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 memoir Gay Bar. In 2022, it was announced that his second book Deep House examines the subject of same-sex marriage and immigration.

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 (2021) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. It was included in The New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2021.

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 and reviews in publications including The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Face and Index Magazine. 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.

Atherton Lin lives in St Leonards-on-Sea, England and Glendale, California.

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, ISBN 9780231208901
 * ‘A Brief Literary History of Gay and Lesbian Bars,’ 2021, Literary Hub
 * ‘Their Tenderest Yearnings of Affection,’ 2021, Fantastic Man
 * ‘Fun,’ included in Sluts (Ed. Michelle Tea), Dopamine, 2024, ISBN 9781635902129
 * ‘Snob Queer,’ included in A Great Gay Book (Ed. Ryan Fitzgibbon), Abrams Books, 2024, ISBN 9781419766787