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I grew up on Long Island with my bad-ass single mother. I was a really happy kid: a loving, if small, home; abundance of friends; excellent student; and loved the arts early on. I was also very fat until age 15, and I think so many of the best and worst and most-complicated parts of me stem back to the experience of growing up large. But I mostly had a good time with it, until I didn’t, and then put myself on a warped version of the Weight Watchers points system. Lost 60 pounds in three months; a really bizarre and formative experience to have as a teenage boy. I still wrestle with body, food, and self-image daily.

My debut novel, Peter in Progress, is out now!

Buy the book directly from Andy

What is your age, where in the world do you primarily live, where did you grow up?
I’m 40. I live in New York, in the South Bronx, in the shadow of Yankee Stadium. I grew up on Long Island (Port Washington).

How do you define yourself on the LGBTQ+ spectrum?
Gay

What is your relationship status?
Single. Divorced (from a woman).

Do you have an “ideal” relationship status?
You know, I’m less sure than ever. I often want for something longterm and hope to meet a man that I’ll build a life partnership with, grow old with. I’m not sure that I ever want to get married again, given what a hassle divorce was (and I had a comparatively amicable one!). But, more and more, I also consider a happy life design centered on self-love, deep friendships and meaningful—but not necessarily permanent—romantic connections. I want to remain open, and I don’t want to prejudge the value of a relationship based on how I want or expect it to end.

What is the biggest misconception about being single or in a relationship?
We focus too much on how relationships end and less on what they bring to us while they are active, or healthy, or serving their purpose. I know first-hand how unfinished we are—even as adults. If people are interrogating themselves and allowing themselves to evolve as fully as I believe they should, then it follows that even the most wonderful relationships can run their course. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

Generally, I think we mourn romantic and platonic relationships that don’t survive or, at least, look back at them with some kind of sad, gray pall. We could celebrate growing out of relationships! And focus on gratitude for what they gave to us when they were meant to.

When was your first intimate moment? Was it with someone you liked? Did you feel pressured into it?
This is tough to say, but if I’m being honest, holding a man’s hand at 36 felt like nothing I had experienced before with women. It electrified my whole body. I couldn’t believe it; I felt like a 12-year-old in my aging skin. But it was so different.

I realized that, with women, I had been doing a kind of learned performance, right down to sexual action, and presumed sexual gratification and pleasure. It wasn’t totally false, but it also wasn’t totally real; it was coming from films I had watched and books I had read. I was playing a part. But the minute that guy took my palm: Oh my god! I understood in an instant where all those scripts and novel scenes come from. It was a profound wake-up call.

How would you define love? Is it the thing you work at for a long period of time? Or is it the strong feeling you feel for someone right from the beginning for no reason?
I think of love as a force that permeates walls between people. I also marvel at the fact that we’ll only ever experience life through our own singular field of experience (as far as we know). That’s true even when we’re in the physical proximity of others. Life is a a lonely enterprise by design. But love—of a person, or a moment in time, or a work of art—to me, that’s when you are somehow able to reach past your singular field and really feel that you’re experiencing life with someone, even if not through their eyes. Sometimes that’s the friend you call every morning. Sometimes it’s a man whose eyes you get lost in for one night only, under a disco ball or beside the Hudson River. Sometime’s its a passage in a novel, or a poem, where some stranger puts words to a feeling you’ve had so perfectly, that you feel seen by another.

Does the relationship fill your deepest needs for closeness with a person? Or do you prefer not to share every part of yourself?
I’m a very open book, and I love to share every part of myself, and to learn so much about somebody else. But I do bring a lot of privilege to that exchange, because I’m a part of a lot of privileged identity groups (I feel this even more sharply since coming out).

When did you come out to family, friends and others for the first time?
As I mentioned, I was 36(!). I came out to my therapist first; then to a few close friends, to get their advice on how to manage my situation. Remarkably, many of them told me to “try” with men before telling my wife. I understood their advice, but I ended up not doing that; fidelity was important to me, though I wouldn’t judge others for making different choices.

Then I told my wife. After I told her, it was a crazy parade of friends, family, coworkers. I didn’t have a clear plan, I mostly told people when I saw them in person.

Did you have any LGBTQ+ role models as a child or teenager? What do you remember about images of same-gender or queer relationships or messages you gleaned?
I think about this a lot, because I grew up in a liberal town on Long Island in the 1990s and 2000s, so I often wonder why I was asleep to myself for so long. There’s no clear or “good” reason why I didn’t realize/accept I was gay. But when I think about culture at that time, I remember that actually a lot of it was quite homophobic and, while there were some images of gay life (Will & Grace comes to mind), it still wasn’t a time when such images were flowering.

