Deep House

Brought to you by Penguin.

It’s 1996, and Jeremy 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 federal rights, including immigration. The pair snatch time in forests and deserts, London fashion shows, Berlin sex clubs and East Village hotel rooms. Finding no other way to stay together, they shack up illicitly among unlikely allies in San Francisco.

Deep House moves through the couple’s domiciles while unlocking doors to a lineage of gay men who have come before – smuggling a foreign partner through national checkpoints or going public to stand up for the right to get down in the privacy of their own homes. They include hapless criminals, sexpot bartenders, friars, pirates, government workers who subvert the system and activists who go all the way to the Supreme Court. Juxtaposing disclosures of undocumented domesticity with courtroom drama to explore myriad forms of intimacy, Deep House is at once a historical kaleidoscope and the innermost tale of two boyfriends who made a home in the shadows of a turbulent civil rights battle.

© Jeremy Atherton Lin 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025