“The gay bar has this cultural presence that’s sort of a joke,” says Atherton Lin over a video call. The gay bar has a distinctive magnetic push-pull allure to its congregants, and the book contains an almost grueling level of ambivalence. Gay Bar, the new cultural-history-memoir hybrid by American-born, London-based writer Jeremy Atherton Lin, is concerned exactly with this quality. So even though I’d give anything to go back to a moody-mean-mediocre queer night now, I also know that when it was available, I often couldn’t wait to leave. Looking back, the crowds could be icy or clingy, the only people I liked were my friends, and the atmosphere was sometimes too spiky for me to ever really relax in my own skin, which is often a central premise of queer nights to begin with. But if I investigate an actual, concrete memory from inside the queer night, the flaws creep in from the edges. When I remember queer nights and gay bars now, there’s a filter on this category of memory that could be called “glisten.” The thought of even waiting in an interminable line just to go into a queer night club sounds like heaven to me now.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |