Interview by Matteo PiniPortrait courtesy Jeremy Atherton Lin

MP Deep House is about your relationship with your long-term British partner and his status as an undocumented migrant living with you in California. You’ve said in the past that in some respects, you are always writing about your relationship with your partner.

JAL There’s a passage in the book about knowing that we’re never going to be on exactly the same wavelength, but we make something of the tuning. I am always writing about him because he is a part of how I connect to other people. When I write about him, I’m also writing about Clive Michael Boutilier, a man who was deemed to be psychopathic by virtue of his homosexuality and who was deported from the United States in 1967, or I’m writing about these immigrant friars who performed a same-sex marriage and were put to death in the 1580s in Rome. When you write about someone you know, you are writing about connections to other people between different identity groups, and from our own experience to historical experience.

MP I read the book as being equally concerned with housing precarity as it is with gay rights. The spaces in which you and your partner cohabitate always feel provisional, unsettled or compromised. Was this sense of instability something you wanted to foreground?

JAL One of the chapters is called “Renters” and originally the book was going to be called Renting. However, I realised the bigger story was a love story challenged by borders and a lack of access to civil partnerships or marriage. I really liked the title of the book Real Estate by Deborah Levy, taking a common phrase and complicating it. Although I don’t speak about house music in the book, I was interested in the competing ideas about where that name came from, whether it came from the public nightclub, the warehouse or from Larry Heard’s idea of making music on your synthesisers at home. The house being a kind of tension between public and private was always in the background of my thinking. Every single apartment in the book is rented and running throughout it is the feeling that you are answerable to someone else. You move out of your parents’ house into a rented apartment, but you still feel like there’s a parent in the other room. People in other cultures adapt to this way of living very seamlessly and productively, but we felt precarious in our day-to-day.

MP Fucking has many valences within the book: resistance, communion, a trust exercise against the backdrop of HIV. You quote Maggie Nelson on perversion, on how it doesn’t overthrow cultural norms, but subtly distorts them. The deviation allows for a culturally productive space.

JAL Maggie’s quote is in the middle of the longest sex scene I’ve ever written, which is political and semi-philosophical. It is about finding out what it is to be a top, to navigate those positions, and being away from society when sex is also part of society. She asks, “Why did it take so long to find somebody with whom my perversities were perfectly matched?” In the end notes of The Argonauts (2015), she writes that it's more than just being perfectly matched, because perversion is about constantly changing. I was trying to enact in the writing that perversion, perverting what nonfiction is or what memory holds.
It was really important to me for the book to be sexual. It’s a shame when real sexuality – multi-sensorial, deep, euphoric, weird, funny and lovely and tender – is hidden from the politics of civil rights. My last book Gay Bar (2021) reclaims the word “fag” and in Deep House I claim our outsider-ness. Sex is a part of that. Obviously, there’s a parallel with architecture and penetration, architecture and anatomy, and I hope that through the book you keep feeling like you’re going like deeper inside the house.

MP In the book, you trace an alternative history of American gay rights legislation, specifically in terms of marriage equality. I was struck by how the figures involved in key court cases have historical importance thrust upon them: they rarely stake any claims to be activists themselves.

JAL Maybe on a more unconscious level, I knew that the people I would find would be people who didn’t necessarily set out to be activists, who had a nebulous sense of their own agency. On another level, there’s this outside-looking-in quality where a lot of the major civil rights breakthroughs are held up as these dignified love stories. Lawrence v. Texas is a good example: two people who barely knew each other, a couple of hapless, almost despicable ne’er-do-wells, where the question remains whether they were even having sex, are the ones who led to the striking down of legislation criminalising sodomy. When I’m doing research, I love it when I find something absurd, hypocritical, ridiculous, or accidentally euphemistic. It’s important to find those discrepancies from the grand narrative, from the palatable version, and honour what the messiness of the situation is.

MP Gay Bar is now sold in “Pride” table displays in bookshops across the world. How do you feel about your position within the institution?

JAL I never wrote to be instructive or educational. I consider myself an essayist in the traditional sense,  and I consider myself a memoirist in terms of trying to interrogate my memories and find what meaning there is in my relationship with memory. Those are my two big overarching projects. When it comes to something like identity within queer spaces in Gay Bar or this book’s exploration of gay marriage and immigration, it comes with an overwhelming sense of responsibility. My narratives are always self-deprecating and confused, and sometimes involve me being a bit of a snot or a brat towards the people I’m engaging with. There’s a conversation between Cathy Park Hong and Maggie Nelson where they talk about the “jerk encounter”. I use a lot of jerk encounters because there's something illuminating about coming up against a jerk, but you’ve got to kind of be a jerk, too. You have to be a human with dimensions. When you emerge out of that, you hopefully have more of a blurry version of things rather than a binary, bad-guy-versus-good-guy idea. When I was at the RCA, I was studying under a historian, David Crowley, who gave me one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever had, which was to put a really simple title on the cover of your book. And it worked in terms of the fact that Gay Bar is now a beach read. But you can find some shadows even within a word or phrase that is so absolute. .