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The current evocation of the gay bar is almost comically opposite to its forebears. As recently as 2011 in Steve McQueen’s Shame, Michael Fassbender’s sex addict is portrayed as falling to the most irreconcilable depths of bodily depravity by ending up in a New York gay sex dungeon. There was the sex club Al Pacino visited undercover in Cruising, then the Blue Oyster Bar in Police Academy. The first ones I ever saw on screen were mostly punchlines to jokes about masculinity. Try unpacking that one.Ĭultural representation of the neighbourhood gay bar has been patchy, at best. It is, for many, the first time we have ever not been the odd one out. So, walking into a gay bar for the first time can be a destabilising experience. Being LGBTQ+ is a minority that exists within families. Where we first experience the strange feeling of being in the majority. Gay bars are the closest the LGBTQ+ community gets to a physical location in which to observe and document our collective experience. ‘Someone called it a forced retirement,’ notes Atherton Lin. After multiple lockdowns we’ve watched aghast at the merciless decimation of the hospitality industry everyone who learned to live and love in gay bars is wondering which will survive. The book’s publication this month could not be timelier.
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‘Sex got lost in that broadsheet dialogue about how sad it was that all these safe spaces were closing. Not just the ones that were great, all of them.’ Some of the reporting of the LGBTQ+ venue closures irritated him. ‘I started thinking about what that meant for me,’ he says, ‘and looking at the gay bars I actually went to. Already, Gay Bar reads like a cult classic.Ītherton Lin began writing his book in response to an alarming news story in 2015, that almost half the gay spaces in London had shut down during the preceding decade. To gauge some of its highly flavoured depth and originality, it begins in the thick of cruising a south London sex bar and ends in Blackpool. The author flits unselfconsciously across genre, between memoir, social history, travelogue and a particularly sexy branch of academia. Atherton Lin is a Californian in his late 40s, married to an Englishman, and Gay Bar is his first book. It journeys through detailed, knotty questions of personal identity and questions the very foundations of LGBTQ+ community. I was thinking about all this while devouring an early copy of Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, by Jeremy Atherton Lin a detailed, frank and brilliantly personal account of the author’s life in gay bars. But a cultural, even sociological, seed had been planted in me, ready to germinate. It would be two or three years before I learned that New York, New York was presided over by a towering drag queen called Solitaire who carried herself with all the poise of a drunk navvy. Like an amateur sleuth, developing his nose for sniffing out the closest available mischief within a five-mile radius of the house I grew up in, I’d accidentally uncovered my first neighbourhood gay bar. ‘You don’t want to be thinking about going in there, love,’ one of them scolded. Two elderly women shuffled past pushing tartan shoppers.
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The wrist on the iconic statue’s right arm, usually raised triumphantly, was limp. One afternoon in the mid-Eighties, sneaking off school to traipse around Manchester city centre, I stood transfixed under a neon Statue of Liberty sign on the side of a pub beside a disused carpark. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.