Gay Bar: Why We Went Out - Harvard Review

Contents:

• A MEMOIR ABOUT QUEER INTY, TOLD ONE GAY BAR AT A TIME
• LIL NAS X TRIED TO EXPLA WHY HE ME OUT AS GAY. THEN KEV HART TERPTED HIM
• 'GAY BAR' TRACKS THE WAVE OF A WHOLE CULTURE — AND ONE LIFE
• GAY BAR: WHY WE WENT OUT
• GAY BAR BY JEREMY ATHERTON L – A GOG OUT MEMOIR
• THE PLEASURE AND PA OF GAY BARS
• GAY BAR BY JEREMY ATHERTON L REVIEW – A LURID, LERARY NIGHT OUT
• IN ‘GAY BAR,’ TIME-HOPPG SNAPSHOTS OF QUEER NIGHTLIFE
• GAY BAR

A MEMOIR ABOUT QUEER INTY, TOLD ONE GAY BAR AT A TIME

AdvertisementSKIP Jeremy Atherton LWhen you purchase an penntly reviewed book through our se, we earn an affiliate 9, 2021GAY BARWhy We Went OutBy Jeremy Atherton LHistory, as is tght, is a straight le of domo fallg — the relentls clack of fact htg fact, an orrly que of aly stretchg on forever. History, as is lived, is a reelg spiral of flight and return; the erative reawakeng of new selv faiar plac; a never-endg terrogatn of our own nfed and nfg motiv; a msy slather of dots on a graph where the center n be plotted only Atherton L’s betiful, lyril memoir, “Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, ” cloaks this lived history that learned history, examg an objective subject — gay bars — to create a highly subjective object: a book about his life, flensed down to jt the bs that ma past the chapter foc on one particular gay bar (jumpg om London to Los Angel to San Francis and back), s history and s place the trajectory of Atherton L’s life. “Gay Bar” danc on the edge of that third space between fictn and nonfictn, a space often rerved for poetry.

Atherton L himself is renred only relatn to the bars he walks through; you’ll fd yourself hard-prsed at the end to say where he was born or how many siblgs he has (and you won’t re) Atherton L has a five-octave, Mariah Carey-que range for discsg gay sex.

LIL NAS X TRIED TO EXPLA WHY HE ME OUT AS GAY. THEN KEV HART TERPTED HIM

Like any good gay bar, this book has a bouncer, and his name is is Atherton L’s first book, but benefs om his extensive experience as an sayist and an edor of Failed Stat, a journal about plac.

“Gay Bar” is well crafted (which is pecially pleasg nsirg this is a memoir about stctur), wh a strong thorial hand that mak the rear feel refully shepherd through the text, even as Atherton L jumps s and ntents. When he discs an important 1966 prott at the historic Greenwich Village gay bar Juli’, he c a New York Tim article to talk about the “tr of activists” volved — not realizg that the article left out a fourth man, Randy Wicker (the only one still alive, cintally enough) a half page later, though, Atherton L warns that spe the activist claim that gay bars “should be kept open to facilate knowledge passg between generatns, ” he himself had never really received gay wisdom “on a barstool. ” This book is not about history, the subject you study, but history, that thg you have wh that guy by the jebox whose name you n’t the fal chapter of “Gay Bar, ” Atherton L grappl wh gog to a new generatn of bars, created by very different forc, meetg very different needs.

Lil Nas X is gettg praise for how he handled a nversatn about homosexualy wh edian Kev Hart. Before the rapper uld rpond, Hart – who stepped down om hostg the Osrs 2018 after homophobic tweets he’d ma years earlier rurfaced – terjected. Lil Nas posted a seri of tweets on the last day of Pri month, where he tend to share wh his followers that he intifi as gay.

'GAY BAR' TRACKS THE WAVE OF A WHOLE CULTURE — AND ONE LIFE

A seri of homophobic tweets Hart ma between 2009 and 2011 drew public scty late last year.

Gay Bar b memoir, history and cricism; 's a difficult book to p down, but that's what mak so readable and so endlsly fascatg. Atherton L's book starts off a crowd room a gay bar where he's gone cisg wh his partner, whom he refers to throughout the book wh the Leonard Cohen-spired nickname Famo Blue Raat. That kd of gay bar — all kds of gay bars, really — are danger of closg, Atherton L wr, due to the populary of datg apps and risg property sts.

