Deep House, Jeremy Atherton Lin
Deep House, Jeremy Atherton Lin
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Deep House
The Gayest Love Story Ever Told

Author: Jeremy Atherton Lin

Narrator: Jeremy Atherton Lin

Unabridged: 10 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/03/2025


Synopsis

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.
 

Reviews

Goodreads review by Vito on February 02, 2025

Jeremy Atherton Lin's "Deep House" combines a memoir of tender love with a broader narrative on queer love before gay marriage legalization. Starting in 1996 when Jeremy meets "Famous," a Brit, the story blends undocumented domestic life with courthouse battles, media spin, and political maneuvers a......more

Goodreads review by Bethany on April 09, 2025

Thank you @littlebrown for the advanced copy to review! A rule-breaking, sweat-soaked, genre-busting story of outlaw love. ^from the publisher! Having read Gay Bar by @jeremyathertonlin - I knew I was in for a treat with this book. First, I love Jeremy’s writing style. The way he weaves personal experi......more

Goodreads review by Terrance on June 14, 2025

This was a great read even though it was quite unexpected. It is a mixture of an international love story developing into a marriage woven with the history of fight for gay marriage. I was not hugely fond of the mixture but it works although the history merely focuses on developments in the United K......more

Goodreads review by Ronan on June 06, 2025

Tão bom quanto Gay Bar!!! Acho tão interessante ler sobre as vivências do Jeremy, curioso pra ver o que pode vir depois deste.........more

Goodreads review by TJ on June 09, 2025

I remember being blown away a few years ago by Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar: Why We Went Out. It was one of those queer books that wasn’t afraid to be raw and deeply personal, that didn’t shy away from some of the more prurient and earthy details of gay sex and gay desire. Now Lin is back with an e......more


Quotes

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