Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Feb 2021
320 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
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.
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. 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?
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. 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. He charts police raids and riots, posing and passing out—and a chance encounter one restless night that would change his life forever.
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.
National Book Critics Circle Awards, 2021
"A vibrant and wistful report on a bygone era in gay culture." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A beautiful, lyrical memoir…Atherton Lin has a five-octave, Mariah Carey-esque range for discussing gay sex." - New York Times Book Review
"Jeremy Atherton Lin's intimate history of gay culture — from the 18th century to today — is electric, immersive, and impossible to look away from... . It's an illuminating, sexy, vibrant examination of place and identity." - Buzzfeed
"A grand, cross-continental adventure... . [Atherton Lin's] deep and vivid details bring his memories to life in a way that will make you feel like you are smack dab in the middle of those bars alongside him. His examination of these spaces from all sides will make you think about them in brand new ways." - Associated Press
"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… 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 Free Press
"A remarkable debut... it's a difficult book to pin down, but that's what makes it so readable and so endlessly fascinating... Each observation is sharp and phrased beautifully; Atherton Lin wastes no words, and the ones he chooses are carefully considered. Gay Bar is a book that's beyond impressive, and Atherton Lin's writing is both extremely intelligent and refreshingly unpretentious." - NPR
"The treatment of time in the book — the way the present is peeled back to reveal the past — is beautiful, and original. 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." - New York Times
"A beautiful amble through the world of gay bars ... a rich tapestry of history, theory, and criticism." - Vanity Fair
"An essential read in 2021." - Vogue, Best Books of the Year
"Brilliantly written ... Atherton Lin writes as though he himself is a sign of the times. With gusto and a sense of abandon he describes his own hunger for excitement, with scenes that are gloriously locked in the present moment." - The Guardian (UK)
"A detailed, frank and brilliantly personal account…Already, Gay Bar reads like a cult classic."- The Evening Standard (UK)
"Atherton Lin takes us on a journey threaded by his own heady experiences, reflecting with unbridled sexual honesty on the role various gay bars played. Always unvarnished – appropriately salacious – the gay 'scenes' of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London come to life, rich with smell, taste, tribalism, and always a frisson of sexual tension…This is exceptional writing." - Financial Times (UK)
"I can't remember the last time I've been so happily surprised and enchanted by a book. Gay Bar is an absolute tour de force." - Maggie Nelson
"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. A must-read for all." - Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings
"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)
"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. A super-exciting debut and an important document of queer lives." - Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave and Against Memoir
"A book of rare dream-like power, an exacting anthropology of queer life. Brainy, audacious, funny, vulnerable, and sexy, Gay Bar is endlessly awake not just to codes and signs but to a culture that's changing faster than most of us are able to see." - Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
"Utterly blown away. Jeremy Atherton Lin creates something new from a territory that feels so familiar and known. We can never have enough complex, intersectional writing about queer experience, and this is such a welcome, needed addition to the canon." - Niven Govinden, author of This Brutal House and Diary of a Film
"Gay Bar is searching, erudite, and sexy. With verve and grace, it probes the past, present, and future of queer life while refusing easy binaries. Gay Bar is about pleasure, but deeply serious too. It is wonderful — one of the best books I have read in ages."―Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered and Daddy Issues
"Each page made me yearn for the dance floor and each chapter made me think about our need for queer spaces in new ways. I'm so glad that someone has written the definitive book about gay bars...but specifically, Atherton Lin, who has captured the subversiveness and sexiness that make these places what they are, or, tragically, were." - Amelia Abraham, author of Queer Intentions
"Like the hypnotic thumps of good house music, Jeremy Atherton Lin's voice pulses. Painstakingly researched and tenderly written, Gay Bar marks queer bars as sites of resistance and reinvention. I longed for nothing more than to club hop with him, to occupy the spaces between light and shadow, between love and desire, and to consume the night alongside him so that we might emerge wholly new." - Alex Espinoza, author of Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime
"Raunchy, tender, and bracingly erudite, Gay Bar is an archaeology, a 4 a.m. afterparty, a disco-and-glitter drenched fever dream. In luxuriant, sublimely evocative prose, Atherton Lin wafts between personal anecdote and political history, exploring the evolution of queer spaces, and how their disappearance is a sign of what we've both gained and lost. Gay Bar is pure pleasure to read: like having an intimate conversation with your funniest, smartest friend." - David Adjmi, author of Lot Six
This information about Gay Bar was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jeremy Atherton Lin was raised in California and now lives in the UK. Atherton Lin's work has been published in the Yale Review, the White Review, the Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement. He has been named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography and the National Magazine Award in Essays and Criticism. He is an editor at Failed States.
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