Gay Bar Why We Went Out

Jeremy Atherton Lin

eAudio - 2021

As 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 history. In the era of Grindr and same-sex marriage, gay bars are closing down at an alarming rate. What, then, was the gay bar? Set between Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London, Gay Bar takes us on a time-traveling, transatlantic bar hop through pulsing nightclubs, after-work dives, hardcore leather bars, gay cafes, and saunas, asking what these places meant to their original clientele, what they meant to the author as a younger man, and what they mean now.In prose as exuberant as a hit of poppers and as dazzling as a disco ball, Atherton Lin conjures the strobing lights and... the throbbing music, the smell and taste of tangles of male bodies, the rough and tender anonymous encounters, the costumes and categories—twink, top, masc, queen, tweaker, tourist, voyeur, exhibitionist—all... more