The golden age of Roman gay bars, if there ever was one, I haven’t experienced. One says: what does it matter, today Grindr and queer evenings are open to all – Il Mucca, Latte Fresco, Gaiam d’Estate et ur. And then, the gay street with coming outs and sidewalk tables. Gay bars, though old-fashioned, behind closed doors – like saunas for that matter – are still there, pleasure, refuge or shame, depending on the era, the evening, the mood of the people who frequent them. Straight people must explain that the entrances are anonymous, dark; You pay before you enter, like at a disco, you always walk down the stairs. Sometimes there is also a dance floor, there is no shortage of music, but the space is small; This is saved for the dark rooms, the rooms behind the meetings – once secret, for which admission to these rooms is still subject to subscription. A corridor or flight of stairs leads to a maze of alcoves and small rooms where lovers and strangers pleasure each other in twilight sensuality.
Monty has 101, which is fairly new, it doesn’t have select entrances, it’s for gays, lesbians and affables, but it does have dark ones. It looks like a beach bar planted underground. last time i was there the tv on the counter was showing again rue paul’s drag race, while the tourists danced the lizzo. Censored is one block up the hill. It’s more classic. The mirrored walls smell of the nineties and the tiny underground rooms look like train cabins. It occurred to me that they broadcast, among many porn, beautiful woman, Behind Termini, in the company, the bears meet again. At the Black Hole Club in San Giovanni, with two blow-ups from Tom of Finland next to the counter, the aisle would be really dark, were it not for the artificial stars: the polaroid is the first zip of a jeans that glows in the dim light. .
American journalist Jeremy Atherton Lynn knows something about this, author of a history of the gay world that passes through their campus yesterday and today between London, Los Angeles and San Francisco. I say he knows something about it because his Gay Bar. because we went out at night (minimal fax, transl. Sara Reggiani) opens with a stack of releases in a dark room in London some years earlier (opening: “It’s starting to smell like a pea”), exploring a seedy clubbing culture where before politics, sex and music they become indistinguishable. “Grinder has access, but I’m not really interested in the fucking photos – Atherton Lynn, now over 50, well behaved, sitting in the publishing house in Rome, Patagonia hat on his head that frames his face turns black and never flies, like sailor Heroes – Happiness Is in Wonder, which is the bottom zipper. The severity of the bar”.
No, he’s not the usual boomer against apps, if anything a very helpful daddy, who later in the book, talking about the recent easygoing twink, writes: “These kids don’t need my wit. Friendship, maybe.” which is not true then, and in fact Gay Bars One can cherish an enviable emotional education testimony from the 1990s.
Atherton Lynn tells us about his arrival in Los Angeles, West Hollywood, nicknamed Boys Town, just after the peak of the AIDS epidemic, when Calvin Klein boxers were very clean-shaven – and straight – Marky Mark, the icon of pop advertising. ups. Then there’s London, where she meets her partner for life, Famous, at a gay Brit-pop night. After moving to San Francisco, to the queer heart of the city, the Castro District… and so on and so forth. Everywhere visits bring ghosts with them: traces of history’s invisible homosexuals and forcibly removed secret places, shelters that are too precarious and transgressive. So the first-hand experiences of a twenty-one-year-old boy who discovers sex, love and nightlife together alternate with historical analyzes and more or less horrifying anecdotes. Like the fact that until the 1990s the cutest British policemen worked in public toilets as sieves in plain clothes, batons behind their backs. Exemplary is the story of Twin Peaks in San Francisco, a gay bar that claims to be “clean”. A strange place at first featured large windows, but for exactly that reason the owners prevented patrons from expressing affection, even a kiss. Not only to avoid the police, but to demonstrate that they can be “respectable”, as if only in this way can homosexuals be granted citizenship. “When you give in to these ideas you create a lobotomized version of gay culture – Atherton Lynn responds – I, on the other hand, wanted sex to be in the book, it’s from the first page. It’s a way of experiencing the world.” There is way. There is music, poetry, psychoanalysis; there is sex for me. I will always write about it. Creating intimacy is a political act”.
There is no intention to romanticize the gay bar, nor to criticize it, he explains, just to talk about it. There were some dark sides. “Some people were excluded on the basis of age, skin colour, level of masculinity” he says, and already as a boy he came to this, that a few years ago in some clubs in Los Angeles , He who is partly Asian, could not set foot on it. The Studio One he frequented, now demolished, once had a racially segregated entrance. “They’re certainly not the right places – she continues – but there is one aspect that is captured by that song by Sylvester, You Make Me Feel Mighty Real, and that is on the dance floor, since identity is always relational. , when we meet we can feel real. Whatever you decide to do that night, a cowboy or a drag queen, it’s in these places that you feel like you can be who you are because How others see you and how they will see you. It’s a mutual perception. On social media and apps, we instead project a version of our identity that’s so well-crafted and flattering that it ends up feeling like connecting. There was nothing else to do. You lose your chance to have someone make you feel a certain way, à la You Make Me Feel This Way”.
Sure, he was lucky. It is in the gay bar that she met her partner Famus. “We recently celebrated our 27th anniversary,” he says. They had a transoceanic love affair between London and San Francisco until Famus took the return plane. As of now they mostly live in the UK, but continue to go on every adventure together. The next book, Atherton Lynn speculates, will be about their love story and “how we built a lasting relationship while inventing our own rules when gay marriage didn’t exist.”
Today Atherton Lynn goes out less. “Let’s stay at home more. basically, look rue paul’s drag race This is the new gay bar. And in the meantime, have an aperitif”. However, the relationship with the local people remains ambiguous: “I tried to convey these vague feelings that I had as a youthful naïveté, without sweetening them”. Gay The bar is despair and potential, tavern and refuge, a desire to touch and contempt for others (and therefore for oneself). You can compile a sampling of the opposites seen in the book and the process of queer emancipation. Some of the steps, now out of date, may refer to: being “respectable” or enjoying it; showing or taking a low profile (after gay it was said, almost straight); turning gay clubs into monuments. , as is the case with the centenary Royal Vauxhall Tavern in London (openly queer and drag since the 1950s), or let them mutilate and perhaps die. “When I was young, I used to fantasize about what it would be like to enter a free space, almost filled with beach-like light, not techno music, dim lighting and sticky floors,” he confesses, even though that’s where the book opens. “There was once a bar in London in the ’90s that was a chaotic place, that was all about breaking the rules and behaving inappropriately. I’m not saying it was a good thing, but anyone who went there , he had the right to negotiate his own rules on a case-by-case basis.” After all, he says, “the feeling of shame comes and goes”, and the gay bar is always in change. They can be toilets where you go to lie down, large cabarets, arcades like the now-demolished eighteenth-century Adelphi on the Thames in London, or rainbow-flecked places where everyone can enter, maybe not erotic, Like – Add I – Coming Out in Rome or the transfeminist bookstore Tuba.
“A guy in Bologna asked me if closing the gay bars wasn’t basically a good thing, because they’ve always been a ghetto. To them, it was a sign that we lived in a more equal society. But it must be said that for other minorities, such as trans, having their own safe space is still a necessity. And then a generation is not enough to declare that equality has been achieved. There are so many regressive rights laws. When a song like Sylvester or another gay anthem plays, the people in the room can feel not only their own past sorrows but also the sorrows of their gay ancestors. If this kind of cultural survival, almost epigenetic, persists even when the threat of persecution is not so immediate, then the echoes of that history are still relevant.