Home Without Borders

Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told

by Jeremy Atherton Lin

2025 (Little, Brown, and Company)

What are the rights and privileges couples enjoy in the United States if they are legally married? Why are these rights and securities not given to everyone? What is the relationship between marriage and civil unions with immigration, healthcare, employment, job security? Where is the line between the public and the private, especially for gay men and women, and particularly within a larger discourse for equal rights that often portrays many sexual acts as "criminal" yet politically wants to portray all LGBTQ+ as "respectable"?

Gay Asian-American essayist Jeremy Atherton Lin met his British boyfriend while backpacking around Europe. When he returned to the States in May 1996, Americans had begun a wider public debat about whether same-sex couples can marry. Galvanized by attempts to do so in Hawaii and then Colorado, conservatives began the Defense of Marriage Act, a move which would stimulate not only a heated debate between Christian conservatives and the queer community, but also discussion within LGBTQ+ circles as well. On the one hand, "marriage" is so bougie and so square, an institution loaded with symbols as well as baggage that many queer people wish to reject and rebel against in their quest to find other ways of coupling and building community. On the other hand, marriage (at least within the United States) provides a number of legal protections not afforded to queer people, particularly if one or both of them is not a US citizen.

Like his earlier book, the excellent Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, Lin braids personal experiences with an eye on the bigger picture, affirming with insight once again that the personal is political, and that so much of our lives is intimately interwoven with larger societal forces. How do we remain "free", when so many of our choices are determined by history, legislation, and geography? In Deep House, Lin provides a thorough accounting of the legal cases and public debates surrounding same-sex marriage in America, as well as branches off into historical examples of how queer folk have attempted to build their own homes and communities before the last century and beyond this country´s borders. This author has an intrepid hunger for information, and I love how much they pour into this book.

But Deep House is also a highly personal book, perhaps even moreso than Gay Bar, which focused more on Lin´s coming out. In this latest book, he writes candidly about the first decade with his boyfriend--from long-distance love affair to moving in together in San Francisco; from working together at a video store to taking roadtrips, having sex with other men, and more. There´s a rich texture to Deep House: as the research of his subject is thorough and almost granular, Lin counterbalances this with passages describing his relationship with utter transparency. He doesn´t hesitate to write about what he adores about his partner, and is explicit in describing their carnal affection for one another; he also reveals their longing, their fears, and how they get into fights, how they decorate their home and what films or music they enjoy. Lin doesn´t attempt to portray him or his lover as perfect, but Instead chooses the risk of being honest about the reality of who they are.

Deep House is a mash-up of essay, history, and memoir, written with care as well as courage. I highly recommend it.

Available for purchase at the Bureau of General Services - Queer Division in Greenwich Village, downtown New York.