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In gay bars, I have been each of these things.”Ītherton Lin lives in the Brockley neighborhood of London with his partner, the artist Jamie Atherton. “Twink, top, masc, queen, member of a throuple, tweaker, tourist, voyeur, exhibitionist, pee-shy, among friends, lonely, terrified of disease. “In gay bars, if such a thing is possible, my self-awareness and sense of ease amplify concurrently,” he writes. Similar to language surrounding his mixed racial identity (Atherton Lin’s father is Chinese, and his mother is of Eastern European descent), labels continuously fail to satisfy, yet he still engages them, trying them on like accessories. “The idea of a safe space isn’t coherent to me, but then again I now recognize that I’m privileged in ways I didn’t previously comprehend. I didn’t, anyway.I went out to take risks,” he writes. The word gay was intoned like a joke or an elegy.” Yet he observes the younger generations’ crop of roving queer parties promising a “safe space” and notices a disconnect: “We did not go out to be safe. “More and more I heard myself defaulting to queer,” he writes, “somehow both theoretically radical and appropriate in polite company. Through grappling with the gay bars extinction, Atherton Lin, 46, ultimately ponders the extinction of gay identity. In lieu of cohesion he achieves something richer, if not more knotty: the gay bar in a state of irresolution, providing a hall of mirrors onto which his identity contracts, expands, and sometimes fractures. The effect is destabilizing, a kinetic bar crawl through space and time and subculture. Instead, each bar is a portal, allowing him to plunge down wormholes, excavating far-flung strands of queer history that he braids with strains of memoir. But rarely is he comfortable staying put.
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Hopscotching between California, where Atherton Lin grew up, and London, where he currently lives, the seven chapters are organized by city and place. Or as he writes in Gay Bar: Why We Went Out: “It was becoming apparent that being homo did not amount to being the same: I clearly was not like other gays.” Atherton Lin’s debut is a book-length essay told through the lens of the gay bars, nightclubs, and sex parties he’s frequented over the span of nearly three decades. As a self-proclaimed outsider - being “mixed-race, a bit of a flamer, the son of an immigrant, and so on” - he wanted to “trouble that a bit.” The popular story about the gay bar, it seemed, centered a dominant flavor of gay man: cis, white, conventionally masculine. Throughout his life, gay bars offered solace and excitement, but they just as often disappointed, excluded, and baffled, providing Atherton Lin with more questions about his identity than answers. He thought about that narrative in relation to his own experiences. I walked around the corner because I couldn't bring myself to go in, but then the next night I did and everything was illuminated and the drag queen smiled at me and I was gay.” “Especially for the generation before me, a lot of times it’s like, I was so nervous. “Going to your first gay bar - I feel like it's told with so much agency,” Atherton Lin told me over the phone, from London recently. Which caused Atherton Lin to wonder, For who? From NBC News to the Guardian, nearly all the coverage contained a similar slant, which played into a popular narrative: gay bars as beacons of liberation, central to the formation of queer identity and community. In 2017, the writer Jeremy Atherton Lin noticed a spate of media coverage mourning gay bars in London, more than half of which had closed within the last decade.