Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told
A fabulously riveting hybrid memoir and queer history lesson ... If the travelogue-style Gay Bar prowls through clubs and adventures with thrill-seeking horniness, Deep House is denser and written from a quieter space of contemplation ...
The book juggles an impressive amount of material, though it can sometimes feel uneven, and the memoir passages can verge into indulgence. But that muchness is excused by what emerges to be the author’s larger project: Atherton Lin writes knowing that the history of queer people, as is the case for most marginalized groups, exists between the lines ... Backed by a formidable array of sources, he combines the rigorously researched and the deeply personal to implode that gap and fill it with as much detail as possible.
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Discursive yet rigorous ... Atherton Lin narrates...with an informed curiosity ... Atherton Lin traverses...with intelligence and finesse ... Some pages you can smell, others you can hear—his books supply their own soundtracks ... The book’s sensitivity to the ambivalence of its primary subjects affords empathy to its historical subjects.
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There’s more than enough here to show [Lin's] skill as a writer ... What makes Deep House so engaging, however, is how its author avoids outrage while recounting past injustices. Instead, knowing that the argument has already been won, both morally and legally, he seems baffled that anyone ever cared who married whom in the first place. When future generations look back and wonder what all the fuss was about, books such as this will illuminate their understanding of a time when bigotry was not only encouraged, but on the statute books.
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