The Brooklyn Rail

The premise of Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told is simple. Jeremy Atherton Lin displays two parallel, interwoven narratives: a sprawling memoir of his love story with his long-term partner, and a historic overview of the complicated and winding debate over gay marriage. In his first book, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, he took a similar approach, exploring queer history through a more personal lens. But don’t be confused. Despite the expectation, Deep House is more than a historic archive or a love-obsessed confession. It’s not even an argument for marriage—gay or otherwise. Instead, Deep House is an argument for love unbridled by restraints: “Our issue, it turned out, had never really been marriage, but borders.”

Sweeping through historical case studies, Lin reframes the narrative surrounding gay marriage through the lens of immigration. It’s a sophisticated turn. Discourse surrounding the pros and cons of gay marriage as an objective for the queer liberation movement are not uncommon, although Lin’s contribution to the conversation resists the binary entirely, speaking clearly about the topic of gay marriage while moving beyond the vision of Pinterest board wedding ceremonies. Instead, Lin expertly draws connections between the citizenship rights that come with marriage, and the insufficiency of second-class citizenship. He does this by offering his own story with his long-term partner from the United Kingdom, who spent many years in the United States living undocumented, largely due to the inaccessibility of marriage. It’s a complicated story—one framed by the context of an insufficient state (that is, if a state ever could be properly sufficient). In it, Lin finds little comfort in theory: “It didn’t seem like we had the time to wait for the dismantling of the systemic suppression of sexual variation, let alone for national borders to be abolished. Queer theory always seemed so far ahead.”

How are we to embody and advance freedom if our instructions remain contained to broad platitudes, elusive morals, and wild dreaming? Each is vital, but on their own, they may not be enough. It’s a critique that Lin is unafraid of making in Deep House—and a pattern that he is committed to breaking from. Lin’s triumph in Deep House may in fact be its eventual realization as a guide. Queer theory may have been far ahead of he and his partner, but in detailing Lin’s own love-obsessed resistance among the stories of countless other queer couples doing the same (loving one another, loving across borders), he offers instruction for how queer people today might commit themselves to the act of loving, even when it may feel as though there’s no place for that love to settle. Lin’s lesson for us all could not come at a more urgent time.

Reading Deep House while the United States reckons with the tightening grip of a new Trump administration made the text feel particularly affecting. These last few months have been marked by the arrest and deportation of dissenters, pointed attacks against protections for vulnerable communities, and increasing steps towards authoritarian rule—and queer and trans folks have been at the center of many of these attacks. It’s something that queer folks know well—abandonment, if not enmity, from our governments. This is on display throughout Deep House—which primarily takes place between the 1990s and the 2010s. Along the way, Lin navigates an evolving landscape of policies regarding sanctuary cities, campaign politicking, post-9/11 militarism, and more—each interpersonal dilemma faced by the couple is grounded in something real. For instance, when Lin’s partner injures himself, it’s a struggle in deciding whether or not they can go to the hospital, given his undocumented status.

It’s a situation that is relevant today, just as much as it was yesterday. There is a queer inheritance at play here—and Deep House demonstrates that what we’ve inherited isn’t all bad. In Lin and his partner’s case, wanting to be free from fear—fear of separation and fear of the prohibition of marriage, and therefore citizenship rights—it isn’t the Supreme Court, nor is it a reliance on imagining that protects them. Time and time again, it is community that does keep them safe—and it can keep us safe today. “Unprotected by either of our governments, we sheltered each other.”

This is true in the case of Lin and his partner, holding one another through the dizzying years of shifting legal ground—anxious hearts steadied only by the other’s heartful kiss. It was true in the case of devoted care offered by trans folks and queer women to those suffering from AIDS during the epidemic—with at one point, one in fifteen gay men in the United States having died as a result of the illness. It’s also true in our case today—with escalating attacks on the queer community manifesting in violence, censorship, and surely enough, threats to the legal protections that we do have. Deep House argues for us to not wait for the law to catch up to us, but to instead love anyways despite the threat, and to do what we can for one another to protect it—even if that fighting must happen in darkness for now. Deep House is here to show us how. “At night in their invisibility the faggots remember freedom.”

The above quote does not come from Lin’s Deep House—but rather, from Larry Mitchell’s seminal The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, a lyrical manifesto written in the fiery years following the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. While Lin does assert in Deep House that “shadows are a very different place to choose to be than to be forced back into,” it is still the shadows where the story ultimately takes place and where queer folks are best able to dream with our eyes open. This is true—whether it be the San Francisco apartment where Lin and his partner made a home, off the beaten path where the gay man cruises, or the Texas home where an intruding police raid made way for gay sex to be decriminalized nationwide in 2003. And this is not a bad thing. It’s in the shadows—in their invisibility—that we can dream beyond borders, beyond marriage, and instead towards something truly liberatory: love.