Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told

by Jeremy Atherton Lin

Overview

Queerty's Spring 2025 LGBTQ+ Books Roundup

From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Gay Bar comes a rule-breaking, sweat-soaked, genre-busting story of outlaw love.

It’s 1996, and Jeremy Atherton Lin has met the boy of his dreams — a mumbling, starry-eyed Brit — just as, amid a media frenzy, US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples federal rights including immigration. The pair steals away to remote forests and vast deserts, London fashion shows and Berlin sex clubs, dinner parties, back alleys, East Village hotel rooms, and San Francisco dives. Finding no other way to stay together, they shack up illicitly among unlikely allies in a “city of refuge.”

With Atherton Lin’s inimitable blend of tenderness and wicked humor, Deep House moves through the couple’s string of rented apartments while unlocking doors to a lineage of gay men who have come before — smuggling a foreign partner through national checkpoints or going public to stand up for the right to get down in the privacy of their own homes. They include hapless criminals, sexpot bartenders, friars, pirates, government workers who subverted the system, activists who went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the celebrated artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Following Gay Bar — called “a rich tapestry” by Vanity Fair and “an absolute tour de force” by Maggie Nelson — Deep House juxtaposes whispered disclosures of undocumented domesticity with courtroom drama and political stunts to explore myriad forms of intimacy while questioning the mechanisms that legitimize love. Deep House is at once a historical kaleidoscope and the innermost tale of two boyfriends who made a home in the shadows of a turbulent civil rights battle.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316545792
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	06/03/2025
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.14(d)

About the Author

Jeremy Atherton Lin is the author of Gay Bar, a New York Times Top Book of 2021 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. His essays appear in numerous places including the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement and the Yale Review, for which he was a finalist for the National Magazine Award. He has reviewed fiction for the Guardian and the Washington Post. His sound programs have been broadcast on NTS Radio. He is based in Los Angeles and East Sussex, England. 

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/28/2025

Lin shrewdly braids the history of gay marriage into an account of his relationship with his husband in this gorgeous follow-up to Gay Bar. He met the man whom he would marry on a dance floor in London in May 1996, at the end of a post-college trip to Europe. They spent two nights together before Lin returned to California. Noting that their cross-Atlantic relationship developed against the backdrop of the Defense of Marriage Act, which allowed U.S. states not to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, Lin seamlessly ties his own love story to a broader history of legal efforts to thwart gay love. Describing the first time he and his future husband had sex, Lin frames it as an act of resistance: “By surrendering to you, and through that to myself, I saw how not to surrender to them.” Elsewhere, he profiles pioneers who paved the way for their eventual marriage, including a British government worker who stamped a fake visa into his Brazilian lover’s passport, and a Colorado couple who in 1979 filed “the first case seeking recognition of a same-sex marriage at the federal level.” Stylish, sexy, and deeply moving, this blends beautiful prose and incisive social history to stunning effect. Agent: Laura Macdougall, United Agents. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Deep House goes from the pensoroso of the best history of marriage equality we have to the allegro of a very hot gay love story told in the funniest, most tender way.”—Edmund White

“Deep House is that rare and beautiful book—equally illuminating and pleasurable. I loved its luminous transcription of queer life, its incisive and intimate legal history of gay marriage in the U.S., its transcendently sexy and propulsive love story, and its portrait of social change that promises not the fantasy of permanent liberty, but that more ephemeral reward: joy. It is exactly the book we need right now.”—Melissa Febos, author of The Dry Season and Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism

“I love this book’s honesty and originality; the intricacy and intimacy with which it studies the politics of love and desire; its huge brain and dirty, beautiful heart.”

—Chris Power, author of A Lonely Man and Mothers

“Jeremy Atherton Lin artfully combines easily forgotten social history with vivid, intimate accounts of his own love life to show us how, for queer people, the often-impersonal political grandstanding around marriage equality, and liberation more generally, can intrude upon and shape the most personal corners of gay life. In writing that is both lyrical and informative, this book also manages to be bold and sexy.”

—Shon Faye, author of The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice

From the Publisher

2025-03-08
Portrait of a gay marriage.

In his award-winning previous book,Gay Bar: Why We Went Out (2021), the American-born author reflected on the watering holes where he and his English partner found sex and community (and sometimes banality) in the days before hookup apps like Grindr. His new book, a similar blend of memoir and sociopolitical history, widens the lens to examine how political debates over same-sex marriage affected the tenuous fate of this transnational couple, who ultimately tied the knot when it became legal to do so in the U.K. The author recounts their meeting in a London nightclub in 1996; that same week, he notes, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. “It wasn’t against the law for us to fall in love,” he writes. “But if we were to forge a commitment, there didn’t seem to be any place to take it.” For the next decade, the couple existed in limbo, first apart on different continents, then together in San Francisco. The author’s partner would eventually overstay his visa, ushering in another form of legal insecurity. “Our relationship, built on apartness—longing—had entered its phase of subterfuge—pretending,” Lin writes. As their personal story unfolds in a series of rented Bay Area apartments, the author serves up a potted history of the gay marriage debate in the ’90s and early 2000s alongside passages on matelotage, a contractual arrangement between two pirates in the 17th and 18th centuries; Clive Michael Boutilier, the gay Canadian deemed a “psychopathic personality” and denied U.S. citizenship in 1965; and the ill-starred relationship of artist Felix Gonzales-Torres and his Canadian lover, Ross Laycock, in the ’80s and ’90s. Lin’s prose is as striking as ever—the lyric descriptions of gay sex recall Edmund White at his randiest—but the accounts of D.C. politics and Supreme Court cases feel dutiful rather than illuminating.

A rangy and readable book, both personal and political, that doesn’t quite coalesce.

Kirkus Reviews