Gay Bar Quotes

“I found myself taking more risks, because failure had a second life — it could spin a yarn. There was an agency in the retelling, in the self-deprecation and of course self-mythologizing. Memoir is how you groom yourself. Memoir is drag.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“Gay is the opium of the people.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“We go out to be gay. We crave this when once again growing bored with the straight world”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“There’s not just a gap, but a chasm between generations that AIDS create. Their absence is felt by those of us who are old enough to feel it. But the younger ones are never going to know about them unless we tell them.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“Disassociation is a gay ritual as much as any other.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“It used to be: We are everywhere. Now it’s: We are everything.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“I am a participant in an archaeology of looking, of cruising.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“the queer archive is ‘fragile from fear and forgetting, too often written in whispers and saved in scraps.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“But I couldn't relate to this widely held notion of community. We hear the word community all the time. Often it sounds like wishful thinking. Queer community is just as vague - just piling a confusing identity onto an elusive concept. Maybe community, as Famous says, excludes inherently.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“I was under the impression I was always late to the party, but in fact I may not have been invited.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“We became a different kind of wallflower—not shrinking violets but judgmental pansies.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“We danced to whatever—Rihanna, Lady Gaga, ‘Finally’ by CeCe Peniston. On Thursdays, a DJ collective played esoteric house, which Famous complained was too serious. Our ongoing joke was how miserable it would be if we ended up dying there: the Joiners Harms, we called it, as Robbie passed around shots of sambuca, the syrup coating my tobacco-stained fingertips.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“Lifestyle 'celebrates the narcissism of similarity,' and elevates provate concerns—namely, leisure and consumption—above the common good.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“You meet men there who are to you as you are to them: nothing but a body with which combinations and productions of pleasure are possible. You cease to be imprisoned in your own face, in your own past, in your own identity.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“(Guy Strait once described the conversion of a struggling venue into a gay bar by way of hiring the right staff as turning it on.)”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“The handsome Prince Nelly, new gay bar royalty, lip-synced along to his power ballad selections with a crooner’s passion, both his fists at his sternum. He announced the next song into a microphone, imparting copious factoids. In general, the music was eighties pop—Dead or Alive, Bananarama, Belinda Carlisle, the Human League—and stuff irresistible after imbibing cheap beer: ‘Fantasy’ by Mariah Carey. ‘9 to 5.’ Crystal Castles. CSS. Janet Jackson’s ‘When I Think of You.’ ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ by Depeche Mode. ‘That’s Not My Name.’ MGMT. ‘D.A.N.C.E.’ ‘Last Dance.’ I recognized the Lovely Jonjo from his appearance on the cover of Butt magazine.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“According to Time magazine, Moby Dick Records folded in 1984 when seven of its ten core employees died of AIDS.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“In David Diebold’s oral history of the Moby Dick label, one producer summed up the company culture: ‘Too many bosses, too many queens, a lot of jealousy.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“Moby Dick was also briefly—for some four years from 1980—the primary disco label in San Francisco”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“The band Erase Errata recorded an eighty-second song about it: ‘The White Horse is bucking. It smashes you with its hoof. It wants you to go for a night of gay dancing. So picture yourself at the White Horse. And picture yourself among the beautiful. And picture yourself alive.’ The lyrics may be ironic, but they assert something many queer people know well: an unshakable fondness for the only gay bar in town. It’s not about holding out for a good night, but rather a letting go—accepting the gay bar’s unconvincing promise of escape.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“Bus Station John told a local paper: ‘There’s not just a gap, but a chasm between generations that AIDS created. Their absence is felt by those of us who are old enough to feel it. But the younger ones are never going to know about them unless we tell them.’ We went out to be told. We went out to feel it. We went out to experience how it used to be, and Bus Station John was happy to be our gay liberation daddy. A mature writer for a gay newspaper reported that the seventies bathhouse vibe at Tubesteak Connection was ‘so authentic, people were actually cruising!”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“We were first invited to Tubesteak Connection by Spider, who manned the door. The DJ, Bus Station John, played ecstatic sets of arcane disco, hi-NRG, Italo and boogie. He was in his forties, and wore a thick mustache, muttonchops, flat cap. Bus Station John gave the appearance he might be prickly, but he called us child. He was there to bear witness, to testify, using rare tracks from what he called ‘the golden age of gay,’ the period between Stonewall and AIDS. The music was our time machine. We were conscious the discs he put on the turntable may have come from the collections of deceased gay men.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“In 1964, the best-named gay activist of the era, Guy Strait, self-published an article entitled ‘What Is a Gay Bar’ (and laid out with the headline in French—‘Qu’est-ce Que C’est? Gay Bar’). According to Strait, while homosexual men had long sniffed out hotel lobbies, public squares, dive bars and gentleman’s clubs with a tacit reputation, a true gay bar was something different. His first rule for a gay bar was its ‘freedom of speech’—the use of idioms and unguarded sex talk. (Anyone who wanted to be schooled could order Strait’s own Lavender Lexicon: A Dictionary of Gay Terms and Phrases for two dollars.) Strait contended that while a cruisy hangout could fly under the radar, a gay bar might be forced to shut down based on the conversations. ‘Gay bars are not the best pickup spots,’ he wrote, ‘but they are the safest; they are not the worst thing that has happened to society and may well be one of the best.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“An honest account of the gay bar must include bisexual, pansexual, confused, questioning, transitioning bars.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“The majority of the Phone Booth clientele was probably straight, yet somehow the atmosphere was predominantly gay. This was an advantageous situation; the straight boys respectfully gave the impression they might capitulate. Ostensibly straight boys whom I kissed there included a construction site foreman, a professional skateboarder and an acrobat. Somebody would always put ‘Family Affair’ by Mary J. Blige on the jukebox, with its message about leaving one’s situations behind at the door.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“A quintessential item was the foam-front, mesh-backed trucker cap, like the one on the head of the musician Arthur Russell, our fag patron saint. He couldn’t give a fuck about genre—experimental composition, country, disco—and was ahead of his time that way.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“It used to be our home: the comment stayed with me. Was it my home --- did it used to be?”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“Between 1977 and 1984, according to Milk’s protégé Cleve Jones, Coors saw its share of the giant California market drop from forty to fourteen percent.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“The critic Michael Warner points out that in the lesbian and gay movement, ‘the institutions of culture-building have been market-mediated: bars, discos, special services, newspapers, magazines, phone lines, resorts, urban commercial districts”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“In 1985, a group of sociologists published the book Habits of the Heart, arguing that a real community must be a ‘community of memory,’ meaning one that remembers its past, including painful stories of shared suffering. Where history is forgotten, they wrote, community degenerates into lifestyle enclaves.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out