Deep House
The Gayest Love Story Ever Told
Published on 5. June 2025
416 pages
978-1-80206-224-3 (ISBN)
Description
A New Yorker, Time Out, NPR, Electric Lit and Publishers Weekly Book of the Year, and Lambda Literary Award Finalist
'A fabulously riveting hybrid memoir and queer history lesson' -The New York Times
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.
'A fabulously riveting hybrid memoir and queer history lesson' -The New York Times
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.
Reviews / Votes
Deep House goes from the penseroso 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" provides the sublime narrative edifice for, as the subtitle declares, "The Gayest Love Story Ever Told"... Discursive yet rigorous... Atherton Lin's descriptive powers, salty and sultry, prove inexhaustible... A sensual historian * The New Yorker * (An) epic tale of love and the law... Addressed lovingly to his husband and full of erotic reminiscences, Deep House is Atherton Lin's attempt to understand their long, transatlantic relationship against a backdrop of the lives and legal cases of those who have come before... Deep House is a living, loving record of their work, and, as the gains they made are being rolled back in Trump's US, it shows that what is at stake is not merely same-sex marriage but the very idea of home -- Diarmud Hester * Observer * A fabulously riveting hybrid memoir and queer history lesson... Atherton Lin writes knowing that the history of queer people, as is the case for most marginalized groups, exists between the lines... Backed by a formidable array of sources, he combines the rigorously researched and the deeply personal to implode that gap and fill it with as much detail as possible... Impressive * New York Times * Jeremy Atherton Lin artfully combines easily forgotten social history with vivid, intimate accounts of his own love life... bold and sexy -- Shon Faye 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 Deep House is that rare and beautiful book-equally illuminating and pleasurable. Luminous... incisive... transcendently sexy.... It is exactly the book we need right now -- Melissa Febos This important book is about two people looking for home, a shared space and a common nationality, and is a shelter for the most intimate observations of lived experience from diverse political headwinds -- Mendez Stylish, sexy, and deeply moving, this blends beautiful prose and incisive social history to stunning effect * Publishers Weekly (starred review) *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Penguin Books Ltd
Target group
Professional and scholarly
College/higher education
File size
1,42 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-80206-224-3 (9781802062243)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
06/2026
Penguin
€16.50
Available immediately
Book
06/2025
Allen Lane
€31.50
Available immediately
Person
Jeremy Atherton Lin is the author of Gay Bar, a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. His essays appear in numerous places, including the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Yale Review, from which he was anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing. His sound programmes have been broadcast on NTS Radio.