I’ve watched a bunch of shows geared at teens today (such as Heartstopper and Love, Victor), and I wonder if things might have been different had I seen such bold, positive, invitational representations as a kid. I think this generation benefits from the permission to explore and play and change. I felt like if I kissed a boy, my life would be over.

Are there any pivotal pop culture moments that you credit for teaching about love and/or relationships?
I’ve turned to so many films, novels, and shows as part of my midlife refashioning, and they have been instructive about gay life at so many levels, ranging from practical to profound. To name just a few: The Heart’s Invisible Furies; The Song of Achilles; Dancer from the Dance; Maurice; Heartstopper; Love, Victor; Pose; Queer as Folk (UK and US); Looking; Trick.

Do you have a “found family” or “chosen family”?
I’ve been amazed by how welcoming queer people have been to me. I really worried I’d be rejected, both romantically and socially, for coming out so late. But I’ve built so many genuinely great friendships here in the city. At first, they were a lot of dates-turned-friends. Then I joined MTG, a gay tennis league, and really connected with a group of guys there, and they have been a found family for sure. Now I’m finding a literary/creative community in places like the Publishing Triangle, Saints & Sinners, and Out/Play.

What is your relationship with your biological family (if any)?
I’m very close to my mom. We talk every day. I have three half-siblings who I love. Plus, I have five nieces and nephews who are wonderful and growing up too fast!

What do you (did you) like about dating as a LGBTQ person? What do/did you dislike?
It’s fascinating because I have 1.5 decades as a “straight” man as a point of comparison. Mostly, it’s tons better. I find people to be more genuine, self-aware, fun, playful—willing to trust and go deep sooner—more active in their exploration of self. So I really enjoy dating “encounters” by and large. It is more fun!

What I dislike among gay men is the fickleness (I have a whole section about this in the novel). I do think there is a lot of poor communication and evasive/misleading behavior that is unnecessary. I prefer honesty and directness; ghosting, constant deferral, and excuses can get very dispiriting. And we all complain about it but seem to keep it up at the same time (I’m guilty of it, too!).

Has race, ethnicity or cultural differences been a factor in who you seek out?
I’m genuinely attracted to all races and ethnicities. I do love meeting and dating men from other countries because I find the cultural exchange to be invigorating.

Have you had any difficulties dating or finding/keeping a relationship?
I’m so new! Some days, I feel like, yes, it’s a little concerning that I haven’t had a boyfriend yet, or anything that’s lasted more than a few weeks. But then I remember I’ve only been out for four years, and really only dating for 3.5 of those. So I’m trying to be patient with myself.

What’s the most surprising thing you have learned about relationships from your perspective?
I mentioned this earlier, but my whole thing is that we, as adults, are not as fixed or complete as we think we are. I think we are changing and evolving as much as teenagers. So relationships are not really about getting to know someone but, rather, being a part of someone’s ongoing journey as they are a part of yours. So they are way more dynamic than I used to believe. It’s sort of like quantum physics - you almost can’t look at a relationship at a fixed point on time; it’s already changing.

Have you experienced heartbreak?
That’s a hard one. My divorce was heartbreaking—but not heartbreak. It was more sadness for causing pain to someone I loved and letting go of a life I thought I was leading. But I felt much more visceral “heartbreak” a few months later when a guy I had been seeing for three weeks broke up with me. I sobbed like a teenager into piles of laundry for six hours. But I’m not quite sure that was heartbreak, either.

Do you have any moments of joy, happiness or pleasure that you can share about being in a same-gender or queer relationship?
For me, it’s still magical to be body-to-body with a man, whether that’s sex or cuddling or anything in between. I don’t know if that’s because of where I am in my coming out journey, or that it was so deferred. But it still feels unbelievable to me.

Are there any things that standard heterosexual relationships have that you feel are out of reach or that you wish you had or could achieve?
No. I don’t miss or want for that “world” at all. I think it is so heavy and laden with scripts and expectations that discourage people from paying attention to who they really are, what they want, and how they are changing. The grass is not greener. Trust me!

Have you ever been in a polyamorous relationship or would you like to be in a situation that doesn’t involve just two people?
I have not been. I see myself more as a partner to someONE; but I’m open to anything. How could I not be, given how I’ve surprised myself? It would depend a lot on the people, and I’d have to make sure that I had clarity on my own intentions, hopes, fears, so that I could communicate those honestly.

