Ten years ago, the Marriage Equality Act, giving same-sex couples the right to marry, was approved by a majority of Irish voters. The relative ease with which the referendum passed lies in stark contrast to Jeremy Atherton Lin’s experience in the US during the mid 1990s, when president Bill Clinton signed the Defence of Marriage Act under cover of night, banning federal recognition of same-sex marriage. (It was repealed by Joe Biden in 2022.)
The evolution of gay rights in the US is interspersed with the story of his own early love affair. As a young man visiting London, he encounters a local boy and, despite having planned on spending his twenties “f**king his way around Europe”, he’s smitten. Geography, however, gets in the way, when he returns home and visa issues keep his boyfriend in England.
Atherton Lin won the National Book Critics Circle award for Gay Bar: Why We Went Out and there’s more than enough here to show his skill as a writer. Describing a transatlantic phone call with his lover, he recalls the line being “somehow damp and dark, as if you were phoning from a Mike Leigh film”, and he draws cautious parallels between the rights of same-sex couples to marry in America with the struggle for interracial marriage in the landmark case of Loving v. Virginia (1967), saying that “it’s worth noting that marriage has never been something available to everybody except gays”. Closer to home, there are interesting political references too, such as an account of Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 Conservative Party Conference speech, where she stated that children who were being taught that it was all right to be gay were being “cheated of a sound start in life”.
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.
