I was expecting a somewhat more academic treatment of the role of gay bars in society and in history; instead, this is author Atherton Lin exploring his own personal journey through the succession of gay bars that he visited along the way. His perspective, that of an Asian-American navigating London and San Francisco, means that racism occasionally adds an additional layer of alienation onto his experience. He mixes everything together until none of it can be teased apart, from musings about identity and expression in social spheres, to analysis of society’s changing relationship with homosexuality, to detailed descriptions of smells and sensations of bodies in close contact, sometimes all within the same paragraph. He also illustrates ambience by rapidly listing off a succession of musicians, or brands, which I’m sure would have served as anchors for people who recognized them, but for me merely placed his already-foreign (to me) experiences into a landscape which I… didn’t recognize either. Still, it was definitely both educational and entertaining to journey along with Atherton Lin through his past, from adventurous naïf to jaded elder, interrogating society along the way. He doesn’t hesitate to turn the analysis on himself either: “I went out to bars to be literary. I drank to create content. If I earned a reputation for making trouble, it was so that I could write about it the following morning… 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.”