He adopts a succession of identities (‘queer’, ‘fag’, ‘post-gay’, ‘gay shamer’, ‘cub’, ‘pig’), and contends with racism and ‘gatekeeping’. I didn’t know how else to learn history but to try it on.’ (There ought to be a history of the post-Warhol lives of the superstars they continued to influence generations of queers.) At the same time, ‘trying it on’ is also a way of dealing with the territorialism of the gay bar. In LA, Holly Woodlawn (a former Warhol superstar) sizes him up with a look. The book is divided into seven chapters, each relating to a different bar or neighbourhood. He compensates for the patchiness of gay history partly by supplying his own stories. Lin, domesticated now but no less enthralled, wonders: What was the gay bar? And what was it for me? Grindr, Scruff, Hinge and Tinder are doing away with IRL cruising grounds. But by 2017, half of London’s gay bars have closed. He visits clubs and saunas in San Francisco, LA, Whitechapel, Vauxhall, Blackpool.
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It reeks of ‘the clammy skin of white Englishmen’. The Bar in Vauxhall is ‘syrupy lager spilling over thick fists, smoker’s breath, someone’s citrussy cologne, the bleached vinyl seats’. Gay Bar: Why We Went Out (Granta, £9.99), Jeremy Atherton Lin’s memoir of bars he has frequented in the US and UK, begins with first impressions. ‘All memory is an inhalation,’ he wrote, ‘followed by a holding of the breath.’ Unfortunately, as McCourt noted, this great living novel was written on the air, entirely dependent on fickle – and fading – memories, as well as shameless untruths. In Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-85 (2003), James McCourt described the mid-century gay bars, cinemas, nightclubs, salons, restaurants and tea rooms as a ‘ roman fleuve … far richer and far less verbal than anything described in Ulysses’. He likened his sketch of New York’s queer past to Ezra Pound’s concept of the periplum – a map of the coast made from the vantage of the choppy sea. Delany described ‘certain social surfaces’ in the porn cinemas of Times Square, from their peak in the 1970s and 1980s to their Giuliani-sanctioned demolition in the late 1990s. In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), Samuel R.
Humphreys survived, however, and his methods proved influential.īetter histories of gay men’s lives followed, written by openly gay writers. Half of the sociology department threatened to resign. (Several years later, he came out as gay himself.) The ensuing furore resulted in a petition to Washington University to rescind Humphreys’s PhD. Humphreys’s dubious innovation was to pretend to be part of this scene in order to observe the ornate dance of invitation and proposition. In 1970, a year after the Stonewall Uprising, the American sociologist Laud Humphreys published his PhD thesis, Tearoom Trade, an ethnographic study of the ‘deviant subculture’ of men who have sex with men in America’s public toilets. Gay spaces were illegal gay art and literature were banned or never published, organised in secret and never archived, their creators and audiences harassed, shamed and murdered by strangers, cops, family and lovers the whole scene was flattened by Aids. Gay history, particularly the history of gay social life, is difficult to reconstruct. It’s important work eventually, you’ll learn to do it yourself.
Encounter him often enough and you begin to understand that lost time can’t be regained, only embellished. What is he still doing here then? It doesn’t matter. The music was better, the clientele was better, the neighbourhood was less gentrified, more authentic. Five, maybe ten years ago, he explains, it was much better here. A t some point on a night out an older queen will swing down from the rafters to let you know you’re too late.