“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.
