Critically Acclaimed Author of Gay Bar Has a New Book Coming: 'We Defied the Law in Order to Stay Together' (Exclusive)

The author of the smash hit Gay Bar has a new book coming out, and it's all about love.

Picture this: It's 1996, and author Jeremy Atherton Lin has met his dream boy: Famous, a mumbly, dreamy Brit. But at the same time, the U.S. Congress is working on the Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples federal rights — including immigration. So the author and Famous find stolen pockets of the world to call their own: remote forests, London fashion shows, desolate deserts and East Village hotel rooms, San Francisco dive bars and Berlin sex clubs. That's the story of Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told , out next June from Little, Brown and Company.

Beginning a year before the pair meet, Deep House "tracks with tenderness and wicked humor the lineage of gay men who came before [the legalization of gay marriage] — whether smuggling a foreign partner through national checkpoints or going public to stand up for the right to get down in their own homes," according to an official synopsis.

"This feels like the book I was born to write. It's the story of how I fell in love across borders before gay couples had access to legal marriage or any other path to immigration," Atherton Lin tells PEOPLE in an exclusive statement. "So we defied the law in order to stay together. Fascinated by how our experiences connect to those who came before us, I've woven in largely forgotten historical figures whose homes were invaded and lives turned upside down just because of who they chose to be intimate with."

The book's love story takes place between 1996 and 2007, and it also traces back to eras including the 1960s and even the 16th century. The Obergefell v. Hodges decision, one of four Supreme Court decisions regarding gay rights, was announced in 2015, on June 26 — Atherton Lins's mom's birthday. That's especially apt, as Deep House also parallels the author's experience with that of the mixed-race marriage of his parents.

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The book comes amidst a historic moment for couples like the ones it follows, too.

"Deep House is a prehistory of gay marriage that reveals how real people like us were affected," the author continues. "As I wrote the book, at least one Supreme Court Justice explicitly stated the goal of overturning same-sex marriage, so while very intimate, it's also a political tale about the precarity of civil rights."

This book "juxtaposes whispered disclosures of undocumented domesticity with courtroom drama and political stunts to explore myriad forms of intimacy while questioning the mechanisms that legitimize love," the book description explains. "It's at once a historical kaleidoscope and the innermost tale of two boyfriends who made a home in the shadows of a turbulent civil rights battle."