Have you had a difficult time navigating the “roles” you should play in a relationship?
At times. I have a tendency toward providing. I get a lot of joy out of “learning” someone, anticipating their needs and wants, remembering small things, finding ways to make their every day brighter. But every now and then, I’ll suddenly get upset or resentful because I’ll feel that my own needs aren’t met in equal stead; but it’s really not fair to the person because a lot of what I’m doing/offering has not been a demand or even request of theirs. And my original intentions were not tied to expectations of reciprocity. So I don’t like dipping into that mental space. Said otherwise, I’m often trying to figure out how to give a lot and be generous of spirit, in a way that is really healthy and participatory.

What is your philosophy about relationships?
I think they’re best thing about life, which can also make them the hardest. More fragile, contextual, and dynamic than we often believe them to be—but no less joyful or important for all of those things. I think for relationships to thrive, you have to pay attention, take people on their own terms, understand yourself and the other person and your connection as in flux. Relationships can be equally amazing, and good for us, whether they last or are fleeting.

Any good/bad advice you received from a friend or queer elder?
This is so specific, but I was sort of hesitant to join a gay tennis league. At the time, I wanted to keep my tennis life separate from everything else going on with me, all the changes. But a new friend of mine, and my trainer, were both pretty insistent that I should do it. I couldn’t understand their dogma around it, but after I joined, I was so glad that I (finally) listened. I think they understood something about how hard it can be to make friends as an adult and that this tennis league could be the place I really get to know gay men outside of a dating-first context. And they were right!

Any advice you’d give to someone younger than you who thinks it’s impossible to find love?
Just stay open—to yourself, first and foremost. Listen to life’s whispers about who you’re becoming next and what you really want right now. Be suspicious of every expectation and every script and stay humble about how well you know yourself. I think if you are in a listening stance, the universe will really gift you with amazing pathways, full of all kinds of love, many of which may surprise you.

Take the QLP Questionnaire!

BONUS:

We all need more inspiration. Recommend something that influenced or helped shape you significantly that you’d recommend to someone else.

Books: The History of Sound; The Heart’s Invisibles Furies; The Color Purple.
And, of course, Peter in Progress!

TV shows: Fellow Travelers (Better than Heated Rivalry—my hot take!!!)

Movie: Contact

Music: “I Could Be Wrong” (the “Radio Edit” by Lucas & Steve Remix of Brandy); “Track 10” by Charlii XCX; “Only Love Can Hurt Like This” by Paloma Faith). “Go Deep” by Janet Jackson is my go-to feel good.

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Doug’s voice is high-pitched and nasal. When he speaks, it’s with rounded vowels and clipped consonants that make him sound like he’s a British character actor. Doug is not that. He’s just a character—a short, chubby, pale-complexioned, side-part-wearing kid with a nervous laugh and a herky-jerky walk. One of the last times I saw my suitemate in our junior year of college in upstate New York, he is giggling at his Chinese girlfriend, whom he’s nicknamed “Coke.” I’m never sure if it refers to her favorite soda or the thick glasses she wears. I’m pretty sure, though it isn’t an inside joke about her being a druggie. Doug’s girlfriend, let alone Doug, is not cool like that. Not like me.

I remember a lot of guys from my college days. Guys I partied with, hung out with, crushed on, and a few I even hooked up with. Doug is not one of them. Instead, I deny him the attention and strange validation he seems to crave from me and my friends. So it’s not surprise that he’s a far distant memory for me 10 years later and 1,200 miles away. Until some strange guy keeps staring at me from across a crowded gym floor in Tampa where I’m getting my pump on with my personal trainer. “Why is that weirdo staring at you,” my trainer asks. I shrug through my shoulder shrugs. Then the strange guy creeps up on me. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

It’s the voice that does it for me.

We eye each other up and down. A decade has made a difference for both of us. We’re both apparently gym rats now who enjoy showing our swole muscles from beneath skimpy tank tops. Even now, I judge him harshly—I’m definitely bigger and more cut. But Doug looks good. He’s lost the glasses and gotten rid of that Clark Kent haircut.

I don’t remember much of what he tells me as we grab a protein shake next door to the gym. Doug’s just not memorable that way. But three things stick out. He already suspected I was gay. He is too. But he has something cool that I do not. He has a hot “Daddy.”

Who is this hot Daddy who has chosen Doug and given him all this new confidence? I need to know. Doug may have glowed up a little bit, but he’s still awkward and has that high-pitched, nasal giggle. I’m still better looking, more confident, and definitely now more muscular than he is. I’m a cool gay guy who deserves to be admired like Doug.

