A LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER

A BRILLIANTLY WRITTEN AND INCISIVE ACCOUNT OF GAY LIFE
–Colm Toíbín, The Guardian

ENGROSSING –Kirkus Reviews EXCELLENT –Booklist ESSENTIAL –Vogue
VOGUE * BEST BOOKS OF 2021
CAPTIVATING –Publishers Weekly MASTERFUL –Shelf Awareness
BEAUTIFUL AND ORIGINAL –The New York Times
THE NEW YORK TIMES * TOP PICKS OF 2021
BEGUILING –Electric Literature GRIPPING –Boston Review
GLITTERY, MAGNETIC –Gay Times
GAY TIMES * BEST BOOKS OF 2021
GLORIOUS –Winnipeg Free Press UNMISSABLE –Jezebel
SPY * MOST NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2021
SPIN * 10 FAVORITE TITLES
REFRESHING –Elephant STYLISH –The Skimm WITTY –Xtra
EXPANSIVE, EXUBERANT AND HORNY –Attitude
ATTITUDE * BOOK OF THE MONTH
LYRICAL –Artforum
ARTFORUM * BEST BOOKS OF 2021
PLAYFUL, HILARIOUS, AROUSING,
SHOCKING AND CHALLENGING –The Face
A RICH TAPESTRY –Vanity Fair A GRAND ADVENTURE –Associated Press
A KNOCKOUT –The Spectator GORGEOUS –The White Review
THE SPECTATOR * BOOKS OF THE YEAR
THE WHITE REVIEW * BOOKS OF THE YEAR
RESTLESS AND INTELLIGENT –The New York Times Book Review
SOMETHING WORTH CELEBRATING –Literary Review
EXCEPTIONALLY WELL-CRAFTED –CBC SEAMLESS –The Harvard Review
A DISPLAY OF A RICH SENSIBILITY –The Guardian
THE GUARDIAN * BOOK OF THE WEEK
ILLUMINATING, SEXY, VIBRANT –BuzzFeed
FUNNY, BRILLIANT –Edge PITCH-PERFECT –Queerguru
AMBITIOUS AND INTELLECTUALLY PROMISCUOUS –The Baffler
EXTRAORDINARY –Erotic Review ENDLESSLY FASCINATING –NPR
NPR * BOOKS WE LOVE 2021
UTTERLY UNIQUE –The Observer

ALREADY, GAY BAR READS LIKE A CULT CLASSIC
–Paul Flynn, Evening Standard

Does gay still have a place?

Strobing lights and dark rooms, drag queens on counters, first kisses, last call; the gay bar has long been a place of solidarity and sexual expression. Now they are closing, a cultural demolition that has Jeremy Atherton Lin wondering: Could this spell the end of gay identity as we know it? In prose as exuberant as a hit of poppers and dazzling as a disco ball, the author embarks on 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. Gay Bar 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 wake of AIDS to today’s fluid queer spaces; through glory holes, into Crisco-slicked dungeons and down San Francisco alleys. Jeremy charts police raids and riots, posing and passing out—and a chance encounter one restless night that would change his life forever. The journey that emerges is a stylish and nuanced inquiry into the link between place and identity, inviting us to go beyond Stonewall and enter the underground. 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.

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I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so happily surprised and enchanted by a book.
GAY BAR is an absolute tour de force.
– Maggie Nelson author of The Argonauts

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Jeremy Atherton Lin’s personal history of queer nightlife is shot with vibrant intellectual adrenaline. With keen original insight, he celebrates the gay bar as a site of ribald, sensuous, and urgent resistance. A must-read for all.
– Cathy Park Hong author of Minor Feelings

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A text for our times that should become a classic.
– Paul Mendez author of Rainbow Milk

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GAY BAR is searching, erudite and sexy, probing the past, present, and future of queer life while refusing easy binaries. GAY BAR is about pleasure, but is deeply serious too. It is wonderful — one of the best books I have read in ages.
– Katherine Angel author of Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again

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Lively and dirty, intellectual and gossipy, GAY BAR is the rare book that feels both like a guilty pleasure and like it is making you considerably smarter as you read. A super exciting debut and an important document of queer lives.
– Michelle Tea author of Against Memoir + Black Wave

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GAY BAR is a book of rare dreamlike power. Brainy, audacious, funny, vulnerable, and sexy, it’s endlessly awake not just to codes and signs but to a culture that’s changing faster than most of us are able to see.
– Paul Lisicky author of Later + The Narrow Door

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GAY BAR is a work of genius. Smooth and ferocious; tumescent and pounding; sweet, awkward, occasionally shy. Phenomenological social history at its most fuckable. Love.
– Grace Lavery author of Please Miss

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Utterly blown away. Jeremy Atherton Lin creates something new from a territory that feels so familiar and known. We can never have enough complex, intersectional writing about queer experience, and this is such a welcome, needed addition to the canon.
– Niven Govinden author of Diary of a Film

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A brilliant, exhilarating juxtaposition of memoir, social history, architectural analysis, shoe-leather geography and more penises than you can shake a stick at, GAY BAR is a study of the intersection between sexuality and identity made concrete.
Passionate, wry, funny, clear-eyed, romantic, sceptical, randy, bold, celebratory and stinky, often all at once.
– Will Ashon author of Strange Labyrinth + Chamber Music

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Raunchy, tender, and bracingly erudite, GAY BAR is an archeology, a 4 a.m. afterparty, a disco-and-glitter drenched fever dream. Written in luxuriant, sublimely evocative prose, Atherton Lin wafts between personal anecdote and political history, exploring the evolution of queer spaces, and how their disappearance is a sign of what we’ve both gained and lost. GAY BAR is pure pleasure to read: like having an intimate conversation with your funniest, smartest friend.
– David Adjmi author of Lot Six

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Each page made me yearn for the dance floor and each chapter made me think about our need for queer spaces in new ways. I’m so glad that someone has written the definitive book about gay bars… but specifically, Atherton Lin, who has captured the subversiveness and sexiness that make these places what they are, or tragically, were.
– Amelia Abraham author of Queer Intentions

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Like the hypnotic thumps of good house music, Jeremy Atherton Lin’s voice pulses. Painstakingly researched and tenderly written, GAY BAR marks queer bars as sites of resistance and reinvention. I longed for nothing more than to club hop with him,
to occupy the spaces between light and shadow and
consume the night so that we might emerge wholly new.
– Alex Espinoza author of Cruising

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Published by Little, Brown (N. America) and Granta (UK). Published also in Italian by Minimum Fax, in French by Editions Tusitala and in Spanish (to be announced).