My First Time Beg Sober a Gay Bar - The Stranger

gay bar 2017

The gay scene Las Vegas clus several lol clubs and bars loted jt off the Strip. Many of the Las Vegas LGBTQ bars and clubs are known...

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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. ” 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.

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.

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

“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.

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”“Gay Bar” has s share of first-book blu.

MY FIRST TIME BEG SOBER A GAY BAR

) 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.

*BEAR-MAGAZINE.COM* GAY BAR 2017

A send act for the Double Hear, the Pneer Square gay bar that lnched a thoand stori | The Seattle Tim .

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