“I wanted to let the reader know that I wasn’t going to start with a sanitized version of what these bars could be,” Atherton Lin, a writer and editor based in London, told me when we spoke earlier this year. In the first words of Chapter 1, there it is: “It’s starting to smell like penis here.” William Faulkner couldn’t have conjured up a better opening. It’s even referred to in the very first line of Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, the recently released book written by Jeremy Atherton Lin that aims to capture the intricacies, complications, and fabulousness of this culture. It turns out that Gay Bar Smell (a free cologne idea one of the Queer Eye guys should cash in on) was an auspicious introduction for me, and an iconic one at that. The neuroticism of being closeted is like that stress of seeing a cop while you’re stoned, but 24/7, and also, you like gay sex. Not only that, but they'd also run and gossip to all my friends and family. Surely if some passerby saw me even casually glance in, they’d figure out I was gay. I’d walk through that smell almost every day while still in the closet, holding a steadfast, soldierly resolve to stare straight ahead. A mixture of cologne and BO, it’d waft out of the open doors of the cavernous establishment down the street from where I lived, like man cake emanating from a queer bakery. Even before I ever went inside a gay bar, I was aware of the smell.
