Margins
Deep House book cover
Deep House
The Gayest Love Story Ever Told
2025
First Published
4.36
Average Rating
400
Number of Pages

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.

Avg Rating
4.36
Number of Ratings
14
5 STARS
36%
4 STARS
64%
3 STARS
0%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Jeremy Atherton Lin
Jeremy Atherton Lin
Author · 2 books
I’m an Asian-American writer living in East Sussex, England. My debut Gay Bar (2021), an exploration of some places that informed my identity, received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. I'm very grateful to those who've helped this little book circulate. You can visit the SOUND page on my website for radio shows and mixtapes inspired by Gay Bar and other queer concepts. Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts.
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