Gay bar sex
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GAY BAR opens in a dark room, which Lin describes as ‘crowded like a bumper car rink’. He does not evade the smells and the dirt and the fluids as a comparatively fusty historian might (see, say, Peter Ackroyd’s QUEER CITY, 2017) and instead embraces impropriety. It is, as far as I can tell, one of the only attempts at a cultural history of the gay bar, be it a cultural history that is sexier and messier, because Lin does not shy away from the visceral qualities of gay bars. Jeremy Atherton Lin’s GAY BAR: WHY WE WENT OUT (2021) is a declaration of the author’s love of gay bars. Through the gay bar as portal, we might enter places where we can be the majority not the minority, places where fantasy and debauchery are made possible, where identity and desire are heightened. The queer DJ and writer madison moore describes clubs as ‘portals’, for their ability to help us imagine a different way of doing things, to escape the capitalist and heteronormative logic of the ‘real world’. With few exceptions, the queer spaces I have visited over the years vary wildly, but there is a slippery quality that unites my experiences in them: the warm bath of alterity.
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A Leathery Mood: On Jeremy Atherton Lin’s ‘Gay Bar’