I’m not sure why it occurs to me to look into getting a Daddy. It’s not like I don’t have everything a 30-year-old gay man needs or thinks that the does. A red convertible BMW, a waterfront condo, and an expensive personal trainer. Even flat abs, thanks to liposuction. But I want one. By the mid ‘90s, the internet is just now becoming a market where you can find anything you need. Pretty soon, I find there are multiple models of Daddies: There are older “Silver Daddies,” generous “Sugar Daddies,” relationship “Dominants,” hairy “Bears,” 100% “bedroom Tops,” and psychological demanding “Sirs” to start. I can have them in any color, size, or even age, though almost all of them are generally 10 to 30 years older than me. But I’m not quite sure what specific need one will fulfill in me. For now, I just have a nagging sense at the back of my brain and an inexplicable tingle much lower. A Daddy seems to be just what I need.

And apparently, these older gay men need me, too. That’s what they tell me in online chat rooms. Masculine Acting Gay Man Looking for Feminine Acting or Appearing Younger Gay Man. But they use shorthand: MascDad4FemSon.

I decode other online screen names that double as personal ads. DomDad4Sub. Sir4Boy. Bear4Cub. The combinations are dizzying, and the longer I hunt and peck on the keyboard, the more I crave one of these men in my life who will give me something I think I’m missing. I settle on one that intrigues me: DiscplGuy. As I click past his AOL screen name and into his profile, what I see excites and scares me. He’s looking for a “good boy” who needs tough love, strong direction, and a firm hand in his life. Less than 12 hours later, I stand at military attention in his apartment, waiting for his inspection and his “fatherly” discipline. He drills this into my head. He is strong, I am weak. He is confident. Unlike me, he claims. He’s in charge now. I am not.

I call him Sir in every sentence and go through a series of manly training drills. Pushups, squats, jumping jacks, sit-ups. Flexing my muscles and posing. And when I disappoint, there is his hand and his belt to show his tough love for me. I work hard to impress, but there’s a part of me that enjoys it when I fall short. It is then that I get a direct look in the eye, a dad-like lecture, feel the sting of his disappointment, and get the fatherly hug of encouragement indicating he knows I will do better next time.

Part of me understands this is his fetish, and now it is apparently mine. Another part, though, convinces me that I am his son, his boy, and that our power exchanges will eventually make me a real man like him. That in his eyes, this insecure boy I’ve recently discovered lives within me, will now feel accepted.

Over the course of several months, our sessions deviate and become a little deviant. I’m introduced to paddles and crops. There are tests of obedience and increasingly stiff punishments when I fail. But each time, I thank Sir. After I do, I earn a reward—a squeeze on the back of my neck, a tousle of my hair, a side hug, and a “good boy.” The ritual is a reminder that I am striving for a type of masculine attention, negative and positive, that sometime is bestowed by a father on his son.

Soon I learn that other “boys” come to Sir for his care and correction. Most are gay, but a few are straight or at least curious. All are 20-30 years younger than him and are drawn to his tall, lean frame, slightly graying hair, piercing blue eyes, and military-like bearing. I suppose for some, the attraction is purely sexual. For other boys like me, the physical and psychological are conflated and confused. Whether we have good fathers, failing fathers, or none at all, we believe he is teaching us to be a man. His lesson is that although we never quite measure up, we still have his “love.”

After about a year, “Sir” and I drift apart. I move to New York City, where for a little while, I try out a few other Daddies. One is a muscular dominant, and a few are just plain old, older guys. Their motivation ranges from a desire for sexual dominance to a willingness to role-play in return for a few hours of companionship. It occurs to me that these power exchanges are not truly unequal. In unguarded moments, they admit their “boys” give them the affection, intimacy, and masculine validation that they cannot find from men their own age. None of them has the same emotional or psychological hold on me as “Sir.” Like a crush, he is irreplaceable in my mind.

But every boy has to grow up. If we’re lucky, they find a partner, marry and have children of our own. We are no longer cool. And as fathers, there are many moments when we lack confidence or feel weak. The form-fitting T-shirts that once revealed our muscles are replaced by sweatshirts that hide dad bods. Our kids make fun of our jokes and laugh, and younger guys—gay and straight—think we’re weird. We come to realize in time, there is no one model for masculinity and that any love, affirmation or validation that we missed out on from our dads or college friends, or even straight men, we need to find within ourselves.

