Gay bar why we went out

Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar: Why We Went Out is a seamless combination of memoir and cultural history, orbiting the yesteryear of queer nightlife—a captivating exercise that hinges on the limitations of one genre proving the necessity of the other. Gay Bar: Why We Went Out is a creative nonfiction book by essayist Jeremy Atherton Lin published by Little, Brown in North America and Granta in the United Kingdom.

Jeremy Atherton Lin presents a talk on his award-winning book Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, a transatlantic tour of the hangouts that marked his life, with each club, pub, and dive revealing itself. As gay bars continue to close at an alarming rate, a writer looks back to find out what’s being lost in this indispensable, intimate, and stylish celebration of history.

After reading Jeremy Atherton Lin's "Gay Bar: Why We Went Out," the "dirty version" of queer bar history, I revisited the refuge of gay bars then and now. By Jeremy Atherton Lin. This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around February 9, This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

He has reviewed fiction for the Guardian and the Washington Post. His sound programs have been broadcast on NTS Radio. Learn more about this author. Accept Reject. Open the full-size image. Page Count 8 pages. Publisher Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 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. 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.

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.

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Each observation is sharp and phrased beautifully; Atherton Lin wastes no words, and the ones he chooses are carefully considered. 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.

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. Come for the history lesson, stay for the party. Gay Bar is an absolute tour de force. With keen original insight, he celebrates the gay bar as a site of ribald, sensuous, and urgent resistance.

A must-read for all. A super-exciting debut and an important document of queer lives. 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. 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.