Gay Bar: Why We Went Out – Harvard Review

Contents:

• A MEMOIR ABOUT QUEER INTY, TOLD ONE GAY BAR AT A TIME
• '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
• GAY BAR BY JEREMY ATHERTON L REVIEW – A LURID, LERARY NIGHT OUT
• IN ‘GAY BAR,’ TIME-HOPPG SNAPSHOTS OF QUEER NIGHTLIFE
• GAY BAR
• 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.

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. 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.

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

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. 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.

GAY BAR: WHY WE WENT OUT

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.

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.

" 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. " 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. 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.

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

“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. 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. 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.

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

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.

On Irish televisn news, the headl rmed the natn that Panti Bliss, a brilliantly articulate mpaigner, had arrived at Dubl Castle, as ed she gay was all the rage jt then. Leo Varadkar, mister for health, soon to be taoiseach, had announced that he was gay, as did a former mister om the other ma party, as did a well-known TV news journalist.

GAY BAR

That day would not have been surprisg had all the bishops of Ireland arrived their fery to let know that they, too, wanted to jo our Gay Bar, a brilliantly wrten and cisive acunt of gay life Los Angel, San Francis and London, Jeremy Atherton L quot the cric Ben Walters on gay history that is “agile om fear and fettg, too often wrten whispers and saved scraps”.

I imaged a walk that two men of my generatn – I me to Dubl 1972 – might do to revis the gay plac that have gone, such as The Gym, a sna jt a stone’s throw om Dubl Castle, or Ingno, another sna, much favoured by prits. He wr about a DJ his 40s lled B Statn John who “played ecstatic sets of arne dis … He was there to bear wns, to ttify, g rare tracks om what he lled ‘the goln age of gay’, the perd between Stonewall and Aids. ”But the ghosts his book are also those who created gay San Francis self, where there were 18 gay bars 1964 and “an timated hundred and eighteen wh a ”.

Atherton L registers the nostalgia that me wh all this change, quotg Fouult: “I actually liked the scene before gay liberatn, when everythg was more vert. Some thgs give him the creeps, like a gay thrift shop: “I crged when I passed , imagg the store to be filled wh stuff svenged om the hom of ad queens … I hadn’t found a way to nsir the multifar story of my people – and to read wh, but not through, the disease.

GAY BAR

When they stop shavg, their beards “were perverted, their bristl perfumed wh the sudor of scrotum” gay group, observed San Francis, “uld be tected om a distance by the stk … Each of them seemed to have a magnificent ass and be wrg a book. There were three bars that he and his partner lled the Triangle: “jolly Gee and Dragon, sordid Joers Arms and laid-back Nelson’s Head – a rpective five-, ten- and fifteen-mute walk om our buildg” wr well about another hntg the London years, the spectre of gay-bashg, quotg Neil Bartlett: “Those nights out were spirg – but the solary walks home were foolish. London, 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.