Deep House
The Gayest Love Story Ever Told
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- $249.00
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- $249.00
Descripción editorial
A Book of the Year for The New Yorker and Electric Lit
It’s 1996, and Jeremy, a young American, has met the British boy of his dreams — just as, amid a media frenzy, US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples rights including immigration. The pair snatch time in forests and deserts, London fashion shows, and East Village hotel rooms; eventually, finding no other way to stay together, they shack up illicitly among unlikely allies in San Francisco.
What emerges is an unexpected romantic comedy haunted by centuries of gay ghosts. Deep House moves through the couple’s various domiciles while unlocking doors to a lineage of outsiders who came before them: hapless criminals, sexpot bartenders, friars, pirates, government workers who subvert the system and activists who go all the way to the Supreme Court to fight for their freedoms. Combining cultural history with radically intimate memoir, Deep House is at once a romp through the queer archives and the innermost tale of two boyfriends who made a home in the shadows of a turbulent civil rights battle.
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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.
