Jeremy Atherton Lin


Jeremy Atherton Lin is an American essayist known for writing about gay culture and alienation. He is the author of the cultural memoirs Gay Bar and Deep House.

Life and work

Atherton Lin was raised in Saratoga, California. He attended Lynbrook High School and graduated from the theater department at UCLA. He served as the inaugural Editorial Director of Surface Magazine, which was then based in San Francisco. After moving to the UK, he obtained the MA in Writing at the Royal College of Art in London.
Atherton Lin's debut book Gay Bar: Why We Went Out won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. It was included in The New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2021.
In Deep House, Atherton Lin recounts his transnational relationship before the legalization of same-sex marriage or immigration concessions for binational gay couples. The book was listed among the Publishers Weekly Top 10 Best Books of 2025 and the USA Today Best-selling Booklist. It was the subject of an essay in The New Yorker, in which culture critic Lauren Michele Jackson dubbed Atherton Lin "a sensual historian."
Atherton Lin's essay 'The Wrong Daddy' was a finalist for a National Magazine Award, the first-ever such nomination for a piece published by The Yale Review in its two-centuries-plus history. Atherton Lin profiled non-binary celebrities Sam Smith, Bimini Bon-Boulash and Mae Martin for British editions of GQ, traditionally a men's magazine. He has published essays in The Paris Review and the Times Literary Supplement, and reviewed new fiction for The Guardian and The Washington Post. He wrote the cover feature on Wolfgang Tillmans for the September 2022 issue of Frieze in advance of the artist's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
In 2022, Atherton Lin was featured in artist Every Ocean Hughes's durational performance at the Moderna Museet. His sound essays have been broadcast by NTS Radio. His music playlists have been written about in publications including The New Yorker and BuzzFeed.
Atherton Lin lives in St Leonards-on-Sea, England.

Essays

  • 'Death in the Age of Instagram,' 2018, Noon
  • 'A Good Old-Fashioned Hit of Poppers,' 2020, The Times Literary Supplement
  • 'The Wrong Daddy,' 2021, The Yale Review, included in The Best American Magazine Writing 2022, Columbia University Press, 2022,
  • 'A Brief Literary History of Gay and Lesbian Bars,' 2021, Literary Hub
  • 'Their Tenderest Yearnings of Affection,' 2021, Fantastic Man
  • 'Fun,' included in Sluts, Dopamine, 2024,
  • 'Snob Queer,' included in A Great Gay Book, Abrams Books, 2024,
  • 'Renting,' included in Little Joe: a book about queers and cinema, mostly, 2024,