That kind of gay bar — all kinds of gay bars, really — are in danger of closing, Atherton Lin writes, due to the popularity of dating apps and rising property costs. He's ambivalent about the development, writing, "I had to consider whether gay bars promised a sense of belonging then lured us into a trap. In a gay bar, am I penned into minority status, swallowing drinks that nourish my oppression — have gay bars kept me in my place?" We go out to get some," writes Jeremy Atherton Lin in his new book, Gay Bar. "We go out because we're thirsty. We go out to return to the thrill of the chase ... We go out for the aroma. Some nights just smell like trouble." Still, he knows that the complicated history of gay bars, and the issues that still exist today, aren't so easy to grapple with. “A lot of the banal and generic places that have these incredible histories are also problematic too, especially involving racism, sexism, ableism, and ageism," he notes. "But at the same time, they’re rich spots where political progress was made.”

At Metropolitan, McEnrue has held a front row seat to that evolution for over a decade, long before same-sex marriage was legalized in 2015. “I remember what it was like pre-dating apps,” he says with a laugh. “It’s funny how things have changed [with gay rights]. Some for the better and some, I don’t know. When it comes to acceptance and exposure, we’re being represented across the board. I think there’s a general sigh of relief.” In LA, Atherton Lin is as alert to the past as he is the next prospect of fun, writing about the history of resistance to the police. But nothing comes simply. Some things give him the creeps, like a gay thrift shop: “I cringed when I passed it, imagining the store to be filled with stuff scavenged from the homes of dead queens … I hadn’t found a way to consider the multifarious story of my people – and to read it with, but not through, the disease.” I can't remember the last time I've been so happily surprised and enchanted by a book. Gay Bar is an absolute tour de force' NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The New York Times * NPR * Vogue * Gay Times * Artforum * He writes well about another haunting in these London years, the spectre of gay-bashing, quoting Neil Bartlett: “Those nights out were inspiring – but the solitary walks home were foolish. London, in 1986, was not a safe place for a visibly gay man like my twenty-eight-year-old self to be out alone after dark – or even by daylight for that matter.”

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An epigraph from filmmaker and writer Derek Jarman, a major figure in gay rights activism at the height of the AIDS crisis, opens one chapter: “When I was young the absence of the past was a terror. That’s why I wrote autobiography.” The real histories of marginalized communities have often been made difficult to access, and Jarman sought to leave behind a record of his own life as a way of self-consciously contributing to the archive. Similarly, the act of remembering the way things once were becomes in Gay Bar a radical necessity—and a reminder that history, after all, is a privilege. Atherton Lin writes about gay culture as having been built on the idea of imitation, “the longing embedded in feeling real—on embracing that feeling, and refusing to accept realness as it’s been constructed for us.” And if the gay bar was once a place where we hoped we could find ourselves—to be someone different from who we’d been before—we did so with intention, building an identity from the ground up, playing the part until we’d memorized every line. Now these empty gay bars are “cast-off exoskeletons,” representative not of the promise of our future selves but of a time that has come and gone. And the gay bars in the larger city where I live now are often overrun by straight tourists and drunken bachelorette parties, appropriation being a natural consequence of being seen. Along the way, Atherton Lin dips into other topics related to the gay community: the appropriation of gay culture by straight people, music, drinking, and the values of the younger generation of LGBTQ people. Each observation is sharp and phrased beautifully; he wastes no words, and the ones he chooses are carefully considered. Gay Bar is a sparkling, richly individual history of enclaves in London, San Francisco and Los Angeles. It is also the story of the author's own experiences as a mixed-race gay man, and the transatlantic romance that began one restless night in Soho. Expansive, vivacious, curious, celebratory, Gay Bar asks: where shall we go tonight? 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. Although we learn few facts about the author and his boyfriend, referred to throughout as Famous, they have a vivid presence.

Atherton Lin has a five-octave, Mariah Carey-esque range for discussing gay sex.” – New York Times Book Review Strobing lights and dark rooms; throbbing house and drag queens on counters; first kisses, last call: the gay bar has long been a place of solidarity and sexual expression—whatever your scene, whoever you’re seeking. But in urban centers around the world, they are closing, a cultural demolition that has Jeremy Atherton Lin wondering: What wasthe gay bar? How have they shaped him? And could this spell the end of gay identity as we know it? An indispensable, intimate and stylish celebration of the institution of the gay bar, from 1990s post-AIDS crisis to today s fluid queer spaces Strobing lights and dark rooms; throbbing house and drag queens on counters; first kisses, last call: the gay bar has long been a place of solidarity and sexual expression—whatever your scene, whoever you’re seeking. 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? The arrival of the big, loud gay venues in Dublin came at the same time as other freedoms. In Barcelona in 1975, when Franco died, there was not a single bar that was clearly designated as gay in the city. In Buenos Aires, a decade later, as military rule ended, it was the same. The explosion of gay bars in both cities came with democracy. They were a sign of the times.In Gay Bar, a brilliantly written and incisive account of gay life in Los Angeles, San Francisco and London, Jeremy Atherton Lin quotes the critic Ben Walters on gay history that is “fragile from fear and forgetting, too often written in whispers and saved in scraps”. While the Irish Queer Archive is housed in the National Library, it was hard not to feel on the day of the count that, with all the new freedom, much will be lost and forgotten. The closing of Atherton Lin’s favourite gay venues in London seems to make the city come alive for him. He gets the right to feel nostalgic, which grants him a sort of honorary citizenship. When the last of his Triangle, the George and Dragon, is to close in 2015, he gets to attend the final night, like a rite of passage, or a way to know that he was growing older: “Everyone had come out of the woodwork. I mean look at us, I said to Famous, two termites. We were far removed from the boys we used to be.” Even before I ever went inside a gay bar, I was aware of the smell. A mixture of cologne and BO, it’d waft out of the open doors of the cavernous establishment down the street from where I lived, like man cake emanating from a queer bakery. I’d walk through that smell almost every day while still in the closet, holding a steadfast, soldierly resolve to stare straight ahead. Surely if some passerby saw me even casually glance in, they’d figure out I was gay. Not only that, but they'd also run and gossip to all my friends and family. The neuroticism of being closeted is like that stress of seeing a cop while you’re stoned, but 24/7, and also, you like gay sex. Searching, erudite and sexy. With verve and grace, Gay Bar probes the past, present and future of gay life, while refusing easy binaries. It is about pleasure, but deeply serious too. One of the best books I have read in ages' He writes passionately about smells. One venue “smelled of all the places where a man’s body folds”. From a guy they took home, “we learned the distinctive scent of blonde males”. When they stop shaving, their beards “were perverted, their bristles perfumed with the sudor of scrotum”.