Just a half page later, though, Atherton Lin warns us that despite the activist claim that gay bars “should be kept open to facilitate knowledge passing between generations,” he himself had never really received gay wisdom “on a barstool.” This book is not about history, the subject you study, but history, that thing you have with that guy by the jukebox whose name you can’t remember. When he discusses an important 1966 protest at the historic Greenwich Village gay bar Julius’, he cites a New York Times article to talk about the “trio of activists” involved - not realizing that the article left out a fourth man, Randy Wicker (the only one still alive, coincidentally enough). And there are times when Atherton Lin’s reliance on rumors and single sources while navigating certain histories gets frustrating. Occasionally, this commitment to the subjective past creates some cringe-worthy moments, as when he names the author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore seemingly only for the purpose of parenthetically deadnaming her a moment later. As much as possible, Atherton Lin seems to be replicating a thin sliver of life as he experienced it (bolstered by applicable history), not imparting a cleaned-up remembrance of his glory days. The nonlinear chronology allows him to start in the present moment, cluing us in to a central truth of the book: We are always in the present. “Gay Bar” is well crafted (which is especially pleasing considering this is a memoir about structures), with a strong authorial hand that makes the reader feel carefully shepherded through the text, even as Atherton Lin jumps decades and continents. This is Atherton Lin’s first book, but it benefits from his extensive experience as an essayist and an editor of Failed States, a journal about places. Like any good gay bar, this book has a bouncer, and his name is Diction. Then, four in the box, we made a sight to peep from the glory holes, pressing together and kissing like an onanistic king rat.” This isn’t (just) textual exhibitionism, it is a vivid piece of self-authorizing code, letting readers know that if you can’t take the prose, you should stay out of the memoir. Describing the start of an orgy at a sex club, he writes: “We formed a chain like kids on a field trip. Atherton Lin himself is rendered only in relation to the bars he walks us through you’ll find yourself hard-pressed at the end to say where he was born or how many siblings he has (and you won’t care).īut Atherton Lin has a five-octave, Mariah Carey-esque range for discussing gay sex. The only other main character, Atherton Lin’s boyfriend, is given the sobriquet “Famous Blue Raincoat” (after the Leonard Cohen song), reminding us that the other characters here, while real, are as much Atherton Lin’s creation as if this were fiction. “Gay Bar” dances on the edge of that third space between fiction and nonfiction, a space often reserved for poetry.
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Early in the first chapter, in a dark back room full of chavs with their trackies pooled around their ankles, Atherton Lin tells us, “I saw these men as being in their domain, depraved and sketchy, whereas I was just passing through.”
Yet Atherton Lin is always on the outskirts of those communities, taking shots at their centers even as he acknowledges their orbits, always standing in and athwart his subject. By posing his central question in the plural - why did we go out? - Atherton Lin emphasizes his membership in communities of people making similar choices, for similar reasons. Each bar stands in for the community that patronized it, and each community stands in for Atherton Lin himself at a certain moment in time. Jeremy Atherton Lin’s beautiful, lyrical memoir, “Gay Bar: Why We Went Out,” cloaks this lived history in that learned history, examining an objective subject - gay bars - to create a highly subjective object: a book about his life, flensed down to just the bits that made it past the bouncer.Įach chapter focuses on one particular gay bar (jumping from London to Los Angeles to San Francisco and back), its history and its place in the trajectory of Atherton Lin’s life.
History, as it is lived, is a reeling spiral of flight and return the iterative reawakening of new selves in familiar places a never-ending interrogation of our own confused and confusing motives a messy slather of dots on a graph where the center can be plotted only retrospectively. History, as it is taught, is a straight line of dominoes falling - the relentless clack of fact hitting fact, an orderly queue of causality stretching on forever. GAY BAR Why We Went Out By Jeremy Atherton Lin