Not just pro athletes but college athletes as well. In Scottsdale, in that bar, we met other players and other officials from other sports. Later, I did talk to him, and it was amazingly reassuring. What are the chances that you walk into a bar and there’s a ref? Immediately, I get a drink, I turn around and I see someone at the bar and say, “Damn it, I know that guy.” It was Bill Kennedy, the N.B.A. I remember walking in that first time quite tentatively with a group of my friends. I went to a little bar there called BS West. I lived in Arizona, in Scottsdale, while I played in the league. I used to go there with my sister with my friends routinely. I’m from Manchester, England, so we have a very vibrant gay community that is very well integrated. Psychologist and former National Basketball Association player Ease and dignity, however, had seemed incompatible with my gayness until my sweaty June bar visit set me on a new path, one that much later led me to marrying my husband, having our children, and becoming an activist for L.G.B.T.Q.
Love was not unimaginable, though I didn’t yet have the hang of it. Sex was already easy to find, though it unnerved me. Marks Place, and I clung to someone I knew named Debbie who was temporarily lesbian. But contrary to so many narratives of relief at finding a gay context, my initial experience was primarily of anxiety, because to be where the least acceptable aspect of myself was the explicit topic made me feel more naked than the go-go boys. By the time I was old enough to enter such an establishment, I had my own tight jeans and inchoate prospects.
I haunted them, promenading back and forth with our family dog, whom I had to walk after dinner, and trying to see past the darkened windows and curtained doors, simultaneously hoping and fearing that one of those men in tight jeans would want to strike up an intimacy as he exited. One was Uncle Charlie’s Uptown, the other had a punning name I didn’t understand at the time: Camp David. There were two gay bars in the neighborhood where I grew up. Matthew Eisman/Getty Images Andrew SolomonĪuthor, “The Noonday Demon,” “Far & Away” Elegiac, randy, and sparkling with wry wit, Gay Bar is at once a serious critical inquiry, a love story and an epic night out to remember.Credit. The journey that emerges is a stylish and nuanced inquiry into the connection between place and identity-a tale of liberation, but one that invites us to go beyond the simplified Stonewall mythology and enter lesser-known battlefields in the struggle to carve out a territory. He charts police raids and riots, posing and passing out-and a chance encounter one restless night that would change his life forever. In prose as exuberant as a hit of poppers and dazzling as a disco ball, he time-travels from Hollywood nights in the 1970s to a warren of cruising tunnels built beneath London in the 1770s from chichi bars in the aftermath of AIDS to today’s fluid queer spaces through glory holes, into Crisco-slicked dungeons and down San Francisco alleys. In Gay Bar, the author embarks upon a transatlantic tour of the hangouts that marked his life, with each club, pub, and dive revealing itself to be a palimpsest of queer history.
But in urban centers around the world, they are closing, a cultural demolition that has Jeremy Atherton Lin wondering: What was the gay bar? How have they shaped him? And could this spell the end of gay identity as we know it? Strobing lights and dark rooms throbbing house and drag queens on counters first kisses, last call: the gay bar has long been a place of solidarity and sexual expression-whatever your scene, whoever you’re seeking. "Atherton Lin has a five-octave, Mariah Carey-esque range for discussing gay sex.” – New York Times Book ReviewĪs gay bars continue to close at an alarming rate, a writer looks back to find out what’s being lost in this indispensable, intimate, and stylish celebration of queer history. “ Gay Bar is an absolute tour de force.” –Maggie Nelson NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The New York Times * NPR * Vogue * Gay Times * Artforum * National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Recommendations from the African Diaspora.Little, Brown Books for Young Readers Arrow Icon Arrow icon.Little, Brown and Company Arrow Icon Arrow icon.Hachette Nashville Arrow Icon Arrow icon.Grand Central Publishing Arrow Icon Arrow icon.