'Brilliantly written and incisive' Colm Toibin 'An absolute tour de force' Maggie Nelson Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2022 Propulsive music and euphoric crowds; drag queens and go-go dancers; strobe lights, dark rooms and glory holes. Gay bars have long been sites of joy and solidarity, sexual expression and activism. But around the world, they are closing. Atherton Lin draws from his experiences of clubs, pubs and dives in London, San Francisco and Los Angeles - and a transatlantic romance that began late one restless night - to trace queer histories. An expansive and vivacious celebration of an institution, Gay Bar is also a stylish, intimate exploration of what these spaces mean, how they are changing and what we stand to lose when they close their doors. 'Essential' Vogue 'This is exceptional writing' Financial Times
JEREMY ATHERTON LIN is an Asian-American essayist based in East Sussex, England. He has contributed to the Times Literary Supplement, the Yale Review, the Guardian, the Face, the White Review and GQ Style. Gay Bar received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography.
Title: Gay Bar: Why We Went Out
Author: Atherton Lin, Jeremy
ISBN: 9781783785834
Binding:
Publisher: Granta Books
Publication Date: 2022-01-13
Number of Pages:
Weight: 0.2281 kg
A brilliantly written and incisive account of gay life in Los Angeles, San Francisco and London... Atherton Lin's book is a history lesson, a travelogue, but it is also a display of a rich sensibility, a kind of autobiography using bars as its thread -- Colm Toibin * Guardian *
I can't remember the last time I've been so happily surprised and enchanted by a book. An absolute tour de force -- Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
Each page made me yearn for the dance floor and made me think about our need for queer spaces. I'm so glad that someone has written this definitive book about gay bars -- Amelia Abraham, author of Queer Intentions
Searching, erudite, and sexy. It wears its erudition with verve and grace, probing the past, the present, and the future of queer life while refusing easy binaries. Gay Bar is about pleasure, but is deeply serious too. One of the best books I have read in ages -- Katherine Angel, author of Daddy Issues
I am utterly blown away. We can never have enough complex, intersectional writing about queer experience, and this is a welcome, needed addition to the canon -- Niven Govinden, author of This Brutal House
Shot through with vibrant intellectual adrenalin. With keen original insight, Atherton Lin celebrates the gay bar as a site of ribald, sensuous and urgent resistance. A must-read for all -- Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings
Lively and dirty, intellectual and gossipy, Gay Bar is the rare book that feels both like a guilty pleasure and like it is making you considerably smarter as you read. An important document of queer lives -- Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave
Painstakingly researched and tenderly written, Gay Bar marks queer bars as sites of resistance and reinvention. I longed for nothing more than to club hop with Atherton Lin -- Alex Espinoza, author of Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime
A book of rare dream-like power, an exacting anthropology of queer life through the lenses of London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Blackpool. Brainy, audacious, funny, vulnerable, and sexy -- Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life At the Edge of the World
Gay Bar exemplifies the multidimensionality Atherton Lin admires: it's at once erotically gamey and intellectually playful, combining soft porn with social theory, semen with semiotics... utterly unique -- Peter Conrad * Observer *
Electric, immersive, and impossible to look away from... an illuminating, sexy, vibrant examination of place and identity * Buzzfeed *
Playful, hilarious, arousing, shocking and challenging * The Face *
Expansive, exuberant and horny * Attitude *
A restless and intelligent cultural history of queer nightlife... Beautiful, and original * Parul Sehgal, New York Times *
Gay Bar commemorates a way of life without reducing it to one thing or fixing it in time; rather, it revels in variety and incident * Edward Behrens, Literary Review *
Gay Bar reads like a cult classic... Atherton Lin's writing vividly itches with the pulse, heat and chaos, the acceptance and rejection of gay nightlife * Paul Flynn, Evening Standard *
