Jeremy Atherton Lin’s beautiful, lyrical memoir, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, cloaks [...] lived history in [...] 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.

The subtitle of Atherton Lin's book is Why We Went Out, and the London-based author offers plenty of reasons in this remarkable debut. Gay Bar combines memoir, history and criticism; it's a difficult book to pin down, but that's what makes it so readable and so endlessly fascinating.

Jeremy Atherton Lin brings a wise, wry voice to his masterful Gay Bar: Why We Went Out . This thoughtful study is part memoir, part research project, part travelogue and a large part classic essay-as-assay, seeking answers on the page.

Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar is a restless and intelligent cultural history of queer nightlife.

A writer’s intimate trans-Atlantic history of gay bars.

In this captivating debut, essayist Lin explores the gay bar as a cultural institution whose time may have passed.

As these institutions continue to close at alarming rates, Atherton Lin vividly reflects on his own experiences visiting gay bars from the early 1990s up to today.