The gayest love story ever told: Jeremy Atherton Lin's memoir is a tribute to home

‘Connecting my story to my forebears; the people who came before me, the people who are around me and the people who are yet to come, seems quite natural to me,’ says American essayist Jeremy Atherton Lin. ‘Hopefully we don’t just talk about ourselves, but we talk about ourselves in context.’

I’m speaking to Lin over Zoom upon the publication of his new book, Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told. Part memoir, part history of the fight for marriage equality, Lin’s book is a delightful rejection of traditional genre.

Throughout runs the story of Lin and his partner, tracing their meeting in England, following them around London and New York and seeing them settle in San Francisco – illicitly, as Lin’s British partner did not return home.

Home is a concept Lin considers throughout, as he takes us from shared house to apartment, studio to friends’ rooms. Lin and his partner make a home together against a backdrop of political turmoil, one he documents in the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act prepared by the US Congress, which stripped same sex couples of their rights, including that of immigration. If the country you live in does not recognise your status as a human being, can home really exist?

Yes and no, says Lin, who juxtaposes the political catastrophe against an intimate domesticity throughout. ‘My partner and I feel that we create safe environments for friends and family, by way of our demonstration of mutual care,’ he says. ‘What happens in the book, even though we feel like we're kind of isolated in various ways, is we are hosts to our friends at the same time. The unideal circumstances of our own life make us sympathetic towards a variety of vulnerabilities.’

Lin draws on personal stories throughout history in considering these vulnerabilities, uncovering the private lives of traditional outsiders and those who have subverted the system and changed the course of history. I felt very confident going into this that I would find these people. I started trusting my research skills, but I knew it would take a little digging, because with some of these cases, like with my partner and I, they kept their head below the parapet, or they've just been forgotten. As I was writing the book, there was a lot of it which was new to me, so it was a constant sense of discovery. And I want you as the reader to feel like we're discovering things together.’

Lin is honest about his own vulnerabilities throughout. His own love story, running through the heart of the book, may reveal insecurities, but it also encapsulates the deep need for human connection denied by the law. ‘Maybe we expect our non fiction narrators to be authoritative, to have a real sense of their own agency and be able to rationalise all their decisions,’ Lin adds. ‘Maybe I continue to develop a confidence, and it’s something readers can relate to. I'm a bit wobbly, and so I might bumble along into certain decisions. There's a whole part when my partner overstays, and it is a little passive on our part. And then when he suggests adopting a cat, there's a subtext there that he's going to stay and that was such a moving way for him to affirm his commitment to me.

‘By letting those parts read like fiction, where you as the reader, realise he is going to stay - that is how I think life feels like it happens to us sometimes, right? We're not always fully aware of how we're approaching things.’