The closing of Atherton Lin’s favourite gay venues in London seems to make the city come alive for him. He gets the right to feel nostalgic, which grants him a sort of honorary citizenship. When the last of his Triangle, the George and Dragon, is to close in 2015, he gets to attend the final night, like a rite of passage, or a way to know that he was growing older: “Everyone had come out of the woodwork. I mean look at us, I said to Famous, two termites. We were far removed from the boys we used to be.” Still, he knows that the complicated history of gay bars, and the issues that still exist today, aren't so easy to grapple with. “A lot of the banal and generic places that have these incredible histories are also problematic too, especially involving racism, sexism, ableism, and ageism," he notes. "But at the same time, they’re rich spots where political progress was made.” 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' In Gay Bar, a brilliantly written and incisive account of gay life in Los Angeles, San Francisco and London, Jeremy Atherton Lin quotes the critic Ben Walters on gay history that is “fragile from fear and forgetting, too often written in whispers and saved in scraps”. While the Irish Queer Archive is housed in the National Library, it was hard not to feel on the day of the count that, with all the new freedom, much will be lost and forgotten.

It’s a tough world, constantly having to measure what we say or do in public. In a bar, we can let down some of that guard.” From leather parties in the Castro to Gay Liberation Front touch-ins; from disco at Studio One to dark rooms in Vauxhall railway arches, the gay bar has long been a place of joy, solidarity and sexual expression. But around the world, gay bars are closing. In the wake of this cultural demolition, Jeremy Atherton Lin rediscovers the party boys and renegades who lived and loved in these spaces. Gay Bar is a sparkling, richly individual history of enclaves in London, San Francisco and Los Angeles. It is also the story of the author's own experiences as a mixed-race gay man, and the transatlantic romance that began one restless night in Soho. Expansive, vivacious, curious, celebratory, Gay Bar asks: where shall we go tonight? He writes well about another haunting in these London years, the spectre of gay-bashing, quoting Neil Bartlett: “Those nights out were inspiring – but the solitary walks home were foolish. London, in 1986, was not a safe place for a visibly gay man like my twenty-eight-year-old self to be out alone after dark – or even by daylight for that matter.”

by Jeremy Atherton Lin

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The New York Times * NPR * Vogue * Gay Times * Artforum *

One gay group, observed in San Francisco, “could be detected from a distance by the stink … Each of them seemed to have a magnificent ass and be writing a book.”He writes passionately about smells. One venue “smelled of all the places where a man’s body folds”. From a guy they took home, “we learned the distinctive scent of blonde males”. When they stop shaving, their beards “were perverted, their bristles perfumed with the sudor of scrotum”. But the ghosts in his book are also those who created gay San Francisco itself, where there were 18 gay bars in 1964 and “an estimated hundred and eighteen within a decade”. Atherton Lin registers the nostalgia that came with all this change, quoting Foucault: “I actually liked the scene before gay liberation, when everything was more covert. It was like an underground fraternity, exciting and a bit dangerous.” One group in San Francisco 'could be detected from a distance by the stink … Each seemed to have a magnificent ass and be writing a book' The prospect of losing gay bars leads him to reflect on their presence in his life. He writes beautifully about his college days in Los Angeles, where he went to his first one, though he can't recall the name, wryly noting, "Of course I can't remember my first gay bar — I was drunk." He's also inspired to dig into the past: "Enough time has passed that gay bars, once a scourge, have become monumental in their own way. But their vastly undocumented history requires transcribing." That history includes the famous 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York, but Atherton Lin also dives into other, lesser-known bars, including ones that endured police raids meant to put gay people in their place. An indispensable, intimate and stylish celebration of the institution of the gay bar, from 1990s post-AIDS crisis to today s fluid queer spaces 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?