Going out out: my life in gay bars

A frank new book about the evolution and importance of gay nightlife has Paul Flynn reflecting on his own nocturnal adventures in the capital — and other cities around the globe. Whose round is it, anyway?
Michelle Thompson
Paul Flynn11 March 2021

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. Something looked off about it. I stared and stared, until it clicked. The wrist on the iconic statue’s right arm, usually raised triumphantly, was limp. Two elderly women shuffled past pushing tartan shoppers. ‘You don’t want to be thinking about going in there, love,’ one of them scolded. I was 14, in my school uniform. She probably meant well. But she could not have been more wrong.

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. 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. But a cultural, even sociological, seed had been planted in me, ready to germinate.

I’ve since drank in gay bars from Belfast to Beijing, Toronto to Tokyo. I’ve met the finest of friends and most deplorable of boyfriends in them. I was sacked from a storied Glasgow gay club for helping myself to its spirits. I watched the first gay bar being built at Glastonbury in 2009, liberating the monolithic festival’s orientation, feel-good factor and taste level overnight. I attended the opening of the first, post-decriminalisation gay bar in the Baltic states. But there was horror amid the hedonism — I also reported on the heart-breaking massacre at Pulse club in Orlando.

In 20-odd years of living in London, I’ve amassed a small, specific checklist of favourite gay bars, plucked from across its multitudes. The more niche, the better. I learned to love boozers as diverse as The Old Quebec in Marble Arch, an arcane institution ‘for older gay gentlemen and their admirers’ (fondly dubbed ‘The Elephants’ Graveyard’ by its regulars) and The White Swan in Limehouse, where TV presenter Michael Barrymore crashed out of the closet. I still maintain that no London pub can emulate the sheer, frenzied, down-home electricity of watching Sunday karaoke night at Soho’s bear pub, The Kings Arms, when a hirsute man of ample proportions nails an Oasis classic, note-perfect from its tiny stage.

The Kings Arms public house, Poland Street, Soho, London, England, UK
The Kings Arms
Alamy Stock Photo

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. It journeys through detailed, knotty questions of personal identity and questions the very foundations of LGBTQ+ community. Atherton Lin is a Californian in his late 40s, married to an Englishman, and Gay Bar is his first book. The author flits unselfconsciously across genre, between memoir, social history, travelogue and a particularly sexy branch of academia. 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. Already, Gay Bar reads like a cult classic.

Atherton 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. ‘I started thinking about what that meant for me,’ he says, ‘and looking at the gay bars I actually went to. Not just the ones that were great, all of them.’ Some of the reporting of the LGBTQ+ venue closures irritated him. ‘Sex got lost in that broadsheet dialogue about how sad it was that all these safe spaces were closing. Come on, we went out to drink and pull!’

The book’s publication this month could not be timelier. After multiple lockdowns we’ve watched aghast at the merciless decimation of the hospitality industry; everyone who learned to live and love in gay bars is wondering which will survive. ‘Someone called it a forced retirement,’ notes Atherton Lin.

Gay bars are the closest the LGBTQ+ community gets to a physical location in which to observe and document our collective experience. Where we first experience the strange feeling of being in the majority. Being LGBTQ+ is a minority that exists within families. So, walking into a gay bar for the first time can be a destabilising experience. It is, for many, the first time we have ever not been the odd one out. Try unpacking that one.

Cultural representation of the neighbourhood gay bar has been patchy, at best. The first ones I ever saw on screen were mostly punchlines to jokes about masculinity. There was the sex club Al Pacino visited undercover in Cruising, then the Blue Oyster Bar in Police Academy. As recently as 2011 in Steve McQueen’s Shame, Michael Fassbender’s sex addict is portrayed as falling to the most irreconcilable depths of bodily depravity by ending up in a New York gay sex dungeon.

Times change. The current evocation of the gay bar is almost comically opposite to its forebears. Our eyes have attuned to that Netflix happy place where a theatrical drag queen showers wisecracks from the stage, trays of shots are shared between strangers and everyone conjoins for a rousing, rainbow-hued chorus of Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’ at closing time. There is even a gay bar in EastEnders, where Phil Mitchell’s gangster son proposed to his cute policeman boyfriend; a Romeo and Romeo for our times.

From the outset, Atherton Lin’s book positions his author’s voice hovering above the gay community, while wading through the thick of it. ‘It was important the narrator could be judgemental,’ he says. ‘I’m reading a lot of contemporary authors who are claiming that everything great about their life comes from being queer. I never really thought like that. It’s weird to me that people ascribe their whole identity to it. My book is about all the things that are uncomfortable or awkward.’

He breaks the boosterish current vogue for positivism and the pathologising of our behaviours in gay writing, stories clearly demarcating their heroes and villains, saints and sinners. ‘A part of the gay bar experience is about having mixed feelings,’ he says. ‘There is disappointment. Of course, sometimes you walk into a room and think, “Does everyone in here like themselves?”’

On reading Gay Bar, I cast Atherton Lin as the perfect literary drinking buddy. His roving eye details specific corners of gay bars I’d otherwise have missed. His travels follow him from his native LA to London as a post-graduate backpacker, where he meets his future husband at the long defunct Popstarz bar. It picks up his life in bars through the couple’s shaky first domicile in San Francisco then flits back to London, where they eventually settle in 2007, just as the Hackney Road triangle of pivotal gay bars — The George and Dragon, Nelson’s Head and Joiners Arms — are peaking and Shoreditch is briefly known as Gayditch.

Atherton Lin’s writing vividly itches with the pulse, heat and chaos, the acceptance and rejection of gay nightlife

The best thing about Gay Bar is that it is a panacea during a time when you can’t actually go to one. The writing vividly itches with the pulse, heat and chaos, the acceptance and rejection of gay nightlife. Because so much of the LGBTQ+ cultural experience is built on socialising, it fills its chasm handsomely.

In the end, even the author accepts gay bars have their shortcomings. Because who couldn’t? In the absence of anything else, they’re the primary resource our community has from which to create our stories. They are our churches, schools and pick-up parlours, streaked with alcohol and nicotine.

‘While I was writing the book I had this sense of forgiveness,’ Atherton Lin says. ‘That particular moment where you’re in a roomful of basic gays and there’s an undeniable connection of people exorcising some demons, a letting off of their gay steam. I accept that. I can feel it in the room. There is catharsis.’

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