Jeremy Atherton Lin has been writing for three decades about the corners of queerness and culture we encounter often but seldom spend time properly thinking about. His debut book, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, dug into the dying queer party space, from its roots centuries ago to the damage done by gentrification today. He had studied it through practice: he grew up in California, attending UCLA as a theater student, and has spent much of his adult life in London, watching the once burgeoning DIY queer scene transform into something scarce, ground down by gentrification over time. In the background of this story, as he was writing it, was the man who is now his husband. In Deep House, Gay Bar‘s follow-up, Atherton Lin looks a little closer at this relationship that has defined his life and the idea of queer domesticity in a world that, in its beginnings, didn’t welcome it.
Starting at their fateful meeting in 1996, we see Atherton Lin, an American, meet a beautiful British artist. But they fall for each other at a political crunch point: in the United States, the Defense of Marriage Act was coming into play, essentially disallowing same-sex couples the same rights that opposite-sex couples were given. As Atherton Lin puts it: “If we were to fall in love, we’d have no place to take it.” A continent apart, their nationalities dictating how they could spend their time together, they chose, as the book tells us, to forgo convention and structure entirely, going off-grid.
The book merges memoir with history, giving it a crackle of humour amongst the pathos. It’s also a gorgeous portrait of how gay relationships form, and where we find the time and space to insert people we love into our lives—like in the below excerpt, lifted from a chapter titled “Other People’s Invitations.” It’s early 1997, and Atherton Lin, working at a magazine, was in the thick of London Fashion Week. One of those invites was to Miu Miu Fall 1997, the brand’s first show to take place outside of Milan. He has a plus one, and so his partner comes with him—but getting into the glitzy gala afterwards proved more difficult. How he contextualizes that rejection relates beautifully to how we find the kind of acceptance we should really be seeking.
Less than a year since we met in London, I was coming back sophisticated. I worked for a magazine. I planned to attend Fashion Week. The show invitations had begun to arrive ahead of me, and you maybe took some pride in the sleek envelopes from Owen Gaster, Hussein Chalayan, Vivienne Westwood, landing incongruously at your grubby student accommodation. My reputation preceded me.
Under a flat gray sky and the watchful beasts of the Natural History Museum eaves, I strutted toward the tents alongside stressed-out editors and minor celebrities, all of them wearing so much fashion. Was I “in”? Somewhat. Invited to this show but not that one, in actuality further from the industry establishment and closer to the petite East Asian guy I kept clocking everywhere. So desperate! I thought, embarrassed on his behalf, internalizing the stereotype of gay Asian men as yappy and persistent. He clutched a camera at his chest, striving for atmosphere shots. No longer able to control himself after the finale of Copperwheat Blundell, he leaped onto the catwalk and snuck backstage.
I took you along to shows that’d given me a plus-one, including Miu Miu, the Prada diffusion line, a momentous addition to London Fashion Week. You can do fashion illustrations, I suggested. The very skinny models paraded, wearing scant fabric in pale hues. A few looks in, I peeped at your notebook. You’d merely drawn a diagonal line with a tiny triangle head. I nudged you, so you did another, much the same: slash, triangle. You couldn’t see past your skepticism.
We weren’t invited to Miuccia Prada’s gala that night, held at a mansion somewhere along the bank of the Thames. We showed up anyway. At the gates we waved our show passes, but the staff had been trained: Not the Same Thing. Alongside us was the Asian groupie with his camera.
He’s overzealous, I informed you. Been seeing him all over.
He was trying to talk his way in, too; I bristled that we were in the same position.
Well, I said. Don’t think they’ll cave.
You became stubborn. As apathetic as you were toward fashion itself, you wanted in on the hubbub around it. You’d come this close, so why not. You wanted to dip into the decadence that awaited inside, like Baudelaire’s ‘lover of universal life’ who ‘enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy.’ Baudelaire rethinks it: ‘Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.’
In a blink, there was the hanger-on— grinning broadly and gliding through the filigreed gates on the arm of Stephen Fry, who was entering his Oscar Wilde era. We were impressed; the wannabe was no longer one of us. He’d become a be, or at least a plus-one.
It really was time to give up. We went instead to the Soho basement with tobacco-stained walls and plates piled with too much spaghetti, topped with spooned Parmesan. We wanted to be, as author Paul Flynn once put it to me, in the places that let the riffraff in. Being turned away suited us, we decided, even if we would have preferred to choose not to join in.
‘When one is left out, something else becomes available,’ writes psychoanalytic essayist Adam Phillips. ‘Exclusion may involve the awakening of other opportunities that inclusion would make unthinkable. If I’m not invited to the party, I may have to consider what else I want: the risk is that being invited to the party does my wanting for me, that I might delegate my desire to other people’s invitations. Already knowing, or thinking we know, what we want is the way we manage our fear of freedom. Wanting not to be left out may tell us very little about what we want, while telling us a lot about how we evade our wanting.’
Some version of this revelation came to us in fits and starts. Because marriage was easy to compute, we assumed we wanted in. But, cast out by marriage and immigration law, we began to perceive the freedom in the wildness.
Out of the closet and into what, theorist Judith Butler once asked: ‘What new unbounded spatiality? the room, the den, the attic, the basement, the house, the bar, the university, some new enclosure whose door, like Kafka’s door, produces the expectation of a fresh air and a light of illumination that never arrives?’
Butler must have been referencing Kafka’s parable “Before the Law.” In it, a man from the country arrives at a gate, cracked open but guarded by a formidable bouncer in a fur coat. The man seeks the Law and awaits permission to be let through. He is not allowed. Will he ever be? It’s a maybe. Not now. He could force his way, the guard says, but would encounter a procession of more obstructionists, each more powerful than the last: “The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him.” So the man waits and waits. He offers bribes, which the doorkeeper accepts without relenting. Before he dies, the man asks why in all those years nobody else has come begging for admittance. The guard explains that the gate has always been for him alone, then closes it. The man spent his life waiting for a permission that was never forthcoming. He dared not set a foot inside, even though the subsequent heavies could be mere myth. He deferred to the gatekeeper’s authority, and diminished himself in a futile attempt to appease.
Though we might know such stories, still the gates continue to appear. The sight of them seems correct, seemingly inevitable. We sought authorization from a Wizard of Oz, even though we realized he was a pathetic fake. It was easy to imagine that a Miu Miu party would quench some thirst. It was tempting to believe that a neat solution like same-sex marriage would render us resolved and unburdened. Yet a breeze had begun to flow through our thinking. It seemed to carry a message that we could allow ourselves to want new forms of wanting. We could gambol outside the gates. We wanted to be happy. We were mostly, wildly happy.
“Deep House” by Jeremy Atherton Lin is published in the UK by Penguin Books on 5 June