Gay Bar: Why We Went Out" has a weird format: it's a bit of a memoir threaded through the author's monograph on gay bars through the ages. Is the bar/club a symbol of the amorphous gay community we belong to by default due to our sexual orientation, or is it a convenient corral or ghetto that keeps the deviants and weirdos safely sequestered from ‘normal’ society? The Gay Bar as a location for people to gather and express themselves, as as the location of queer history-both where it occurs and where it is passed on. Despite his mercurial temperament, Lin’s aim is nobly humane: he urges habitués of the bars to look beyond the stereotypes that codify gay desire and “to see one another as multidimensional beings”.

At its worst, as Sehgal notes, Lin tries to be profound and this is when the book is at its most mundane.Travelling and experiencing queer spaces, their individual quirks, the shine and grime, meeting the people that live within them, is a favourite thing of mine to do - and it’s clear Atherton Lin feels the same way.

First, a travelogue about the various bars that Lin has frequented throughout the various stages of his life. This book manages to weave together vast stories of the changing nature of queer nightlife, the joys and sorrows that it can bring, and a truly wide sense of history, but never loses its sense of fun. Of course, any reader in enforced pandemic lockdown is likely to be both highly envious, not to mention rather appalled, at the goings-on here. Gay Bar is a sparkling, richly individual history of the gay bars of London, San Francisco and Los Angeles, focusing on the post-AIDs crisis years of the 1990s to the present day.For those who would like a more diverse story, I recommend Jewel's Catch one about the fabulous social minded Black lesbian who ran one of the most popular diverse LGBT nightclubs in LA. In Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, Lin traces the history of the gay bar through time, from truly secret places where discovery could be deadly, to places where joy could reign unfettered, even for a few hours, from places where people gathered to mourn, to spots that have their own places in their neighborhoods. It all simply worked, and I think any gay man of a certain age will truly enjoy the trip down memory lane that can be found in these pages. 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.