The book’s publication this month could not be timelier. Popular Soho gay bar Molly Moggs becomes latest London venue to shut its doors.‘This has decimated my career’: Inquiry into Covid’s effects on nightlife finds a sector ‘on its knees’.The night Freddie Mercury smuggled Princess Diana into a gay bar in disguise.Come on, we went out to drink and pull!’ READ MORE ‘Sex got lost in that broadsheet dialogue about how sad it was that all these safe spaces were closing. Not just the ones that were great, all of them.’ Some of the reporting of the LGBTQ+ venue closures irritated him. ‘I started thinking about what that meant for me,’ he says, ‘and looking at the gay bars I actually went to. Already, Gay Bar reads like a cult classic.Ītherton Lin began writing his book in response to an alarming news story in 2015, that almost half the gay spaces in London had shut down during the preceding decade. To gauge some of its highly flavoured depth and originality, it begins in the thick of cruising a south London sex bar and ends in Blackpool. The author flits unselfconsciously across genre, between memoir, social history, travelogue and a particularly sexy branch of academia. Atherton Lin is a Californian in his late 40s, married to an Englishman, and Gay Bar is his first book. It journeys through detailed, knotty questions of personal identity and questions the very foundations of LGBTQ+ community. I was thinking about all this while devouring an early copy of Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, by Jeremy Atherton Lin a detailed, frank and brilliantly personal account of the author’s life in gay bars. But a cultural, even sociological, seed had been planted in me, ready to germinate. It would be two or three years before I learned that New York, New York was presided over by a towering drag queen called Solitaire who carried herself with all the poise of a drunk navvy. Like an amateur sleuth, developing his nose for sniffing out the closest available mischief within a five-mile radius of the house I grew up in, I’d accidentally uncovered my first neighbourhood gay bar. ‘You don’t want to be thinking about going in there, love,’ one of them scolded. Two elderly women shuffled past pushing tartan shoppers. The wrist on the iconic statue’s right arm, usually raised triumphantly, was limp. One afternoon in the mid-Eighties, sneaking off school to traipse around Manchester city centre, I stood transfixed under a neon Statue of Liberty sign on the side of a pub beside a disused carpark. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.Either way, 10Best will make sure you know the best places to dance in San Francisco. Maybe you need to just let go after a long museum tour, or burn some calories after that big bowl of pasta in North Beach. So when you're trying to choose that one last activity that will top off your San Francisco vacation just right, consider dancing. When you want that feeling, we'll introduce you to the best dance clubs in San Francisco, like the iconic El Rio. Giving yourself over to the rhythms, the lights, and the energy is a total release. Whether you prefer to be inside or out, there's no end to activities in San Francisco.īut few pursuits tap into all the senses like dancing. And the temperate climate and natural beauty of the Bay Area offers year-round hiking and exploring.
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