GAY BAR: WHY WE WENT OUT

He's ambivalent about the velopment, wrg, "I had to nsir whether gay bars promised a sense of belongg then lured to a trap. In a gay bar, am I penned to mory stat, swallowg drks that nourish my opprsn — have gay bars kept me my place?

He wr betifully about his llege days Los Angel, where he went to his first one, though he n't rell the name, wryly notg, "Of urse I n't remember my first gay bar — I was dnk. " He's also spired to dig to the past: "Enough time has passed that gay bars, once a surge, have bee monumental their own way. " That history clus the famo 1969 uprisg at the Stonewall Inn New York, but Atherton L also div to other, lser-known bars, cludg on that endured police raids meant to put gay people their place.

Throughout the book, Atherton L scrib the gay bars that he equented, and his scriptns of the tablishments are endlsly evotive. " Atherton L explor topics like archecture and urban geography, as they relate to gay bars, betifully; he wr wh a real knowledge that's more than jt tellectual dilettantism. About the changg looks of bars before the turn of the century, he observ, "A new type of gay bar began to appear London's Soho the neti — airy, glossy, ntental.

GAY BAR BY JEREMY ATHERTON L – A GOG OUT MEMOIR

" Along the way, Atherton L dips to other topics related to the gay muny: the appropriatn of gay culture by straight people, mic, drkg, and the valu of the younger generatn of LGBTQ people. Gay Bar is a book that's beyond imprsive, and Atherton L's wrg is both extremely telligent and rehgly unpretent.

And while succeeds on many levels, perhaps the most remarkable one is Atherton L's nstant qutng of himself, and the realizatns of how he's changed sce he walked to his first gay bar years ago: "Maybe, I thought, I'm a dis ball. Jeremy Atherton L’s Gay Bar: Why We Went Out is a seamls batn of memoir and cultural history, orbg the yteryear of queer nightlife—a ptivatg exercise that hg on the limatns of one genre provg the necsy of the other. The ocsn for Atherton L’s shamelsly hybrid text is the realizatn that, jt as queerns has graduated to the mastream, and cisg now primarily exists the digal sphere, so too has our qutsential gatherg space—the gay bar—lost somethg of s urgency.

THE PLEASURE AND PA OF GAY BARS

“Gay is an inty of longg, ” Atherton L wr, as he looks back on years spent those dark, crowd plac, “and there is a wistfulns to beholdg the form of a buildg, like how the sight of a theater stirs the imagatn. An epigraph om filmmaker and wrer Derek Jarman, a major figure gay rights activism at the height of the AIDS crisis, opens one chapter: “When I was young the absence of the past was a terror.

Siarly, the act of rememberg the way thgs once were be Gay Bar a radil necsy—and a remr that history, after all, is a privilege. Havg e out after the emergence of AZT, Atherton L acknowledg that he was once repelled by what the gay past reprented.

GAY BAR BY JEREMY ATHERTON L REVIEW – A LURID, LERARY NIGHT OUT

AIDS, police btaly, a history of racism and vlence—the gay bar don’t get off easy jt for beg a sometim lifavg haven for a privileged few.

He scrib his early experienc as a gay man gay plac wh a tenrns for his younger self that never que veers to sentimentaly, prentg stead a hyper-ntextualized nostalgia wh well-curated dips to the historil rerd. The gay bar I’d once ped to as a teenager, armed wh a fake ID and the need to outn the stranglehold of the closet, is now a .

IN ‘GAY BAR,’ TIME-HOPPG SNAPSHOTS OF QUEER NIGHTLIFE

Atherton L wr about gay culture as havg been built on the ia of imatn, “the longg embedd feelg real—on embracg that feelg, and refg to accept realns as ’s been nstcted for .

” And if the gay bar was once a place where we hoped we uld fd ourselv—to be someone different om who we’d been before—we did so wh tentn, buildg an inty om the ground up, playg the part until we’d memorized every le.

GAY BAR

Now the empty gay bars are “st-off exoskeletons, ” reprentative not of the promise of our future selv but of a time that has e and gone. And the gay bars the larger cy where I live now are often overn by straight tourists and dnken bachelorette parti, appropriatn beg a natural nsequence of beg seen.

As the remag partiers n attt, gay bars obvly still exist—“this is what we fought for, apparently”—but Atherton L mak the se for why they’ll never be the same. ” But upon reachg the wistfully movg ncln of Gay Bar, s narrator—a historian-as-participant—heads out of the bars and to the streets.