The popular story about the gay bar, it seemed, centered a dominant flavor of gay man: cis, white, conventionally masculine. Throughout his life, gay bars offered solace and excitement, but they just as often disappointed, excluded, and baffled, providing Atherton Lin with more questions about his identity than answers. He thought about that narrative in relation to his own experiences. I walked around the corner because I couldn't bring myself to go in, but then the next night I did and everything was illuminated and the drag queen smiled at me and I was gay.” “Especially for the generation before me, a lot of times it’s like, I was so nervous. “Going to your first gay bar - I feel like it's told with so much agency,” Atherton Lin told me over the phone, from London recently. Which caused Atherton Lin to wonder, For who? From NBC News to the Guardian, nearly all the coverage contained a similar slant, which played into a popular narrative: gay bars as beacons of liberation, central to the formation of queer identity and community.
In 2017, the writer Jeremy Atherton Lin noticed a spate of media coverage mourning gay bars in London, more than half of which had closed within the last decade.
