DEEP HOUSE: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told does so very much for illuminating the reality of empathy

DEEP HOUSE: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told
JEREMY ATHERTON LIN
Little, Brown and Company (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

One of Electric Literature’s Best Non-fiction Books of 2025!

The Publisher Says: 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A story whose timeliness could not possibly be greater. Author Jeremy takes us through a moment, thirty years ago, when the political landscape looked a lot like today's. He had just fallen in love with "Famous Blue Raincoat," an undocumented Brit, which is presenting practical problems of residence and life together. How do you rent an apartment, earn a living, make couple-friends? You're carrying the usual relationship stuff but on top of that is the need to be discreet, even secretive, about big pieces of your life.

What Author Jeremy chooses as his narrative strategy is lighter on the deeply personal details in favor of a potted history of the topic of marriage equality in the US from DOMA in 1996 through twists an turns of bi-national queer couples litigating their basic human rights (which is not how rights are supposed to work except here in looney-religious-land) through to the now-imperiled Obergefell v Hodges decision in 2015.

It's a lot to take in. The personal parts pertaining to Author Jeremy and "Famous Blue Raincoat" are sprinkled on like powdered sugar to make the wodges of information go down easier. There are so many facts that impinge on the love story he's telling that there's really no other way to tell the whole story. Author Jeremy was threading needle after needle after needle, trying not to be preachy while advocating equality, trying not to be confessional while honestly depicting the cost of a life defined by struggle to access simple equality, trying not to chirp triumphantly about battles won while they're being refought, yet leaving his readers with real hope in a world that does not do much to support it.

The amount of focused effort in these four-hundred-plus pages is humbling. It's a gift to receive this kind of careful craft on such a personal topic. I'd've given a full fifth star had I had citations, not simply end-notes; it's a "me" thing, it likely won't bother a lot of y'all, but when you're relying on sources to make factual cases and points within cases, I'd like to be pointed at those sources in the text not simply as end notes. I feel a bit unkind bringing it up in a time where even the inclusion of end notes is increasingly rare, but, well, I'm pedantic and grouchy and old.

Surprise!

Don't wait...get yourself a copy fast as you can for your #PrideMonth reading. It's a pleasurable way to appreciate fully and personally what is at stake in the current political crisis.