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From a guy they took home, “we learned the distinctive scent of blonde males”. One venue “smelled of all the places where a man’s body folds”.
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Although we learn few facts about the author and his boyfriend, referred to throughout as Famous, they have a vivid presence. Some things give him the creeps, like a gay thrift shop: “I cringed when I passed it, imagining the store to be filled with stuff scavenged from the homes of dead queens … I hadn’t found a way to consider the multifarious story of my people – and to read it with, but not through, the disease.”Ītherton Lin’s book is a history lesson, a travelogue, but it is also a display of a rich sensibility, a kind of autobiography using bars as its thread. In LA, Atherton Lin is as alert to the past as he is the next prospect of fun, writing about the history of resistance to the police. It was like an underground fraternity, exciting and a bit dangerous.” One group in San Francisco 'could be detected from a distance by the stink … Each seemed to have a magnificent ass and be writing a book' Atherton Lin registers the nostalgia that came with all this change, quoting Foucault: “I actually liked the scene before gay liberation, when everything was more covert. We were conscious the discs on the turntable may have come from the collections of deceased gay men.”īut the ghosts in his book are also those who created gay San Francisco itself, where there were 18 gay bars in 1964 and “an estimated hundred and eighteen within a decade”. He writes about a DJ in his 40s called Bus Station John who “played ecstatic sets of arcane disco … He was there to bear witness, to testify, using rare tracks from what he called ‘the golden age of gay’, the period between Stonewall and Aids. Later, when he lived in San Francisco, he was aware of the ghosts of those who had so recently made the Castro into a sort of mecca.
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He moved to LA in 1992, the year when “over four thousand new cases of Aids were diagnosed in the county … Men who slept with men constituted the vast majority of those cases.” His book is also haunted by the dotted line in the gay story, the gaps in the narrative. “Gays,” he writes, “can relax in a gay bar, people will say, but I went out for the tension in the room.”
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His eyes looked as dark as night.” In gay bars, he became someone on whom nothing was lost. He comes into his own when he notices someone in the crowd, such as a boy “both bashful and blithe” in the London club Popstarz: “He had a retroussé nose, and a mouth that was small but with pillowy lips. He loves what he called “the never enough of nightlife”. With gusto and a sense of abandon he describes his own hunger for excitement, with scenes that are gloriously locked in the present moment. They were a sign of the times.Ītherton Lin writes as though he himself is a sign of the times. The explosion of gay bars in both cities came with democracy. In Buenos Aires, a decade later, as military rule ended, it was the same. In Barcelona in 1975, when Franco died, there was not a single bar that was clearly designated as gay in the city. The arrival of the big, loud gay venues in Dublin came at the same time as other freedoms. Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Getty Images There is no sign that it was ever there.Ī brilliantly articulate campaigner … Panti Bliss celebrates in Dublin, following the same-sex marriage referendum in 2015. Soon, no one will remember when the owners of Minsky’s on Ely Place, believing their clientele to be too stuffy, changed its name overnight to The Shaft, and the place rocked for a while. Or the front part of Rice’s pub at the corner of Stephen’s Green and South King Street, or Bartley Dunne’s on Stephen’s Street. I imagined a walk that two men of my generation – I came to Dublin in 1972 – might do to revisit the gay places that have gone, such as The Gym, a sauna just a stone’s throw from Dublin Castle, or Incognito, another sauna, much favoured by priests.
#Gay bar book review archive
While the Irish Queer Archive is housed in the National Library, it was hard not to feel on the day of the count that, with all the new freedom, much will be lost and forgotten. In Gay Bar, a brilliantly written and incisive account of gay life in Los Angeles, San Francisco and London, Jeremy Atherton Lin quotes the critic Ben Walters on gay history that is “fragile from fear and forgetting, too often written in whispers and saved in scraps”.