Book Review: Gay Bar: Why We Went Out by Jeremy Atherton Lin

By Al Preston

Warnings: language and brief talk of sex.

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            I have only ever gone to one gay bar in my entire life. At almost thirty, that sounds a bit sad. Why not? Well. For one, I discovered on my twenty first birthday that alcohol tastes so bad. You know that liquid children’s medicine you had to take that you can still remember the taste of to this day because it was so horrific? It doesn’t matter what medicine you remember, we all have one. Now imagine that taste every single time you drank alcohol, no matter how it was dressed up. That’s what it tastes like to me.

            Secondly, I am an introvert, through and through. I’d rather the party be at home if there was going to be a party. Being drunk and drunk people also makes me a bit nervous, why—I’m not sure, but they always have.

            Needless to say, even the concept of a bar would seem like my worst nightmare. The singular gay bar I have been to was also in a small town with few people willing to admit their queerness let alone walk into the only gay bar in town.

            All that said, I know how important bars are. Just because I never want anything to do with them, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a very important social and historical function of them, especially for queer people. I’ve talked about the importance of bars before, but having no desire to enter one, I’d like to know why other people do. That, and as bars seem to be phasing out of popularity, I wondered why people used to go to them and why they aren’t going to them now.

            Which led me to Gay Bar: Why We Went Out by Jeremy Atherton Lin, and it was exactly what I was looking for. Lin talks about his personal experiences going to gay bars from San Francisco to London. How love, sex, drinking, and the ability to make bad decisions fueled crazed nights in hundreds of bars. He talks about the different ways people engaged with bars and found people.

            He met his long-time partner in a gay bar in London. The two of them would cruse to other bars for sex partners to take home. He shows how sex in the back room was common. There are discussions about sex dungeons and bathhouses as social gatherings. As well as bars as a place to be wild, to get an adrenaline rush. They sought danger and wild experiences.

            However, while that is the major thread within this book, bars, their history, and Lin’s experience inside each one, this is also a book about what it means to be queer. What is a queer identity? How does it meld with your other identities?

            Lin is an Asian American and often felt isolated in white gay bar spaces. While he doesn’t directly talk about his race and what being queer means for Asian Americans, he does note that there is something there. Something important about the fact that he’s not a white gay man. The way other Asian Americans identify as gay also isn’t his experience, so he only speaks to what he knows.

            This isn’t about a queer identity for parents or friends; a cleaned-up version. This is the queer identity that appears and grows in bars. As well as how one identifies themselves with queerness. While I’ve only ever been to one gay bar, the underlining message about identity is one I relate to heavily.

            Lin talks about the different kind of gay men; the way masculinity plays into how they present themselves.

“Gay, in other words, was not something that I was pursuing. Gay was happening to me” (page 67).

            There’s something horribly powerful in Lin’s words in these two lines. He was speaking about how he acted at bars, how he was expected to act. How he was perceived by those around him. Memories of childhood bullies, being denied entry into certain bars, the way other gay men around him acted. For much of the early part of this book, Lin seems to feel a disconnect between how he himself feels about his queerness—almost acting as if it is nothing, something as natural to him as breathing, something he doesn’t label—and how everyone around him decides his queerness for him—how he talks, walks, and exists, what partners expect from him, what the bars themselves expect.

            As the book progresses through Lin’s life and more and more bars, you can see how his perception of his outward and inward queerness changes as he ages. Language matters quite a bit. For Lin, ‘fag’ wasn’t a slur, it was his style of queerness (so to, was not ‘masking’ his masculine smells). From that point on, he refers to things with that language until, slowly, it fades away to queer. Earlier in the book, right before claiming ‘fag’ Lin complains that queer sounds so academic. So boring and all encompassing. He wanted definition and identity. Something specific.

            Yet, as he grows older and he and his partner, Famous, don’t interact with gay bars the same way, ‘fag’ fades to ‘queer’. The book started with ‘gay’!

            Lin tells us the history of the building’s bars reside in and then the history of the bar itself. His prime was in the 1990s, when I was born. It was a wild moment for me to realize that in about the same year I was born, Lin was realizing he was nearly thirty (the year I was born, he is the age I am writing this review).

            In the post-AIDS period, he doesn’t talk about it much. Safe sex was something they required, and it was as if no one wanted to talk about it. Bars were trying to return to the time before AIDS, where sex was wild and free. However, Lin acknowledges that it wasn’t working. Near the end, he talks about how bars were fading away. Visiting a handful in his later years, he found them entirely different. When he went out, he wanted danger. When these younger generations went out, they wanted safety.

            This is a powerful book. I am hesitant to say it has much structure at all, however. While it’s clear there is a goal in mind, and a path you are following, it can be hard to see at times until Lin drops powerful lines on you. He jumps around time and place multiple times then smooths out the whole story as you keep reading.

            It is not confusing, however. You meander through his wonderings alongside him. Our minds are rarely straightforward. Reading this book feels like you are following the train of thought Lin used to write it. It’s captivating in that way, like watching someone else’s mind work.

            In a way, it is very heavy on theory and the queer experience. While there are pieces of this story anyone can follow, some parts will speak more to others than they did to me. I latched onto Lin’s story of identity. Others will identify with his telling of gay bars. Others still might identify with something else, like the love between Lin and Famous.

            While reading, I couldn’t help but feel like this way of telling a story is so very queer. I was reminded of Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw where she explains that the structure of her story is a queer one. While this may not have been Lin’s intent, I was reminded of Bornstein and her writing all the same.

            As mentioned, Lin uses some slurs throughout, not intended to be used as such, but for those who may have trauma associated with those terms, I recommend proceeding with caution. He also discusses sex a lot. He doesn’t shy away from the act although he does not write out full out sex scenes. It’s not for a young audience, but anyone 21 and older will most certainly identify with this one.

            I highly recommend this book. There’s something for everyone, even straight people. It’s a powerful read that really gets you thinking, either about the role of bars themselves or what identity means to the world and what it means to you.