Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told - Jeremy Atherton Lin

“We made a home before the state would call it one.” – Jeremy Atherton Lin, Deep House

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1996: Two Worlds

In the fall of 1996, I was unpacking boxes in a dorm room at Hampden-Sydney College, a rural all-male school in Virginia. The walls were cinderblock, the mattresses thin, the air thick with mildew, cologne, and cigarette smoke. The rituals were familiar to anyone who has been through fraternity life: pledge line-ups, late-night drills, forced memorization of founders’ names, humiliations meant to pass as tradition.

It was a world where masculinity wasn’t just expected — it was demanded. You learned how to drink, how to carry yourself at a party, how to talk about women, and how to keep any sign of difference hidden. To fall in love with another boy wasn’t simply off-limits. It was unimaginable.

That same year, three time zones away, Jeremy Atherton Lin was falling in love. He met a mumbling, starry-eyed Brit named Jamie — the beginning of what would become a decades-long relationship. While I was memorizing the Greek alphabet on command, he was stumbling into a future.

Same year, same age bracket, but we might as well have been on different planets.

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Love in the Shadow of DOMA

“In 1996, the state declared us illegitimate. We were already legitimate to each other.”

Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told frames Atherton Lin’s romance against the backdrop of the Defense of Marriage Act. DOMA was Congress’s attempt to wall off intimacy itself, denying federal recognition to same-sex couples and stripping away immigration sponsorship rights. For Jeremy and Jamie, that meant their partnership wasn’t just unofficial — it was actively invalidated. Jamie’s decision to overstay a tourist visa made it illegal.

What makes Deep House so powerful is how quietly it works. Atherton Lin doesn’t rage at the injustice, though he could. Instead, he shows how law seeps into the ordinary: the kitchen table, a border checkpoint, the silence of a shared bed. He drifts between second-person addresses to Jamie, historical digressions, queer archives, even detours into case law. The structure is fragmented, but that’s the point. Queer life has always been lived half in the open, half in the cracks.

And yet, what lingers is the sheer improbability of endurance. In 1996, gay men in mainstream culture were still written as tragic figures or comic relief. To imagine two twenty-year-olds meeting then and still being together now, married, feels unthinkable. Their story defies the script.

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XY and the Fantasy of Freedom

“A photograph is not a home. But it can haunt one.”

What we had in those years, in Virginia, were glimpses — contraband images and rumors smuggled through the culture. For me though, one of the sharpest was XY Magazine. It was glossy, reckless, aspirational. Boys my age in tank tops and low-slung jeans, smiling like desire itself wasn’t dangerous.

Though I was just out of graduate school at the time, married, I still looked from time to time. One cover burned into my memory — the March 2006 issue. Two boys in a tiled shower, tangled together, one of them impossibly beautiful, facing the camera with his wrists pinned above his head. That boy was Jamie Atherton.

At the time, that cover looked like freedom. Only later did I learn, through Deep House, that it was published without his consent. For kids like me, it was intoxicating contraband. For Jamie, it was exploitation.

And here’s the coincidence that makes that issue unforgettable: tucked inside the same magazine was a teenage Colton Haynes, posing in a cowboy hat, boots, and jeans. One boy would go on to Hollywood stardom, forced into a suffocating closet even as the internet recycled those images endlessly. The other would become the husband at the heart of Atherton Lin’s love story.

Two lives, one glossy artifact: one exploited, one closeted. Both trapped in the contradictions of visibility in the 2000s — fantasy and erasure, promise and danger.

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Colton’s Closet

By the time Colton Haynes found fame on Teen Wolf and Arrow, those XY images were already circulating online. His management’s response was silence. His job was to play straight heartthrobs, and the industry wasn’t ready for an openly gay superhero.

In 2016, a fan mentioned those XY photos on Tumblr, saying they missed when Colton was “openly gay.” His half-joking reply — “Was it a secret?” — was the closest he had come to acknowledging them. Within months, he came out formally, admitting he’d been closeted under pressure for years. Later he spoke of panic attacks, depression, rehab. The very photos that once promised freedom had become evidence he was forced to deny.

