As recently as 2011 in Steve McQueen’s Shame, Michael Fassbender’s sex addict is portrayed as falling to the most irreconcilable depths of bodily depravity by ending up in a New York gay sex dungeon. There was the sex club Al Pacino visited undercover in Cruising, then the Blue Oyster Bar in Police Academy. The first ones I ever saw on screen were mostly punchlines to jokes about masculinity. Try unpacking that one.Ĭultural representation of the neighbourhood gay bar has been patchy, at best. It is, for many, the first time we have ever not been the odd one out.
So, walking into a gay bar for the first time can be a destabilising experience. Being LGBTQ+ is a minority that exists within families. Where we first experience the strange feeling of being in the majority. Gay bars are the closest the LGBTQ+ community gets to a physical location in which to observe and document our collective experience. ‘Someone called it a forced retirement,’ notes Atherton Lin. After multiple lockdowns we’ve watched aghast at the merciless decimation of the hospitality industry everyone who learned to live and love in gay bars is wondering which will survive. The book’s publication this month could not be timelier.
‘You don’t want to be thinking about going in there, love,’ one of them scolded. Two elderly women shuffled past pushing tartan shoppers. The wrist on the iconic statue’s right arm, usually raised triumphantly, was limp. One afternoon in the mid-Eighties, sneaking off school to traipse around Manchester city centre, I stood transfixed under a neon Statue of Liberty sign on the side of a pub beside a disused carpark.