My First Time Beg Sober a Gay Bar - The Stranger

Contents:

• IN ‘GAY BAR,’ TIME-HOPPG SNAPSHOTS OF QUEER NIGHTLIFE
• A SEND ACT FOR THE DOUBLE HEAR, THE PNEER SQUARE GAY BAR THAT LNCHED A THOAND STORI
• BT GAY CLUBS LAS VEGAS
• MY FIRST TIME BEG SOBER A GAY BAR

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

If you felt a twge of boredom (bon if you thrill to disheveled, elive, gamy), then I have a book for Atherton L’s “Gay Bar” is a rtls and telligent cultural history of queer nightlife.

Atherton L began wrg 2017; more than half of London’s gay bars had shuttered the prev 10 years.

A SEND ACT FOR THE DOUBLE HEAR, THE PNEER SQUARE GAY BAR THAT LNCHED A THOAND STORI

” There was an “upsurge stay-at-home gays” and rovg is beg lost? If you’re expectg an elegy, thk aga; “Gay Bar” has somethg knottier, more troubled, to offer.

“The gay bars of my life have nsistently disappoted.

In the openg scene, Atherton L and his partner (rather regrettably referred to as the Famo Blue Raat, after the Leonard Cohen song) go out to a London gay bar, lookg for a ltle adventure, and enter a crowd: “Wh a kd of btal elegance, the group spread apart like the blas of a pocketknife.

BT GAY CLUBS LAS VEGAS

Atherton L is a skilled rear of the signifiers of cloth and archecture, the fetishizatn of workg-class fashn, for example, and how the rise of AIDS fluenced sign cisns: “A new type of gay bar began to appear London’s Soho the ’90s — airy, glossy, ntental.

Sometim that history is his Atherton“Gay Bar” offers a twist on the nventnal memoir; ’s a life seen snapshots, the bars as the backdrop. Amaretto sours Wt Hollywood, Atherton L llege, still strenuoly datg women and meetg his first groups of gay men.

“Everythg about beg gay was so crowd: the ads for bars and rts and waxg servic rammed together, shallow and histrnic and imper, ” he wr.

MY FIRST TIME BEG SOBER A GAY BAR

”“Gay Bar” has s share of first-book blu. ) Most jarrg, perhaps, are Atherton L’s efforts at mimickg the theorists he clearly admir, those sectns that e across as parodi of amic wrg: “If the word muny is ed a failure of vobulary — too broad, too utopian — perhaps the metaphor to bt replace is metaphor self”; “gay bars are about potentialy, not rolutn. Gay bars are not about arrivg.

He’s already told what he most miss about gay bars; how movgly he replit here, wh his wi, strobg tellect, enliveng skepticism, raslly allure: “Perhaps you uld ll a gay bar a galaxy: We are held together but kept om llidg by a fe balance of momentum and gravy. What we do know: It was a fully functng gay bar sce at least the 1930s, back when owner Joe Bellotti Sr. Wells, who is not affiliated wh Nightjar, relled a pack of other gay and lbian bars Pneer Square durg that time, cludg the 611, the Silver Slipper and Shelly’s Leg.

The Double Hear beme a gay bar the 1930s, when “Pneer Square is where all the gay kids hung out, ” a lol drag queen, popularly known as Vilma, said an terview for the book “An Eveng at the Garn of Allah, ” by lol historians Don Plson and Roger Simpson. ’s nt and uncle) were the managers, and they would “do anythg for you if they liked you, even bail you out of jail, but if you crossed John he’d throw you out a mute, gay or straight.