It’s impossible not to see the parallel. In the same magazine, Jamie Atherton’s image was exploited without consent, turned into an icon for strangers. Colton Haynes’s images became a weapon to keep him closeted, proof of something Hollywood didn’t want to admit.

That single issue of XY crystallizes the contradictions of gay visibility in that era: our fantasies were being printed in glossy color, but the real people inside them were stripped of agency.

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The Improbability of Endurance

“We didn’t expect forever. But we kept choosing it anyway.”

Against that backdrop, the endurance of Jeremy and Jamie’s love is remarkable. They met in a moment when permanence was not part of the script, when same-sex relationships were supposed to be fleeting, unserious, or doomed. Yet here they are, decades later, married.

Meanwhile, I was at Hampden-Sydney, where a boyfriend wasn’t just unlikely — it was unimaginable. The deprivation wasn’t only legal; it was cultural. Whole generations of us missed the chance to stumble through love in our youth, to grow up alongside the people we desired. While Jeremy and Jamie were cobbling together a home without recognition, I was rehearsing a performance of masculinity so airtight it left no room for possibility.

That’s the quiet tragedy Deep House makes visible: queer life wasn’t just about the fight for marriage equality. It was about decades of deferred adolescence, of lives forced to begin in secrecy or not at all.

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A Different Kind of Testimony

Deep House isn’t a victory lap. Atherton Lin resists the easy triumphalism that sometimes creeps into queer memoir. Yes, marriage equality arrived. Yes, permanence became possible. But the focus is on the long in-between, the limbo years when recognition was withheld, when intimacy itself was provisional.

That’s what makes the book more than memoir. It’s testimony. It documents what was denied, what was risked, what was endured. It tells the truth behind the glossy images — the lives lived beneath the contraband fantasies of XY.

And it reminds us how fragile representation was, and is. One man exploited, another closeted, both turned into symbols. And yet, in Atherton Lin’s telling, both reclaimed: Jamie as the partner in a lasting marriage, Colton as an openly gay man still standing after Hollywood tried to erase him.

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Joy and Loss

Reading Deep House, I feel both joy and loss. Joy, because their story proves that queer futures were being carved out even in the 1990s, in spite of everything. Loss, because I wasn’t given that horizon. At Hampden-Sydney, I didn’t even know to imagine a life like theirs.

But maybe that’s the power of a book like this. It insists that our stories didn’t begin with Obergefell, or with rainbow flags flying from city halls. They were already unfolding in kitchens, in bedrooms, across border checkpoints, and even in the pages of a controversial magazine.

Permanence was possible, even then. Love survived DOMA. It outlasted bureaucracy and borders. And it reminds us — quietly but insistently — that the stories we weren’t allowed to see were happening anyway.

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Why I Keep Reading

That’s why I keep coming back to books like Deep House. Jeremy Atherton Lin is doing the work I want to do: weaving the personal with the historical, the intimate with the political. His story of Jamie isn’t just about a marriage. It’s about the culture that tried to erase it, the magazine covers that distorted it, the laws that sought to deny it. And still, it endured.

In writing under Caleb Reed, I’m chasing that same braid. To tell the stories of where I was — in a fraternity house in rural Virginia — alongside the stories of what I missed, what I wasn’t allowed to imagine. To hold both joy and loss in the same frame. To testify, in my own way, that our lives have always been larger than the scripts written for us.

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Author’s Note: This was another selection from Eric Cervini’s (Very Gay) Book Club. Remember my commitment to read whatever they sent? This was one of those. I had started Gay Bar a year or so ago but left my Kindle on a plane and never got around to finishing it. When Deep House came, I read it in 2 or 3 days. I literally couldn’t put it down. Then I went back and re-read Gay Bar because I couldn’t get enough of Atherton-Lin’s style: mixing in facts, history, deeply personal experience, and genuinely good story telling to deliver his message.

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References & Links

• Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told — Jeremy Atherton Lin (Amazon) or (Bookshop.org)

• Gay Bar: Why We Went Out - Jeremy Atherton Lin (Amazon) or (Bookshop.org)