Gay bar chronology melds memoir, travelogue and history lesson in intelligent, witty prose – Winnipeg Free Press
If gay bars are an endangered species, can gay identity be far behind? That is the question Jeremy Atherton Lin asks in Gay Bar.
In the hands of this ridiculously skilled first-time author, that premise becomes a meditation on his richly textured life during his coming-out years. The author partied his way through Los Angeles, London and “San FranDisco” over the past 30 years, surviving police raids, after-hours parties and the rise of the AIDS epidemic, and lived to tell these nostalgic stories.
With incisive, kinetic prose, author Jeremy Atherton Lin captures the thrill of going to gay bars.
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Jamie Atherton photo
With incisive, kinetic prose, author Jeremy Atherton Lin captures the thrill of going to gay bars.
With his incisive, kinetic prose, Atherton Lin fuses together memoir, travelogue and history lessons, turning a lifetime of bar hopping into a richly queer palimpsest. Atherton Lin, who is committed to getting his stories down in writing, observes, “The queer archive is fragile from fear and forgetting, too often written in whispers and saved in scraps.”
Gay Bar does not pretend to be the definitive guide to gay bars. Atherton Lin is more interested in how bars and other queer spaces made him the man he is today, capturing the ephemeral nature being the new boy in town and how gay bars shift in popularity with the seasons.
His quest when going out is never community. “I wasn’t looking for safety. I went out for the tension in the room.” He writes ecstatically about “the never enough” of clubbing, and never takes himself too seriously. “Some boy would pull me into a deep kiss after midnight. I was aware I did not look untouchable: anything remotely expensive-looking about me was on discount at that hour.”
Drinks are served through the legs of drag queens standing on bars. Windows are blocked out so patrons can leave their inhibitions aside. There are some graphic tales. But in the end, his story of going out parallels the history of the gay movement. He just wasn’t prepared to live in the shadows anymore.
In one memorable scene, Atherton Lin recalls the claustrophobia he feels at a dinner party followed by the incredible release experienced when entering a pulsing, dark dance bar, suddenly surrounded by strangers, with no obligation to talk to anyone. The joys of anonymity abound.
As any seasoned partygoer knows, getting ready to go out can often be more fun than the being at the bar. Atherton Lin captures a lifetime of primping in three concise sentences: “Going to the gay bar has always been about the expectation, the titillating at the mirror beforehand. Gay is false hopes and pre-drinking. Gay is backstage.”
At the book’s emotional heart are the two chapters set in San Francisco and the now-famous characters who emanated from its streets: Sylvester, Harvey Milk, Allan Ginsberg, Edmund White and Randy Shilts, to name a few. He paints San Francisco as a giant advent calendar, where you just have to look in a window or stand on a fire escape and watch the gay parade pass by.
Predictably, the author meets his life partner in a bar. Dubbed “Famous” (an abbreviated version of the Leonard Cohen standard), in what amounts to a writerly magic trick, Famous manages to both dominate the narrative and have essentially nothing revealed about his life. When it comes to Famous, what happens at the bar stays there.
He dubs the period between Stonewall and AIDS “the golden age of gay,” a time when queer people had evolved to feel freer to express their true selves in public. AIDS created a permanent change in the nature of queer spaces. “Airy, glossy, continental” bars started to appear and the dank, seedy underworlds that felt somewhat unclean were no longer in vogue. The new sanitized spaces were designed to send a clear message: “In here you can’t catch a disease.”
Mostly there is joy, unabashed joy, in remembering the good times the bars offered back in the day. No question, that access wasn’t always the same for queer people of colour or trans folks. Currently, a shift has occurred to the creation of spaces that feel safe for everyone. Atherton Lin touches on this, but that is a topic for another book.
Right now, when most bars are closed, Atherton Lin is the friend you cannot wait to have sitting on the barstool next to you when they reopen. Brilliant, intelligent and witty, Gay Bar will intoxicate you until they do.
Winnipeg writer Greg Klassen fondly remembers Friday nights in the 1980s spent at Vancouver’s legendary Gandydancer, with its translucent dancefloor and unlimited stream of beautiful young men.