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.

"“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" - 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

"Stylish, sexy, and deeply moving, this blends beautiful prose and incisive social history to stunning effect" - Publishers Weekly (starred review)