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Deep House

The Gayest Love Story Ever Told

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Deep House

By: Jeremy Atherton Lin
Narrated by: Jeremy Atherton Lin
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

It’s 1996, and Jeremy 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 federal rights, including immigration. The pair snatch time in forests and deserts, London fashion shows, Berlin sex clubs and East Village hotel rooms. Finding no other way to stay together, they shack up illicitly among unlikely allies in San Francisco.

Deep House moves through the couple’s domiciles 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 subvert the system and activists who go all the way to the Supreme Court. Juxtaposing disclosures of undocumented domesticity with courtroom drama to explore myriad forms of intimacy, 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.

© Jeremy Atherton Lin 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 Biographies & Memoirs Gay Studies LGBTQ+ Studies Sociology Marriage

Critic Reviews

“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
(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)
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
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
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