In “Deep House,” Jeremy Atherton Lin uses the story of his own life as a catalyst for a kaleidoscopic survey of legal flash points regarding gay rights and immigration.
Juan A. Ramírez is a writer and critic who covers arts and culture. His work has appeared in The Times, Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Theatrely and Interview magazine.
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DEEP HOUSE: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told, by Jeremy Atherton Lin
As with his excellent debut, “Gay Bar: Why We Went Out,” Jeremy Atherton Lin’s sophomore book, “Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told,” is a fabulously riveting hybrid memoir and queer history lesson. In his first book, Atherton Lin mapped his coming-of-age onto a chronicle of disappearing gay bars around the world. In this new offering, the American writer shares the story of his relationship with his British partner, who remains unnamed, and uses it as a catalyst for a kaleidoscopic survey of legal flash points regarding gay rights and immigration.
“Deep House” focuses on the challenges faced by transnational queer couples before marriage equality. Not only were such couples denied the ability to wed, but with differing citizenships, they also lost a critical pathway to legally reside together in the same country. Atherton Lin situates these couples at the forefront of the fight for gay rights.
He and his partner became one such couple in 1999. The two had met in London three years prior, their immediate attraction intensifying into trans-Atlantic correspondence and eagerly awaited visits across England and Atherton Lin’s native California. During one of their stints in the United States, his partner began feeling, with his trip back to London imminent, that he had “nothing to return to, and everything to stay for,” so he overstayed his tourist visa, and the two began an illicit domesticity in San Francisco.
If the travelogue-style “Gay Bar” prowls through clubs and adventures with thrill-seeking horniness, “Deep House” is denser and written from a quieter space of contemplation. “I want to learn how we arrived here together and find out who traveled first,” Atherton Lin writes. “Allow me to shuffle the cards that were stacked against us.”
That shuffling is free-associative and anecdotal, and allows Atherton Lin a flexibility in his storytelling. He bounces between yarns from his own life, capturing his and his partner’s days living in basement apartments, working video-store jobs and flirting with polygamy, to surfacing tales of the queer people who came before him, including the committed, American-Mexican couple who had to cross the border to Mexico and back every three months to stay in the United States in the 1970s and the drunk Texas horndogs who accidentally toppled the country’s anti-sodomy laws in 2003.
Epochal legal decisions aren’t introduced from a detached, academic perspective, but arise in connection to Atherton Lin’s own life, shared like gossip through the community grapevine. “At the end of April 1997, just after I returned to the States, boyfriends Mark Watson and Ander Da Silva received surprising news,” is how he begins a passage about a British immigration officer who granted his Brazilian lover unauthorized permission to stay in the U.K.
The book juggles an impressive amount of material, though it can sometimes feel uneven, and the memoir passages can verge into indulgence. But that muchness is excused by what emerges to be the author’s larger project: Atherton Lin writes knowing that the history of queer people, as is the case for most marginalized groups, exists between the lines. That, because queerness has been so often and systematically criminalized, queer lives, queer struggles and queer culture are documented furtively or euphemistically, if at all. 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.
Though it foregrounds L.G.B.T.Q.+ issues in charting his and his partner’s journey, “Deep House” acknowledges that they’ve not been alone in the fight for domestic peace, finding kinship with those affected by interracial restrictions, and even with elders from his Chinese grandparents’ generation, who experienced arranged marriages. Submitting his story to this larger record, he elicits from these anecdotes a human element of randomness; none of these figures chose to make history, but were rather recruited into it.
DEEP HOUSE: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told | By Jeremy Atherton Lin | Little, Brown | 401 pp. | $29
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