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.
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.
Lin writes sublimely of their early years, moving from one rundown apartment to another, learning each other’s bodies and desires, becoming part of a community. While academic tangents on anything from Prop 22 to the Chinese Exclusion Act to homosexuality in ancient Rome can be less engaging, overall, this is another gorgeously written memoir.
Lin shrewdly braids the history of gay marriage into an account of his relationship with his husband in this gorgeous follow-up to Gay Bar ... Lin seamlessly ties his own love story to a broader history of legal efforts to thwart gay love ... Stylish, sexy, and deeply moving, this blends beautiful prose and incisive social history to stunning effect.
A rangy and readable book, both personal and political, that doesn’t quite coalesce ... Lin’s prose is as striking as ever—the lyric descriptions of gay sex recall Edmund White at his randiest—but the accounts of D.C. politics and Supreme Court cases feel dutiful rather than illuminating.
