Gay Bar by Jeremy Lin

The meeting on 20 July was attended by Sharad (moderating), Aaron, and Lip Sin.

Lip Sin noted that from interviews the author had given, it sounded as though this book was a project long in the making. Aaron added that it seemed as if the book were written in bits and pieces across a long period of time.

Aaron did not like the book: he found the writing pretentious and the author’s aims unclear. He thought the author did not interrogate his identity (white-passing Asian) or his desires (seemingly only attracted to white men) deeply enough. This led Aaron to think that the author was avoiding important issues on purpose. For example, he pointed to how the author wrote a lot about sex but did not say anything about STIs or sexual health.

Sharad was ambivalent about the book. He found the absence of an emphasis on diversity and race striking, even refreshing, since it seems to have become an obligatory fixture of contemporary gay writing. He thought the book did a good job of using gay bars as settings to explore the author’s relation to and growth as a gay man – sometimes as spaces of “false intimacy”, sometimes as places to just “be gay”, sometimes a place of longing for transcendence. He thought the author captured nicely that gay bars weren’t places of relaxation, but a place of a tension where bodies “orbit” around each other. Ultimately, however, Sharad found the book boring because the different places in the book weren’t distinct enough and so working through those different sites was a slog.

Aging: Sharad thought the description of Blackpool made it sound fascinating. Apparently, it is a heavily disadvantaged area where a lot of young people have moved away from, so its gay bars are filled with motley middle-aged people.

Consent culture: Sharad noticed that the author seemed to be nostalgic for a gay bar culture that put less emphasis on safety and consent, and instead reveled in a more open-ended, sleazy past. For the author, getting manhandled as a youth and then growing up and doing that to new youths seemed to be a natural cycle, just what you do as a gay man. As opposed to Lin’s insouciance over consent, Aaron brought up his own experience of being groped in saunas and felt violated and repulsed. Clearly, the author needs to rethink his idea of non-consent.

Intergenerational Sex: Aaron thought the author’s descriptions of intergenerational sex, of sex with guys 20 years his junior, came across as taking advantage of younger people. This is an area that the author neglects to ruminate over too.