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With few exceptions, the queer spaces I have visited over the years vary wildly, but there is a slippery quality that unites my experiences in them: the warm bath of alterity The queer DJ and writer madison moore describes clubs as ‘portals’, for their ability to help us imagine a different way of doing things, to escape the capitalist and heteronormative logic of the ‘real world’ Through the gay bar as portal, we might enter places where we can be the majority not the minority, places where fantasy and debauchery are made possible, where identity and desire are heightened   Jeremy Atherton Lin’s GAY BAR: WHY WE WENT OUT (2021) is a declaration of the author’s love of gay bars It is, as far as I can tell, one of the only attempts at a cultural history of the gay bar, be it a cultural history that is sexier and messier, because Lin does not shy away from the visceral qualities of gay bars He does not evade the smells and the dirt and the fluids as a comparatively fusty historian might (see, say, Peter Ackroyd’s QUEER CITY, 2017) and instead embraces impropriety GAY BAR opens in a dark room, which Lin describes as ‘crowded like a bumper car rink’ It’s a space seething with desire, but one edged with violence too, as Lin’s body is tugged and grabbed by a circle of ‘benevolent bullies’ whose ‘bodies circumscribed a turf, as on a playground or prison yard’ In one memorable section, Lin describes an underground fisting club in 1970s San Francisco called the Catacombs, quoting the theorist Gayle Rubin’s memory of it: ‘Just walking into that room could put a person in a leathery mood’   GAY BAR is a kind of queer bildungsroman, in which Lin comes of age in the bars he writes about The book’s structure revolves around venues Lin has known in London, LA and San Francisco, using them as anchors through which to explore the history of queer life in the area, as well as vanished gay spaces that once existed in the neighbourhoods Scenes