But the ghosts in his book are also those who created gay San Francisco itself, where there were 18 gay bars in 1964 and “an estimated hundred and eighteen within a decade”. Atherton Lin registers the nostalgia that came with all this change, quoting Foucault: “I actually liked the scene before gay liberation, when everything was more covert. It was like an underground fraternity, exciting and a bit dangerous.” One group in San Francisco 'could be detected from a distance by the stink … Each seemed to have a magnificent ass and be writing a book'

His book is also haunted by the dotted line in the gay story, the gaps in the narrative. He moved to LA in 1992, the year when “over four thousand new cases of Aids were diagnosed in the county … Men who slept with men constituted the vast majority of those cases.” The prospect of losing gay bars leads him to reflect on their presence in his life. He writes beautifully about his college days in Los Angeles, where he went to his first one, though he can't recall the name, wryly noting, "Of course I can't remember my first gay bar — I was drunk." He's also inspired to dig into the past: "Enough time has passed that gay bars, once a scourge, have become monumental in their own way. But their vastly undocumented history requires transcribing." That history includes the famous 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York, but Atherton Lin also dives into other, lesser-known bars, including ones that endured police raids meant to put gay people in their place. 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.

Before I realized the importance of having a strong LGBTQ community around me, gay bars were an ominous mystery. Much like gender reveal parties today, they seemed both obnoxious and dangerous to a closeted me, ignorant of the mere idea of a gay community. The first time I reluctantly stepped inside a gay bar was at that effervescent spot around the corner from where I lived, because a friend had made it his mission to bring me. I mentally prepared myself ahead of time (a.k.a. got hammered), trying to muster courage as if I were about to storm the beaches of Normandy. Inside, I was intimidated. I had never seen so many gay people in one room before. After a half hour, I begged to leave. This was a facet of my gay evolution that I was only reminded of after reading Gay Bar. 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." 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.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The New York Times * NPR * Vogue * Gay Times * Artforum * Atherton Lin explores topics like architecture and urban geography, as they relate to gay bars, beautifully; he writes with a real knowledge that's more than just intellectual dilettantism. About the changing looks of bars before the turn of the century, he observes, "A new type of gay bar began to appear in London's Soho in the nineties — airy, glossy, continental. The design sent a clear message: In here you won't catch a disease. The new establishments were not circumspect, nor did they toy with their orientation gradually. These gay bars were born that way. They were conceived specifically to take gay men's money." The subtitle of Atherton Lin's book is Why We Went Out, and the London-based author offers plenty of reasons in this remarkable debut. Gay Bar combines memoir, history and criticism; it's a difficult book to pin down, but that's what makes it so readable and so endlessly fascinating. 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' 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.

by Jeremy Atherton Lin

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? 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.”