Nostalgia for seedy nightclubs reeking of sex and poppers

Gay bar, how I miss you. Barely any lesbian joints have survived the online dating scene, and Grindr has replaced the cruising bars. Why get dressed up and brave the buses when all you have to do to get a date is access an app?

I was keen to indulge in some nostalgia when I picked up Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar: Why We Went Out. I would now prefer dinner with friends to seedy nightclubs reeking of sex and poppers, but as a youngster I loved a gay disco.

Taking us through a personal, historical and political view of the gay bars of London, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Lin skilfully recreates the throb of disco, invoking the stench of beer and sweating men. ‘It’s starting to smell like penis in here,’ is a memorable opening line for any book. Although lesbians get the odd mention, this is about men: macho, camp or both.

My first gay bar was in 1977, aged 15. Rockshots in Newcastle was famed for its male go-go dancers and lesbians so butch they could kick-start a vibrator. At that time it was dangerous to be an out lesbian, and the gay bar was my refuge and classroom. Where else would I learn the art of dancing to Saturday Night Fever with a tiny woman dressed like John Travolta? I spent hours watching the courting rituals of lezzers for guidance on how this secret community conducted itself. This was the same for Lin, who came of age in the early 1990s in California.

His description of his experiences with his life partner Famous is primarily a documentation of the couple cruising for sex. Lin writes of San Francisco:

The streets were like advent calendars. I wanted to open each door and reveal a bisexual hippie, leather daddy, elegant transvestite, friendly bull dyke wielding tattoo gun, sleazy yogi, stoned poet, skateboarder too lazy to resist my advances.