“Does gay still have a place?” asks the back cover blurb, and whilst Atherton-Lin’s riveting and joyous book may not provide anything approaching a definitive answer, it’ll make you want to find a place, even make you nostalgic for a place whether real or imagined. Appearing at the tail-end of a year-long lockdown, this book could not arrive at a better time to make you yearn for the dancefloor, the gossip, the flirting, and the giggles of your favorite gay bar(s).
In the light of recent closures of many LGBTQI venues across London, and the struggle for many others to survive the lockdowns, the question begs asking. In the era of “dating” apps and marriage equality, chemsex and home entertainment, is the gaybar defunct, antiquated, no longer fit for purpose? When we can no longer go out, what does it mean to stay in? Many of us can probably remember the first time we set foot inside a gay bar. It’s a queer rite of passage. Mine was The Thompson’s Arms in Manchester in the late summer of 1986, when I came out at the age of nineteen. It was to be the first of many, many, many nights out.` |
Every queer knows that the gay bar, in whatever town in whatever country, would be the place to head to. A good sloshed chunk of my life has been spent in gay bars, and one of the most powerful things I experienced while reading this book was a stirring up of memories: many of the places in London Atherton-Lin writes about are venues I also frequented, such as the George & Dragon and the Joiners Arms in mid-noughties East End of London.
The narrative voice is pitch-perfect throughout, at turns informative, hilarious, brutally honest, and philosophical. The Guardian’s Peter Conrad found it lurid and florid but I found it to be neither; rather it’s just queer. |
At times dishing the dirt, at other times simply telling it how it is, with perhaps the turn of phrase or embellishment of a born raconteur. But never florid. Atherton-Lin certainly pulls no punches when writing about sex, but this is (piss)elegant prose even when it’s being downright dirty: precise and candid, at times epigrammatic, Gnomic. So many lines to underline and read again and again. Part memoir, part social history, the narrative weaves and dips around various locations, and fluctuates between the confessions and configurations of his youth to informative passages about the history of some of these places (there’s a wonderful section of the fisting parties at San Francisco’s The Catacombs, and a history of the London Apprentice that completely took me back there. The book considers the sociological and at times revolutionary role performed by the “gay bar” and there’s a wonderful refrain throughout about why we go out, why he went out (both with and without his husband, the Famous Blue Raincoat (though mostly with). Geographically speaking, Atherton-Lin’s been fortuitously well-placed to have first-hand experience of a variety of gay bars from LA in the early 90s to London mid-90s (and a wonderful evocation of the queer indie scene, especially Popstarz) to Blackpool in 2016, via noughties San Francisco and Hoxton, East London, right up to the author’s current location in Brockley, South London. Whilst I appreciate the book’s intention isn’t to serve as a kind of guide to queer Britain, I’d have liked more on Manchester and the rise and fall of the gay village. A trip to Blackpool is the only location from the North of England, sadly, but that didn’t stop me from going right back to the start and reading the whole book again once I’d reached the end – which isn’t something I’ve done for a long time. I hope he’s working on another book because I need it. |
Gay Bar Why We Went Out published by Granta Jeremy Atherton Lin
Jeremy Atherton Lin is an American-born essayist based in the United Kingdom. He has contributed to the Yale Review, the White Review, W, the Face, Literary Hub, Noon, Tinted Window, ArtReview and the Times Literary Supplement. He is an editor at Failed States, the journal of art and writing on place. His first book is Gay Bar (2021).
Review by Jonathan KempQueerguru London Contributing Editor Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011, all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire (2015, both Punctum Books).
Labels: 2021, book review, gay bar, Jeremy Atherton Lin, Jonathan Kemp
