The New York Times reviews 'restless and intelligent' GAY BAR by Jeremy Atherton Lin, published today

Congratulations to Jeremy Atherton Lin, whose debut book GAY BAR is published by Little, Brown in the US today. 

An indispensable, intimate, and stylish celebration of the institution of the gay bar, from 1990s post-AIDS crisis to today's fluid queer spaces

Strobing lights and dark rooms; throbbing house and drag queens on counters; first kisses, last call: the gay bar has long been a place of solidarity and sexual expression—whatever your scene, whoever you’re seeking. But in urban centers around the world, they are closing, a cultural demolition that has Jeremy Atherton Lin wondering: What was the gay bar? How have they shaped him? And could this spell the end of gay identity as we know it?

In Gay Bar, the author embarks upon a transatlantic tour of the hangouts that marked his life, with each club, pub, and dive revealing itself to be a palimpsest of queer history. In prose as exuberant as a hit of poppers and dazzling as a disco ball, he time-travels from Hollywood nights in the 1970s to a warren of cruising tunnels built beneath London in the 1770s; from chichi bars in the aftermath of AIDS to today’s fluid queer spaces; through glory holes, into Crisco-slicked dungeons and down San Francisco alleys. He charts police raids and riots, posing and passing out—and a chance encounter one restless night that would change his life forever. 

The journey that emerges is a stylish and nuanced inquiry into the connection between place and identity—a tale of liberation, but one that invites us to go beyond the simplified Stonewall mythology and enter lesser-known battlefields in the struggle to carve out a territory. Elegiac, randy, and sparkling with wry wit, Gay Bar is at once a serious critical inquiry, a love story and an epic night out to remember.

Listen to Jeremy on the Kirkus Fully Booked podcast. 

"I can't remember the last time I've been so happily surprised and enchanted by a book. Gay Bar is an absolute tour de force."— Maggie Nelson

“Gay Bar” is a restless and intelligent cultural history of queer nightlife... Atherton Lin is even more talented at seeing what no longer remains, of deciphering places as palimpsests 'of a kind, with their traces of fragile, fugitive queer history.' - the New York Times