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.

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

GAY BAR: WHY WE WENT OUT

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 BY JEREMY ATHERTON L – A GOG OUT MEMOIR

“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.

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

” 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. 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.

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

" 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.

" 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.

GAY BAR

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 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 .

GAY BAR

” 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.