Gay club back rooms

With few exceptions, the queer spaces I have visited over the years vary wildly, but there is a slippery quality that unites my experiences in them: the warm bath of alterity. Through the gay bar as portal, we might enter places where we can be the majority not the minority, places where fantasy and debauchery are back possible, where identity and desire are heightened.

It is, as far as I can tell, one of the only attempts at a cultural history of the gay bar, gay it a cultural history that is sexier and messier, because Lin does not shy away from the visceral qualities of gay bars. Scenes of bygone club dance floors are set out before us in palpable detail, from the disco song playing to the too-tight outfits worn.

Of another L. His prose does the same, smoothly winding its way from the eighteenth century to the modern day, transporting us into a pocket of gay history for a few pages then — snap gay snap, naturally — back to the present. Is it absorbed by the dimness — or more fully exposed, as if under ultraviolet? In the early chapter set in L.

Lin demonstrates how gay bars can contribute to identity formations by allowing those who visit them to be open and exploratory, while also room how they can replicate oppression. He also describes the history and ongoing existence of racist door policies. Lin, who began frequenting the famous L.

But GAY BAR is often nostalgic about precisely the kinds of gay spaces that seem to be disappearing: the saunas, pubs with glory holes in the toilets, or kinky, dark clubs with a sense of risk. Places where visitors present fetishistically and expect to club be fetishised.

The Dark Room Boom

Across the book, Lin interrogates why these kinds of bars and clubs are on the wane. Is it because cruising has been replaced by Grindr? Is it because of gentrification, whereby premises are bought up and turned into luxury housing or wine bars especially in the astronomically overpriced cities that he writes about: London, L. Or is it because on some level society disapproves of them?

Could we think about the erasure of these spaces as a mixture of all three of the above — part of the privatisation or sanctification of gay culture that came as a response to the AIDS room, and that has been ongoing ever since — another act of assimilation, accelerated by the arrival of civil partnerships and same-sex marriage?

These are difficult questions, and Lin is smart to raise them without offering definitive answers. The film documents gay bars around Britain in an exploration of their gradual gay and is several hours long, stitching together footage of bars that are almost always completely empty, and shot after hours.

The pathos of the songs still playing and the lights still whirling conjure the last dance — bars on the verge of closure, the end of an era, a visual articulation of the void left without these spaces to go to. The film takes on a new meaning during the pandemic, a cipher for all the abandoned gay bars across Britain that shut their doors to stem the spread of the virus.

But the film also seems to say something about architecture and identity. The word gay was intoned club a joke or an elegy. He asks whether, in trying to escape the stereotypes, gay people may have forgotten about the parts of the culture that makes them who they are and, in attempting to evade otherness, let too many people in.

Queer readers who have never experienced some of the bars that Lin is talking about might be the ones to get the most out of GAY BARnot because we should necessarily keep these spaces or the behaviour that plays out back them, but because understanding the history of gay bars better helps us to consider their future, to ask ourselves: If gay bars are indeed portals, where do we want them to take us?

Amelia Abraham is a journalist from London. My father believed the sea to be covetous: a pleading dog that would lap at you adoringly, sidling up