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There is a significant nostalgia for predictability. At least since the pandemic began, I have noticed some version of the statement “I could really use some precedents.” It’s a poor joke, based on a new word that ironically cites an adjective that has been used a lot in the American media lately: unprecedented funding for ICE, unprecedented abuse of executive power, unprecedented complicity of the courts. But a bold screenshot of a Facebook post has been circulating on social media since June, listing the years since 2003 when Democrats, along with Republicans, have repeatedly funded ICE. Critic Anahid Nersesian, writing from Los Angeles, where protests have been accompanied by state violence (tear gas, beatings, trampling, and “less-lethal” munitions to the head), reminds us that “the recent crackdown on immigration began not with a Republican but with a Democratic president,” Bill Clinton, whose “Border Patrol has tripled in size, becoming the country’s second-largest law enforcement agency”; and that the Obama administration has carried out more deportations “than any other president in history.” All of which suggests that the unprecedented in scale is not quite unprecedented. The desire for precedent-setting times is a desire for a present that is made understandable and meaningful through language, a moment in which we don’t have to pat ourselves on the back.
Author Jeremy Atherton Lean taps into this sentiment, writing about what it’s like to think of yourself as special and new in an era that is unprecedented. His first book, The Gay Bar, combines his own experiences of nineties nightlife as a mixed-race kid with mildly conservative views on sex with a historical study of the gay bar as both an idea and an artefact in danger of disappearing. His new book, Deep House, published in June, is a sublime narrative construct for, as the subtitle puts it, “the gayest love story ever told.” The superlative reads like a provocation. (“I’ll be the judge of that,” one Goodreads user noted.) But what follows is a movingly accumulating story of love and immigration, a threatened legal apparatus that “legitimizes interpersonal relationships, manages sexual identity, and defines citizenship,” weighed down by the ghosts of others, former lovers, who have become the subject of lawsuits. Atherton Lin’s method, merging memoir with cultural history, reveals how fickle and self-serving institutional memory can be. Who knows what machinations and what lives from the past will be codified as significant precedent, what mundane triumph or injustice? Much will be lost, but much can be reclaimed. What counts is shaped not in medias res but in the belated and vital act of interpretation.
“I remember the throb, not the heat,” Atherton Lean begins, describing his first encounter with a slight British man he met in an alternative gay bar in mid-Nineties London. Back home in Los Angeles, Atherton Lean, then 21, was “looking for someone older,” someone who had survived a severe case of AIDS and retained “a memory of queer culture.” Instead, on the last leg of his sexual journey through Europe, he encountered this “guy who couldn’t stop smiling,” a young man he would later call Famewall, short for “Famous Blue Coat,” after the Leonard Cohen song, though in Deep House he is referred to in the second person: “The first words you said to me, or mouthed to me under the music, were, ‘I’m so ashamed.’” When you lay beneath me, your eyelids fluttered and your pupils began to shine again. I thought you felt safe enough with me to let go. Their love is fierce and puppyish, grasping and unplanned, an intercontinental agony of letters and mixtapes and short dates. Bill Clinton has since signed into law the bill introduced in Congress the month they met: the Defense of Marriage Act, which limited the benefits and protections of more than a thousand federal laws, including immigration law, to heterosexual couples. Still, by the late ’90s, the couple were living together in San Francisco the only way they could think of, and Famous was doing it illegally. “Thus began our illegal life,” Atherton Lin writes in a letter to readers, “illegal but ecstatic.” It was a different kind of closet.
“We didn't know anyone in our position,” Atherton Lyn admits in the book. “There were others before us and around us, but most, like us, kept a low profile.” It wasn't until he
Sourse: newyorker.com
