Jeremy Atherton Lin > 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

“It used to be: We are everywhere. Now it’s: We are everything.”
― 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

“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

“I am a participant in an archaeology of looking, of cruising.”
― 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

“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

“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

“I never felt as much a citizen as I did when we became outlaws.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Deep House

“But it struck me that people may be deeply uncomfortable with two lovers’ attendant vulnerability. Love brings loss to mind.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Deep House

“I don't necessarily find such pragmatism unromantic. It's rather lovely to think of someone willing to do the admin with you.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told

“...I never felt as much a
citizen as I did when we became outlaws.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told

“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

“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

“I understood clearly through those days that I was living a feeling. And when I remember now, I am still living that; it has been folded into me and continues to resonate. On some level,
we knew then that we were creating this feeling to be taken along from then on.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told

“Love brings loss to mind.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told

“I understood clearly through those days that I was living a feeling. And when I remember now, I am still living that; it has been folded into me and continues to resonate. On some level, we knew then that we were creating this feeling to be taken along from then on.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Deep House

“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

“We'd reckon with absence through language.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told

“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

“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

“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

“There is no particular way to describe what I was intuiting around me. Maybe there isn't a term for a sense of loss when you don't know what you're missing.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“But that prescribed social necessity began to give some gay men pause. A thirty-seven-year-old Studio One regular spoke with ambivalence to the Times in 1976. ‘Even the dances have a depersonalized quality to them. The Hustle and The Bus Stop, for instance. In both, you have 50 or 100 people lined up, dancing the same way, completely unattached to each other, simply doing the same movements, like robots. Like lemmings, they begin to form those lines.’ He went on to prognosticate a dystopian future, what he called the ultimate discotheque: ‘I can envision the day when we all just walk up to the entrance to a disco, put a bunch of quarters in a slot, enter and become immediately surrounded by music. Then each of us will go into a space the size of a telephone booth and dance by ourselves.”
― 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

“Rubin admits that bureaucracy lacks glamour and charisma, and that queers are prone to live for the moment. But: ‘momentary excitements are intrinsically fragile, evanescent, and unstable. Part of the reason for our impaired memory of the older strata of queer knowledges is that the institutions and organizations that produced them are gone. Queer life is full of examples of fabulous explosions that left little or no detectable trace.’ The question is whether the spark is extinguished when an official story is made of the blast.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“Queer scenes are the true salons des refusés,’ wrote the critic Michael Warner, ‘where the most heterogeneous people are brought into great intimacy by their common experience of being despised and rejected in a world of norms that they now recognize as false morality.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out