Deep House by Jeremy Atherton Lin (Paperback)

Publishes 4 June
 
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.
 
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'Deep House goes from the penseroso of the best history of marriage equality we have to the allegro of a very hot gay love story told in the funniest, most tender way.' - Edmund White
 
'An epic tale of love and the law' - Diarmud Hester
 
'Jeremy Atherton Lin artfully combines easily forgotten social history with vivid, intimate accounts of his own love life... bold and sexy.' - Shon Faye