Gay Bar

'Brilliantly written and incisive' Colm Tóibín'An absolute tour de force' Maggie NelsonFrom leather parties in the Castro to Gay Liberation Front touch-ins; from disco at Studio One to dark rooms in Vauxhall railway arches, the gay bar has long been a place of joy, solidarity and sexual expression. But around the world, gay bars are closing. In the wake of this cultural demolition, Jeremy Atherton Lin rediscovers the party boys and renegades who lived and loved in these spaces.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?

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, I can't remember the last time I've been so happily surprised and enchanted by a book. An absolute tour de force, 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, 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, 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

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. His first book Gay Bar (2021) received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography.