Jeremy Atherton Lin: Deep House

Wednesday 11th June 2025, 6:30 pm

Storysmith, 236 North Street, Bristol, BS3 1JD

We’re absolutely thrilled to welcome Jeremy Atherton Lin to Storysmith to discuss his memoir Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told.

Jeremy’s debut Gay Bar: Why We Went Out was one of our favourite books of the year in 2021, was featured as part of our Subscription for Curious Readers in 2022, and has been a perennial bookseller recommend in the shop ever since. We’ve been collectively looking for an opportunity to invite Jeremy to Storysmith for years, so it’s safe to say we’re absolutely buzzing for the publication of Deep House.

And we’re still more delighted that the one and only Polly Barton (translator of Asako Yuzuki’s Butter and Saou Ichikawa’s Hunchback, author of Fifty Sounds and Porn: An Oral History) will be on hand to ask the questions!

Tickets include a glass of wine. Pre-order your copy of Deep House (rrp £25.00 ) for a special discounted price with your ticket, then collect on the night!

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About Jeremy Atherton Lin

Jeremy Atherton Lin is the author of the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Gay Bar: Why We Went Out. His essays appear in numerous places including the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement and the Yale Review, for which he was a finalist for the National Magazine Award. His sound programs have been broadcast on NTS Radio. He is based in Los Angeles and East Sussex, England.

About Deep House

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.

Book cover of Deep House by Jeremy Atherton Lin

Praise for Deep House

“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

“Jeremy Atherton Lin artfully combines easily forgotten social history with vivid, intimate accounts of his own love life to show us how, for queer people, the often-impersonal political grandstanding around marriage …” – Shon Faye

“I love this book’s honesty and originality; the intricacy and intimacy with which it studies the politics of love and desire; its huge brain and dirty, beautiful heart” – Chris Power

About Polly Barton

Polly Barton is a Japanese translator and writer. Her translations include Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, and Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai. Her translation of Asako Yuzuki’s Butter was named Waterstones Book of the Year 2024, and her translation of Saou Ichikawa’s Hunchback was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025. She is the author of Fifty Sounds and Porn: An Oral History.