9 Queer Couples and the Exact Moment They Fell in Love
I've loved romance from the moment I saw Chad Michael Murray in One Tree Hill on a bootleg DVD in Beijing. I used to watch it at 4 a.m. on the quietest volume, taking note of all the things I was sure I'd experience one day (even though I was not white, straight, a basketball player, or even remotely popular). As a 27 year old whose longest relationship spanned twelve weeks, I can safely say that romance is no One Tree Hill.
Still, I've always been a romantic. As a photographer and journalist, I work to understand experiences that are not mine, and manifest things I can't quite put to words. Romance -- especially queer romance -- is one of those things, and so I find myself constantly observing it, hungrily. While I don't have any Valentine's Day plans this year, I figured the best way to celebrate was to document the love of those around me, trying to cut through the smokescreen of my superficial childhood idea of it. Here are nine queer couples, and the exact moment they realized they were in love.
Brandon and Will
Will: "I think I felt it when at one point he had become quite ... tipsy [at Electric Zoo], and I was holding him up with my arms right in front of the stage and we were just so free and ... I'm going to get emotional, but I felt so much joy ... and I hadn't felt that in a long time. Not like that. Just ecstatic joy."
Beau and Josh
Beau: "The first time I met Josh, he was interviewing me for a job. We hit it off right away. The interview felt like a first date, and I ended up getting the position. When you're into someone, you want to be around them all the time, and having 40 hours a week together accelerated us getting to know each other. After my internship ended, I was headed back to Oklahoma to finish school, and that's when we had to confront the feelings that we had developed. It was important to us to commit to exploring a relationship before I left to understand what this was and what it could become."
Bruce and Ying
Ying: "I loved him [Bruce] in part because he was so patient with me ... I was so cautious of getting into a relationship and he was willing to wait. We have a strong sense of communication and transparency. There is never that cadence of passive aggression. We both are comfortable in speaking how we feel, and that's so important."
Cleo and Lo
Cleo: "I was very much not looking for a relationship when we met, but I remember even being on our first date and feeling oddly comfortable and thinking, "Oh this is not what I expected coming and experiencing." I was transitioning from a full-time job at the time, and I felt very vulnerable, so there was a part of me that was trying to be more aware of acts of care and love and consistency. And I noticed how consistent Lo was, how their acts weren't just one-offs. They never pressured me to be somebody different or shift my expectations. It felt like they were constantly holding their heart out in their hand, putting it out there for me. One morning as Lo was singing in the shower -- they have a really beautiful voice -- I felt something in my body say, "I want this person to see all of me."
Jari and Corey
Jari: "We were best friends for five years, and everyone always thought that we were dating. The summer before we started dating, our relationship seemed to evolve a little bit, and I just remember laying on the beach cuddling and being affectionate. Then when Corey left to go back to school, she kissed me on the lips when she said goodbye. It was just super quick, and I said, "Oh we've never done that before," and she just smiled, shrugged, and walked away. I thought about that kiss for the entire semester."
Johanna and Amy
Johanna: Amy and I were friends at first. We met at Pride in June, and from the moment we met, we didn't stop talking. She was living in Syracuse at the time, and even though we had only met once, she just started calling me all the time just to tell me about small things that were happening in her life. Then she started calling me at night to literally fall asleep on the phone ... for hours. I didn't understand this at first, and I knew this was my friend, but these calls slowly made me feel some type of way. By September, on these phone calls while she was sleeping, was the first time I thought, "Okay I think I'm falling in love with this person."
Mar and Mim
Mim: "I think one of the moments in which we fell in love with each other was when I was lying on Mar's bed and she asked me to close my eyes and lie back. And then I heard this little rustling of plastic and Mar started throwing all these faux rose petals on top of me, and when I opened my eyes there was ... a preposterous amount of them, like an entire grocery bag, all over the bed. And I still have one in my phone case."
Stephen and Mitchell
Mitchell: "One of the first nights Stephen spent at my place, we'd gotten home from a party and he jumped into my bed but accidentally kicked a huge cup of water off my nightstand. He was super embarrassed, and we ran around trying to clean it up but then didn't think about it again. A few nights later when I went to empty out the ashtray on my nightstand, I noticed that it was still full off water. It made me miss him, and that was when I knew."
Thomas and Jess
Jess: We had a friend that kept trying to set us up, and she'd pitch Thomas to me, saying, "He's great, romantic, maybe too romantic -- he's a Pisces." But I had just emerged from a terrible relationship and was in such a low place so the timing just didn't feel right. I was intrigued though, and the more I learned about Thomas through her, it did seem as though we had a lot of weird similarities, and it almost felt irritating ... like it was annoying that there was some sort of a connection here without ever having met. So when we finally met and hit it off in real life, I thought, "Well I guess this is what we are supposed to be doing, even though it's still not great timing for either of us." I was very reluctant to make it official, largely because I thought, this seems fated and we're going to be together anyway, so what's the rush? At the time I was also a little bit more suspicious, because my previous relationship had made me question myself: "Maybe I don't know what it feels like to be in love?" I didn't feel like I could trust myself to make good decisions, or see good things. Months later, when I realized I was in love, it was less about fireworks going off and more about noticing that I could finally allow myself to be in love. Because falling in love was an option from the beginning, but I needed to take some action to unlock that and allow myself to feel it."
