Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

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We want to be in a room full of penises wherein each contains the strong possibility that it is, to use the old-fashioned queer initialism, tbh – to be had.

I am, of course, referring to ‘Famous’, Lin’s moniker for his partner, which apparently is derived from the Leonard Cohen song ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’.

A book of rare dream-like power, an exacting anthropology of queer life through the lenses of London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Blackpool. I really valued how candidly and explicitly he describes his experiences and what a positive example this gives of how sex is a part of Lin's own evolving sense of being a gay man and how an open long term relationship can work.

It's a love story, a memoir, an observation of gay semiotics, an academic work, a queer psychogeography landmark. Certain "profundities" are so cloyingly sentimental in their performed intellectualism that I have to laugh, and the motif of Proust references make me want to vomit out of their abundant pretention. With numerous think pieces and essays asking if gay bars are still necessary, I’m not sure this book answers the question; but it doesn’t have to. The dust is mostly shed skin, and Lin broods about a scene that is “mortal yet transcendent – not so much in a spiritual way, just that we are constantly escaping ourselves”.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. Lively and dirty, intellectual and gossipy, Gay Bar is the rare book that feels both like a guilty pleasure and like it is making you considerably smarter as you read. The Gay Bar as a location for people to gather and express themselves, as as the location of queer history-both where it occurs and where it is passed on. I found it a bit difficult to figure out which side of the fence Lin himself straddles (sorry, one has to beware of bad puns in a review of a gay book). Focusing mostly on various spots in the UK and US, we trace the movement towards wider queer acceptance, and what this means for the clubs, bars and community spaces around them.