Will I love Gay Bar?

"You're always looking for something better," somebody told Jeremy Atherton Lin. His response? "I thought that was the whole point."

When Lin arrived at college, in 1992, HIV was still a death sentence. Newly out, he didn't know, well, how to be gay. So he went out dancing. (I did the gay bars too when I first came out, found a lover at one, and stopped. Lin found a life partner there, too; they've kept dancing.)

This erudite, affecting book merges personal saga with gay history and theory, mapped onto bars in L.A., San Francisco and London (most, due to… show more.

Gay Bar is an imaginative history of gay bar culture in London, San Francisco, and LA – where the author has lived, over several decades. It is both personal and more widely historical, blending anecdotes and “overheard” with in-depth research to uncover the importance and also problems that come with these spaces, which are increasingly becoming extinct, as gay bars in major cities struggle to stay in business.