Deep house The gayest love story ever told

In a style similar to his debut, Gay Bar (2021), Lin's second book combines memoir and cultural history that veers from the erudite to the erotic. It's 1996, and Lin, newly graduated from college, is in London pursuing carnal knowledge but instead finding a chaotically dressed British boy who is sweet, sexy, and charming. The two embark on a (very) long-distance relationship. At the same time, the U.S. has passed the Defense of Marriage Act, defining marriage as solely between a man and a woman. Lin intertwines these two at-odds stories of a budding, beautiful, but messy relationship (Lin's boyfriend ultimately lives undocumented in San Francisco) during a time of political upheaval around the very makeup of that relationship. 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. He met the man whom he would marry on a dance floor in London in May 1996, at the end of a post-college trip to Europe. They spent two nights together before Lin returned to California. Noting that their cross-Atlantic relationship developed against the backdrop of the Defense of Marriage Act, which allowed U.S. states not to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, Lin seamlessly ties his own love story to a broader history of legal efforts to thwart gay love. Describing the first time he and his future husband had sex, Lin frames it as an act of resistance: "By surrendering to you, and through that to myself, I saw how not to surrender to them." Elsewhere, he profiles pioneers who paved the way for their eventual marriage, including a British government worker who stamped a fake visa into his Brazilian lover's passport, and a Colorado couple who in 1979 filed "the first case seeking recognition of a same-sex marriage at the federal level." Stylish, sexy, and deeply moving, this blends beautiful prose and incisive social history to stunning effect. Agent: Laura Macdougall, United Agents. (June)

Portrait of a gay marriage. In his award-winning previous book,Gay Bar: Why We Went Out (2021), the American-born author reflected on the watering holes where he and his English partner found sex and community (and sometimes banality) in the days before hookup apps like Grindr. His new book, a similar blend of memoir and sociopolitical history, widens the lens to examine how political debates over same-sex marriage affected the tenuous fate of this transnational couple, who ultimately tied the knot when it became legal to do so in the U.K. The author recounts their meeting in a London nightclub in 1996; that same week, he notes, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. "It wasn't against the law for us to fall in love," he writes. "But if we were to forge a commitment, there didn't seem to be any place to take it." For the next decade, the couple existed in limbo, first apart on different continents, then together in San Francisco. The author's partner would eventually overstay his visa, ushering in another form of legal insecurity. "Our relationship, built on apartness--longing--had entered its phase of subterfuge--pretending," Lin writes. As their personal story unfolds in a series of rented Bay Area apartments, the author serves up a potted history of the gay marriage debate in the '90s and early 2000s alongside passages on matelotage, a contractual arrangement between two pirates in the 17th and 18th centuries; Clive Michael Boutilier, the gay Canadian deemed a "psychopathic personality" and denied U.S. citizenship in 1965; and the ill-starred relationship of artist Felix Gonzales-Torres and his Canadian lover, Ross Laycock, in the '80s and '90s. 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. A rangy and readable book, both personal and political, that doesn't quite coalesce. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.