Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

***Los Angeles Times* bestseller National Book Critics Circle Award Winner** **NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The New York Times \* NPR \* Vogue \* Gay Times \* Artforum \* "*Gay Bar* is an absolute tour de force." -Maggie Nelson "Atherton Lin has a five-octave, Mariah Carey-esque range for discussing gay sex." -*New York Times Book Review*** **As gay bars continue to close at an alarming rate, a writer looks back to find out what's being lost in this intimate, stylish, and indispensible celebration of queer history.** 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? In *Gay Bar,* the author embarks upon a transatlantic tour of the hangouts that marked his life, with each club, pub, and dive revealing itself to be a palimpsest of queer history. In prose as exuberant as a hit of poppers and dazzling as a disco ball, he time-travels from Hollywood nights in the 1970s to a warren of cruising tunnels built beneath London in the 1770s; from chichi bars in the aftermath of AIDS to today's fluid queer spaces; through glory holes, into Crisco-slicked dungeons and down San Francisco alleys. He charts police raids and riots, posing and passing out-and a chance encounter one restless night that would change his life forever. The journey that emerges is a stylish and nuanced inquiry into the connection between place and identity-a tale of liberation, but one that invites us to go beyond the simplified Stonewall mythology and enter lesser-known battlefields in the struggle to carve out a territory. Elegiac, randy, and sparkling with wry wit, *Gay Bar* is at once a serious critical inquiry, a love story and an epic night out to remember.