I swallowed Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar: Why We Went Out (Little, Brown) in a single fun weekend. Narrating the recent past one LA, London, or San Francisco gay bar at a time, this book of creative nonfiction links theory, geography, and romantic memoir via the knowledge made available through the erotic; it opens with a dedication to its other daddy, Lin’s longtime lover, whom he calls Famous Blue Raincoat. 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. Speaking from a critical proximity to the whiteness that can go unnamed inside the pub, Lin describes the personal and social displacement bars hasten (alienation, dispossession) alongside the unzipping and reveal of social norms. 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. Published in the middle of Covid—at a time when many yearned to remember “why we went out”—the book brought home a history of felt experience, gesturing to the coziness of queer domesticity (a dad’s gay bar) and promising another installment from this skilled author.
Thomas (T.) Jean Lax is a writer and curator of media and performance at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.