That was certainly the case for me, as Lin’s stories beckoned me into a haze of nostalgia.Īs Lin chronicles, gay bars come in every possible shape and cater to every conceivable interest. For queer readers-and gay men in particular- Gay Bar will serve more as an invitation to reminisce about our own experiences.
#Boston gay bars and clubs series
Lin’s memories are explicit, offering a window into a world that is still foreign, no matter how many Netflix series feature gay characters. For straight readers it will undoubtedly shock. The experience of reading Gay Bar is profoundly different, I suspect, depending on who you are. Rather, he paints a portrait of a culture in transition, of a new queer world emerging and an old one fading away. Deploying queer history and critique in this intimate way, Lin does not offer readers any answers-that is not his goal. But Lin also applies a critical eye to these memories, thinking about ways in which gay bars, even while serving as sites of community, can also exclude and isolate. By turns raunchy and melancholic, it charts Lin’s coming out, his relationships, and his early adulthood as a gay man. Part memoir, part history, part pornographic novel, Gay Bar is a gripping read. These are the questions that haunt Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar, a rumination on the place of the gay bar in Western culture. In a world in which queer people are ever more accepted and rigid identity categories make less and less sense, what is their purpose? Do we still need gay bars? Even before any of us knew what a coronavirus was, dating apps and the growing social acceptance of queerness had initiated gay bars’ global decline. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic has hastened these trends. The United States is not alone-European gay bars have been failing for some time now. In the entire country there are only fifteen lesbian bars left, a fact that spurred the creation of The Lesbian Bar Project in October of last year. Greggor Mattson, a sociology professor at Oberlin College, found that 37 percent of U.S. Gay bars around the country are going under. Today it feels like that history is slipping through our fingers. Most famously, President Barack Obama designated the Stonewall Inn in New York City a National Monument in June 2016, honoring the site of the famous 1969 riots. In recent years more and more gay bars have won similar recognition.
In 2013 the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to give Twin Peaks landmark status, elevating it into the pantheon of queer sites that the government has officially recognized as culturally and historically significant. They installed massive windows, making it the first gay bar in the city, and perhaps even the country, to give passersby on the street a clear view of the people inside. Mary Ellen Cunha and Peggy Forster, known as “the girls,” bought the bar in 1971. In a world in which queer people are ever more accepted and rigid identity categories make less and less sense, what is the purpose of gay bars? Do we still need them?Īnd not without reason.