Gay bars book
A Leathery Mood: On Jeremy Atherton Lin’s &#;Gay Bar&#;
With few exceptions, the queer spaces I acquire visited over the years vary wildly, but there is a slippery quality that unites my experiences in them: the passionate bath of alterity. The queer DJ and author madison moore describes clubs as ‘portals’, for their ability to help us imagine a different way of doing things, to escape the capitalist and heteronormative logic of the ‘real world’. Through the gay bar as portal, we might enter places where we can be the majority not the minority, places where fantasy and debauchery are made possible, where identity and desire are heightened.
Jeremy Atherton Lin’s GAY BAR: WHY WE WENT OUT () is a declaration of the author’s love of male lover bars. It is, as far as I can tell, one of the only attempts at a cultural history of the gay bar, be it a cultural history that is sexier and messier, because Lin does not shy away from the visceral qualities of same-sex attracted bars. He does not evade the smells and the dirt and the fluids as a comparatively fusty historian might (see, say, Peter Ackroyd’s QUEER CITY, ) and instead embraces impropriety. GAY BAR opens in a dim room, wh
Gay Bar: Why We Went Out (Paperback)
Praise For…
One of the New York Times Critics’ Top Books of
New York Times Editors’ Choice&#;
NPR’s Best Books of
Artforum’s Best Books of
Vogue’s Best Books of
Wall Street Journal’s10 Leading LGBTQ+ Books for Lgbtq+ fest Month
LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of
Cosmopolitan's Best LGBTQI+ Books of
Debutiful's Leading Books of February
Queerty’s Foremost Holiday Reads
“A beautiful, lyrical memoir…Atherton Lin has a five-octave, Mariah Carey-esque range for discussing gay sex.”
&#;—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“A remarkable debut. . . it’s a difficult publication to pin down, but that’s what makes it so readable and so endlessly fascinating. . . Each observation is pointed and phrased beautifully; Atherton Lin wastes no words, and the ones he chooses are carefully considered. Gay Baris a manual that’s beyond impressive, and Atherton Lin’s writing is both extremely intelligent and refreshingly unpretentious.”
&#;—NPR
"The treatment of time in the publication — the way the present is peeled advocate to reveal the past — i
Long Live the Gay Bar
We almost walk past it, it’s so still and dark. I double advocate and point the building out to my younger friend: it’s Henrietta Hudson, one of the last remaining lesbian bars in New York City, and, at 30 years antique, also the oldest. On a cold pandemic winter evening, we go out to walk and speak, and our hangout begins to feel like a walking tour of Before. “Here’s Julius’ … There’s the Center, past the AIDS Memorial Park. Down that way is Cubbyhole.” At Henrietta’s we end and read flyers pasted to the windows and doors. Beneath an image of Rosie the Riveter are updates I’ve been following online about the bar’s uncertain future and information on where to send donations to assist offset expenses from its pandemic closure. These sense like signs of the end of an era, but what that means—particularly amid so many concurrent crises—I can’t quite tell.
It’s a signature paradox of our current moment that theoretically being able to be gay anywhere has resulted in fewer concrete places in which to be gay in particular. Over the past decade, queer life has, in many ways, gained public presence in mainstream US customs, thanks in part to increased representation in media an
Queer bars are the site of some of my most treasured memories. They’re also one of my favorite settings for books. Whether it’s a accurate story about a concrete bar or a imaginary tale about a favorite haunt, I can’t reside away from books with queer bar settings. On this list, you’ll uncover fiction and nonfiction books about queer bars. We’ve got everything from travelogues and memoirs to mysteries and romances where the bars become characters of their own.
For centuries, gender non-conforming bars have offered a safe space for Gay people to let loose, meet new friends and lovers, and build collective. Of course, they’re not perfect. Some gay bars and lesbian bars hold been unwelcoming to the BTQ+ parts of the rainbow. And for a community disproportionately impacted by addiction and substance maltreatment issues, bars aren’t a safe space for everyone. But for many people, queer bars are the first places where they can explore their identities, make queer friends, and see with their retain eyes that a finer future is possible for them.
That was certainly my experience growing up gay in Arkansas and Oklahoma. The way I saw myself and envisioned the path my life would take shifted the first time I stepped fo
.