Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told - Hardcover

by Jeremy Atherton Lin (Author)

From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Gay Bar comes a rule-breaking, sweat-soaked, genre-busting story of outlaw love.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER The New Yorker Best Books of 2025 Publishers Weekly Top 10 Books of the Year Time Out 10 Best Books of the Year NPR Books We Love 2025 Lammy Award Finalist in Gay Memoir/Biography

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.

A Recommended Book in the Washington Post, the New York Times Style Magazine, Observer, W Magazine, NBC News, E! Online, Queerty, Literary Hub, Stylist, & Dazed

Author Biography

Jeremy Atherton Lin is the author of Gay Bar, a New York Times Top Book of 2021 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. His essays appear in numerous places including the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement and the Yale Review, for which he was a finalist for the National Magazine Award. He has reviewed fiction for the Guardian and the Washington Post. His sound programs have been broadcast on NTS Radio. He is based in Los Angeles and East Sussex, England.