The past month has been excessively busy with work, and so I’ve found it difficult to get much done in the way of writing. I have, however, been able to do a little reading. Right now, I’m struggling to get through Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told (Little, Brown and Company, 2025). It’s a mix of memoir, auto-theory, and epistolary essay (Atherton Lin addresses it to his partner), and it recounts the struggle that the author (who’s American) and his partner (who’s British) face in trying to be together after falling in love while the former was touring around Europe in his early 20s. Their struggle begins in the 1990s, when a confluence of institutionalized homophobia, supercharged by the HIV/ADS epidemic, and xenophobic immigration law prevent them from residing legally in the same country. So, the love story provides the basis to think through the history of immigration policy, activism around gay marriage, queer theory, and other things.
It’s well-researched, thoughtful, insightful, and, at times, quite moving, although the descriptions of their relationship are sometimes overwrought. It’s an important book, and there need to be more like it in the world. However, my resistance has to do with how it’s still essentially a story about the couple–a promiscuous, non-monogamous couple, sure, but a couple all the same. Part of why the injustice that Atherton Lin and his partner experience can feel so much like an injustice has to do with, at least in part, their relationship’s resemblance to what we expect a relationship to look like, or should look like. To be fair, that wasn’t the case for pretty much all of the 20th century, as Atherton Lin’s research aptly shows, but Deep House arrives swiftly on the heels of a boom in LGBTQ romance novels and rom-coms. Romantic couplehood remains a reliable means for both broader intelligibility and relatability. There’s a reason why marriage equality became the centerpiece of mainstream LGBT politics.
Of course, there can be queerness, by which I mean strangeness, in coupling. And maybe Atherton Lin will eventually go there, but as someone whose been single for most of his life but who still has had an array of rich, complicated, and difficult-to-classify intimacies, I find frustrating works that ask me to yet again consider a love story as a story about a couple. They remind me of the relative lack of comparable accounts of other kinds of intimacy, ones that seem to approximate closer to the kinds of intimacies that I’ve had and will probably continue to have.
Maybe the book just isn’t for me, but then perhaps that’s why the subtitle, as cheeky as it may be, irks me. In proffering itself as the gayest love story, it’s asserting itself as something worthy of attention–we, readers, are called to witness and affirm its superlative gayness. I bristle at the implication of a standard of measurement, one that also implies that I’m missing out on some fundamental gay experience by not coupling up. Ok, gurl, we get it. You’re in love. Now sit down.
And yet, here’s where I’m conflicted: even with my frustrations, I absolutely and unquestionably defend this book and the love it recounts from any charge that we don’t need it. There can never be enough gay love stories, but neither the need nor the stories that rise to meet it should distract, overshadow, or otherwise make it easier to ignore the array of intimacies that are not just gay, but also gayest.
Anyway, we’ll see if I finish it.
Next up on my reading list is Polly Barton’s translation of Saou Ichikawa’s Hunchback (2023). I read a sample of it and eagerly await its arrival in the mail.
Steven A. Ruszczycky, PhD 