Jeremy Atherton Lin’s tale of passion in an age of persecution

On 17 September 1998, in Harris County, Texas, four police officers entered the home of John Geddes Lawrence Jr, a 55-year-old gay man. Responding to an anonymous report of an altercation between the occupants, they ventured into the bedroom. There, according to the lead officer at the scene, they observed the homeowner having sex with another man, Tyron Garner.

Lawrence and Garner were arrested and charged under a Texas anti-sodomy statute and were later found guilty. Sensing an opportunity, gay rights lawyers challenged the decision, appealing it all the way to the supreme court. In June 2003 the court ruled in their favour, a landmark decision that pronounced anti-sodomy laws in the US unconstitutional and upheld the right to privacy of all Americans regardless of sexual orientation.

Stories like Lawrence and Garner’s are threaded through Deep House, Jeremy Atherton Lin’s epic tale of love and the law, alongside his own story of his efforts to make a home with his partner. In 1998, in his early 20s, the California author met and fell in love with an English artist, “a 20-year-old with a saturnine smile”. The two would live together for the best part of a decade between the UK and the US, before settling down on the south-east coast of England.

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.

Atherton Lin is the author of Gay Bar (2021), an award-winning personal history of LGBTQ+ bars and clubs, and Deep House is similarly preoccupied with the meanings and feelings we attach to spaces, in this case private rather than public ones. The homes occupied by the writer and his partner are key to their story. From the ninth floor of a council block near Victoria Park, east London, to a San Francisco loft shared with a couple of promiscuous gays and their pet cockatoo, how Atherton Lin and his partner love each other is entwined with where they put down roots.

Deep House also shares with the earlier book a cheerfully shameless approach to conjugal sex and the recounting of it. Much of what is described is, alas, unprintable in a newspaper, but the author’s intent with this airing of dirty laundry is not to merely titillate. Allowing us to witness the intimate moments Atherton Lin shared with his partner is a conscious choice – one made possible by gay activists. 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.

Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told by Jeremy Atherton Lin is published by Allen Lane, (£25). Order it at observershop.co.uk for a special 20% launch offer. Delivery charges may apply

Dr Diarmuid Hester is a cultural historian, activist, and an authority on gender and sexuality based at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge