Originally published on 2/19/21 in The New York Times Book Review
History, as it is taught, is a straight line of dominoes falling — the relentless clack of fact hitting fact, an orderly queue of causality stretching on forever. History, as it is lived, is a reeling spiral of flight and return; the iterative reawakening of new selves in familiar places; a never-ending interrogation of our own confused and confusing motives; a messy slather of dots on a graph where the center can be plotted only retrospectively.
Jeremy Atherton Lin’s beautiful, lyrical memoir, “Gay Bar: Why We Went Out,” cloaks this lived history in that learned history, examining an objective subject — gay bars — to create a highly subjective object: a book about his life, flensed down to just the bits that made it past the bouncer.
Each chapter focuses on one particular gay bar (jumping from London to Los Angeles to San Francisco and back), its history and its place in the trajectory of Atherton Lin’s life. Each bar stands in for the community that patronized it, and each community stands in for Atherton Lin himself at a certain moment in time. By posing his central question in the plural — why did we go out? — Atherton Lin emphasizes his membership in communities of people making similar choices, for similar reasons.
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