It journeys through detailed, knotty questions of personal identity and questions the very foundations of LGBTQ+ community. I was thinking about all this while devouring an early copy of Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, by Jeremy Atherton Lin a detailed, frank and brilliantly personal account of the author’s life in gay bars.
But a cultural, even sociological, seed had been planted in me, ready to germinate. It would be two or three years before I learned that New York, New York was presided over by a towering drag queen called Solitaire who carried herself with all the poise of a drunk navvy. Like an amateur sleuth, developing his nose for sniffing out the closest available mischief within a five-mile radius of the house I grew up in, I’d accidentally uncovered my first neighbourhood gay bar. ‘You don’t want to be thinking about going in there, love,’ one of them scolded. Two elderly women shuffled past pushing tartan shoppers. The wrist on the iconic statue’s right arm, usually raised triumphantly, was limp. One afternoon in the mid-Eighties, sneaking off school to traipse around Manchester city centre, I stood transfixed under a neon Statue of Liberty sign on the side of a pub beside a disused carpark. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.
