Because on some level I knew the story didn’t deserve an award for its language, but the impulse. I wrote a bad short story when I was a teenager, which won an award, so I realized I had energy. When I was a kid I did a lot of acting, so maybe that’s the solution, maybe I’m not directing the scene, but acting in it. This raises questions, like: how do I avoid fetishizing us as a couple? How do I avoid aestheticizing the sex? But ultimately, I approve of fetishizing and aestheticizing, so the question becomes: am I writing like a camera filming a scene that’s meant to elicit a certain response, or can I find a within-ness. When did you start writing, and was it a longstanding ambition to write a book? I’m really always writing our love story. I remember a favorite line about taking the night bus home with your soon-to-be boyfriend, and your interconnected hands rolling between one another’s laps like a ball of yarn. Is it not only the gay bar that’s closing, but gay altogether? If the gay bar is a metonym for gay identity, it’s a dated image- arch, boozy, very delineated.
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And it made me think about my complicated relationship with gay. When I first went out, I only knew horrible gay bars, so was I destined to be a horrible gay? And there was this moment, right, when so many gay bars were closing, about five years ago, and it felt like seeing yourself-your category-as sites in a cityscape, now scheduled for demolition. And it’s about how those places shaped me. I tend to say that I look back on the gay bars where I’ve hung out, with each revealing itself to be a palimpsest of queer histories.
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What’s the first gay bar? Depends on how you define it, how far back you want to go. I think what helps justify the book’s waywardness is that there can be no grand narrative to gay bars, there’s no Gay Bar Common Era. Early on, someone started saying, “So, this is the cultural history.” And I found myself almost barking, “NO!” This being gay bars, it’s got to be messier. People would give their take, and I’d recognize what didn’t feel quite right. It’s the gift that keeps giving! How do you explain Gay Bar to strangers? When you declare a book “nonfiction,” it’s expected to explain itself. I’ve been excitedly telling a lot of friends about this book, and each time I describe it, something new seems to come out of my mouth. What we’re left with is a nuanced yet expansive cultural history of the gay bar, but also much more: a genre-defying journey through queer history and a memoir told through the prism of great parties. From underground kink clubs to welcoming lesbian bars and more chichi gay establishments, he celebrates the breadth of these spaces and the communities they foster, but also switches the lights on, looking at the exclusion and cliquishness that can exist within their walls-particularly through his own experience as a mixed-race gay man. Venturing back into the gay bars that shaped his life, exploring their legacy and, in doing so, mapping the history of gay bars across time, he shows us just how varied these spaces are.
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If the term Gay Bar sounds like a monolith, a cultural institution, the California-raised and London-dwelling author Jeremy Atherton Lin’s debut book, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, blows this idea wide open.