable and so endlessly fascinating. “A beautiful, lyrical memoir…Atherton Lin has a five-octave, Mariah Carey-esque range for discussing gay sex.” One of the New York Times Critics’ Top Books of 2021Ĭosmopolitan's Best LGBTQI+ Books of 2021 Elegiac, randy, and sparkling with wry wit, Gay Bar is at once a serious critical inquiry, a love story and an epic night out to remember. The journey that emerges is a stylish and nuanced inquiry into the connection between place and identity-a tale of liberation, but one that invites us to go beyond the simplified Stonewall mythology and enter lesser-known battlefields in the struggle to carve out a territory. He charts police raids and riots, posing and passing out-and a chance encounter one restless night that would change his life forever. In prose as exuberant as a hit of poppers and dazzling as a disco ball, he time-travels from Hollywood nights in the 1970s to a warren of cruising tunnels built beneath London in the 1770s from chichi bars in the aftermath of AIDS to today’s fluid queer spaces through glory holes, into Crisco-slicked dungeons and down San Francisco alleys. In Gay Bar, the author embarks upon a transatlantic tour of the hangouts that marked his life, with each club, pub, and dive revealing itself to be a palimpsest of queer history.
But in urban centers around the world, they are closing, a cultural demolition that has Jeremy Atherton Lin wondering: What was the gay bar? How have they shaped him? And could this spell the end of gay identity as we know it?
Strobing lights and dark rooms throbbing house and drag queens on counters first kisses, last call: the gay bar has long been a place of solidarity and sexual expression-whatever your scene, whoever you’re seeking. "Atherton Lin has a five-octave, Mariah Carey-esque range for discussing gay sex.” – New York Times Book ReviewĪs gay bars continue to close at an alarming rate, a writer looks back to find out what’s being lost in this indispensable, intimate, and stylish celebration of queer history. “ Gay Bar is an absolute tour de force.” –Maggie Nelson NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The New York Times * NPR * Vogue * Gay Times * Artforum * National Book Critics Circle Award Winner