"Gay Bar" by Jeremy Atherton Lin

An audio book. Partly autobiographical, partly a cultural history of gay clubs. Some became so fashionable that too many straights attended - bouncers rejected people who didn't look gay enough. The gay jargon is creative - etymologies supplied.

It starts in London. He has a partner. He writes about changes in the law (private gay sex is ok, but threesomes are public sex), raids, stings, Some clubs were accused of racism and sexism. Gay clubs had mirrors over urinals, and leaflets. Episodes of "Absolutely Fabulous" were played. There were codes. People played roles. People talked about being "post gay". Clubs were cashing in on the pink pound. Cigarette and underwear ads.

In chapter 2 he's 18 in LA. It's 1992. Gangsters owned some of the bars.

Then it's San Francisco. "We are very open", shop signs said. Working class areas were taken over by gays who liked wearing working class clothes. Leather was a "mask of masculinity". Some clubs were self-policed, located not in backstreet cellars but high streets with big windows. Beatniks and gays intersected for a while.

Then 7 years in Shoreditch. He writes about The London Apprentice ("L.A.") club. The arrival of gays to an area is a precursor of gentrification. Gays had trouble with fundamentalist Muslim youth and skinheads. "Skin" became a subset of gay, with potential for right-wing infiltration. "In the 70s the import of American clone-style into London discos unseated the entrenched cross-class tropes and introduced a cowboy-hatted egalitarianism. Social roles became harder to read, became role-play"

When he tells friends that he's writing about gay bars, they tell him to visit Blackpool. The last chapter is mostly set there. He wonders whether gay bars are needed. They were community centres, a place for knowledge to be passed down to younger generations, a safe place. But were they safe? Newcomers were targetted for sex, and the streets nearby were risky. The young gays have other places to go, and the web offers alternatives.

Other reviews

• Colm Tóibín (Lin quotes the critic Ben Walters on gay history that is “fragile from fear and forgetting, too often written in whispers and saved in scraps”)
• goodreads