Deep House

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, 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.

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

Endorsements

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

The Washington Post — recommended

The New York Times Style Magazine — recommended

Observer — recommended

W Magazine — recommended

NBC News — recommended

E! Online — recommended

Queerty — recommended

Literary Hub — recommended

Stylist — recommended

Dazed — recommended

"a rich tapestry" — Vanity Fair

"an absolute tour de force" — Maggie Nelson