REVIEW: Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told by Jeremy Atherton Lin

Reviewed by Brian Watson

Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told (Little Brown and Company: June 2025) is the second memoir from Jeremy Atherton Lin. His first, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, came out a scant three years ago; both memoirs discuss aspects of his relationship with the man Mr. Lin met in 1996 in London, the English man who would go on to become his husband. Both memoirs skillfully blend the historical and the personal, creating works that are both researched and lyrical at the same time.

In the first memoir, readers learn about the history of gay bars in London, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, all places where Mr. Lin and his partner lived together. But in Deep House, Mr. Lin unleashes the full breadth of his research skills, unraveling the history of same-sex unions and the marriage equality movement.

In Gay Bar, Mr. Lin refers to his partner as Famous, riffing on a nickname that friends bestowed: Famous Blue Raincoat. There is a rationale for the use of a nickname: both Mr. Lin and his partner share the same given name, and two Jeremys could potentially confuse the reader. In Deep House, however, the intimacy is further developed: Mr. Lin uses you, the second-person pronoun, to refer to his partner. Deep House documents the immigration struggles Mr. Lin and his partner encountered in their natural desire to remain together. In myriad ways, Deep House is also a 350-page love letter, dictated to that second-person Jeremy, and is one he qualifies by saying, “Stories don’t really have beginnings and endings, do they?” A story that, in its highs and lows, shares the depth of their love with the grateful reader.

Early in the first chapter, love lands on the page with poetic perfection: “You seemed more innocent but also somehow more broken–in than I was. You were so quiet, so nice. The type of boy that someone will always take under their wing. In a crowd, the one who is nearly overlooked, then identified as the best.”

And yet, this love is not that of fairytales. Mr. Lin met his partner in 1996, the same year when President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) into law. DOMA was a response to a case winding its way through the Hawai‘i Supreme Court, Baehr v. Miike, a case that seemed to signal to conservative onlookers that same-sex marriage could become a rapid reality. DOMA not only blocked federal recognition of any state’s same-sex civil unions, domestic partnerships, or marriages, but it also denied all federal benefits, including immigration, extended to marriage partners in binational relationships.

Mr. Lin is at his best when portraying the complexity of the marriage equality movement, both within political and judicial circles, and from thought leaders within the gay community. He reminds us that many queer writers and artists opposed marriage equality for its focus on the heteronormative instead of on the myriad policy issues where all people, not just those of us on the rainbow, could benefit from.

“[Michael] Warner persuasively wrote [in a 1999 article, ‘Normal and Normaller: Beyond Gay Marriage’] that ‘such areas of law as probate, custody, and immigration need far more sweeping reforms than same-sex marriage.’ After the landmark Obergefell decision [in 2015], Warner would describe the marriage movement as propelled by a lack of ‘thinking creatively about other ways that those rights and obligations might be distributed.’”

To have read both Gay Bar and Deep House is to witness a writer’s evolution. What begins in Gay Bar as a thoughtful and thought-provoking interweaving of the personal with the historical becomes even more profound, more tightly interactive, in Deep House. In the second memoir, there is a sense that any of Mr. Lin’s lingering reserve for describing not just the amatory but also the erotic has faded. It is profoundly moving to read along as he interplays the legal concerns that surround queer relationships with the intimate, erotic facts of those relationships.

“We had to wonder whether the neighbors who’d “blessed” us, or those politicians who damned our moral turpitude in the halls of Congress, carried with them some image of us fucking: the buttery thickness and sweet musk, initial pain, long strokes, thrusts, anticipation. The ritual tasting of oneself on the other. The sameness and difference, all viscid. Our spooge in ropey strings like bright white Silly Putty.

“Or maybe all this never even crossed their minds at all. I could never know if they were freaked out because of, or ignorant of, our actual bodies, in all their grimy glory. Was fornication, its sounds and tastes, too intense to let in, like a country on the other side of the world some would rather disdain to visit?”

Deep House is an enduring reminder to readers and to writers of memoir alike that our lives are best understood within the context of society and history. Gay Bar inspired me in my writing; Deep House, however, is a masterclass in the ease with which the writer can blend the contextual and the personal. Perhaps more importantly, Deep House is a vivid example of quiet tenderness. It is, indeed, a love letter that details more than a decade’s worth of life from first date to marriage. But Mr. Lin never effuses, never shouts. Love is in the quiet details.

“We could pretend our mattress was a raft that braved open waters. We could pretend it was its own floating nation. I could convince myself we were self-governed. Roland Barthes: ‘What I want is a little cosmos (with its own time, its own logic) inhabited only by “the two of us.” Everything from outside is a threat.’”

As Deep House approached its conclusion, the many similarities between Mr. Lin’s life and mine—we both struggled to create lasting happiness and security within a binational relationship, riding the ways of euphoria and frustration as the marriage equality ebbed and flowed during the 1990s, 2000s, and, for me, the 2010s—my happiest moment as perhaps a unique reader was realizing that both our marriages, that of the two Jeremys and my marriage to my husband, Hiro, occurred on the seventh of July.

My lasting hope for all memoir readers is that Mr. Lin will continue to share his researched and lyrical writing with us. Deep House captivates. May we all follow where Mr. Lin leads.