Deep House

From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Gay Bar comes a rule-breaking, sweat-soaked, seminal story of outlawed love, weaving the author’s decades-long, transnational romance with a larger inquiry into the many ways queer couples lived and loved before gay marriage became legal.

In his second book of cultural memoir, following up his “absolute tour de force” (Maggie Nelson) Gay Bar, Jeremy Atherton Lin lays bare a love outside the law—the blooming of his binational relationship through pivotal years in the gay marriage debate. In 1996, Jeremy meets the boy of his dreams, nicknamed “Famous”—a mumbling, starry-eyed Brit—just as US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, which denies same-sex couples federal rights, including immigration. Being together across borders means dropping out, hiding away, and seeking out sanctuary among unlikely allies in a “city of refuge.”

Layering their experiences with those of past outliers, including his parents’ interracial romance, Jeremy Atherton Lin explores the many forms of intimacy and questions the mechanisms that legitimize love. Told through personal and historical memory and structured like a mixtape, DEEP HOUSE weaves a chorus of whispered disclosures of undocumented domestic life with the courthouse battles, media spin, and political maneuvers surrounding the most contentious civil rights issue of an era.