Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

Gay Bar is an indispensable, intimate, and stylish celebration of history that takes readers on a time-traveling, transatlantic bar hop through pulsing nightclubs, after-work dives, hardcore leather bars, gay cafes, and saunas.

This book invites readers to go beyond the simplified gay bar liberation mythology of Stonewall and enter the many other battlefields in the war to carve out space in which to exist, express, and love as a gay man.

With prose as exuberant as a hit of poppers and as dazzling as a disco ball, Atherton Lin conjures the strobing lights and the throbbing music, the smell and taste of tangles of male bodies, the rough and tender anonymous encounters, the costumes and categories—twink, top, masc, queen, tweaker, tourist, voyeur, exhibitionist—all the while tracking the protean aesthetics of masculinity and gayness.

This book is an elegiac, sexy, and sparkling with wry wit tribute to the history of gay bars and their significance in the lives of gay men.