But we also understand that men of any age will still always need reassurance from one another that we’re good men That is why almost 25 years later and 1,000 miles away, Sir spots me across the internet and sees me flexing about my writing and career on LinkedIn. I remember him at once. And his words stir familiar feelings.

He writes simply: good job, boy.

Steve Majors’ latest memoir in essays is Man Made: In Search of Dads, Daddies, Father Figures, and Fatherhood.

Age 10, a few more poems scattered about, based on the recommendation of an English teacher. Junior high and a few more written in diaries and never finished. Nothing real until freshman year, with another class project and another encouraging English teacher. None of this was exceptional or original, especially not the poetry, until I was 15 and I became, shamefully and undeniably, obsessed with a boy who told me “he would never date a redhead,” in what I now recognize was the politest way he could think to say no.

Three years full of poems followed that “no,” along with hundreds of phone calls, nights spent consoling him after an ill-fated football game (he was the kicker, and I thought that was a sign that he was special), and lies told to his friends and parents about my involvement in his life. It was not until the most volatile time in a high schooler’s life (senior prom and graduation season), that I was able to open my eyes, and yet it still took months to pry my mind away from him.

It would not be until a few months later that I met my partner, Kris, and discovered poetry was meant to be something else entirely. Writing from what can only be called “desperation,” I discovered the joy of writing from mutuality. My favorite word in this age of dating rules and self-involved designs.

For my creative writing practicum in undergrad, I wrote a chapbook called Loam: the ideal soil type for fruiting plants, which I thought was a rather funny title for a queer love letter proudly displayed on the shelf of a homophobic institution. Openly dedicated to Kris, I wrote 15 poems about the ways in which our relationship, and our sex life, resembled the garden, the gardener, and the very soil itself. And later, as the school’s literary magazine editor, I helped more thinly veiled queer and/or erotic poetry slip through the cracks and onto the page.

When I met Jerry at the AWP conference in Baltimore this past March—and walked among the hundreds of queer journals present—I realized that my poetry really does have places to grow in the light, not hidden in plant metaphors, however beautiful they might be.

The Queer Love Project, in its openness, its range, its adaptability, seemed like a beautiful—and safe—place to invite poets to grow. The first essay I read was “Why ‘Heated Rivalry’ Reheated My Own Sapphic Love Story,” demonstrating the open conversation between and within the community that I have been looking for. Bouncing from one conservative community to the next by way of my academic journey, I have been searching, too, for a queer community that does not fall into the trap of old-fashioned thought by building borders and rules around our lives.

As a woman who has written about the uncomfortability of straight women writing over and over again about queer men, I have long wondered if I am just as “bad”—especially since I still choose not to tell people that Call Me By Your Name is my favorite novel, and one of the main assists to my coming out. But in the essay, a queer woman recalls her hot-and-heavy, and deeply emotional, times with her partner after watching Heated Rivalry (which clearly has no present concerns for a sapphic plot-line) and so did I!

Jerry invited me to be the Queer Love Project’s poetry editor, and I would like to open up the new poetry section of QLP to embrace the “wrong” way of doing things, the questionable, and the confusing, and not fret over current concerns about how to “correctly” be a lesbian, or a transmasc person, or what have you.

We are not building queer lives to be stifled by rule following; we are queer because we don’t follow the rules, and we deserve to grow in our queer lives. Watching my partner transition little by little as they have discovered themselves, over the last five years, has taught me that more than anything. And fearing for their acceptance in all communities has taught the importance of true queer community.

Poetry, like a body, is not to be policed. Poetry is to question, to work through, to strive to understand or make peace with the fact that you can’t. On any given day, I will refer to myself as a lesbian, as a sapphic woman, as a queer person. And on any given day, I will write a poem about my partner’s thighs or the chunk of hair that always falls over their right eye, or about that guy, who I still wonder what it would’ve been like to have sex with. I hope others will share their poetry, no matter who or what they are writing about, as long as this writing helps them grow.

I’ve been on the other side of the submission portal for a few years, and I haven’t written in a long time, so this will be an opportunity for all of us to return to poetry. As a show of good faith, here are two of my older works to purvey. Let me know what you think in the comments. I look forward to reading your work as well. Email us at to queerloveprojectsub@gmail.com

Paris

In spite of my assumed levity,
I do not live in a soft-edged state of ignorance,
Fastened in the black between the stars and moon,
Where I believe that the river is bluer
Than the sky or that I don’t desire
The sun to function healthfully.

I know I persist in such dishonour that the gods
Detail my baseness in salons and garden parties 
And I receive from them no encouragement
To address or call on them when in town,
Where the streets signs turn inside out
To avoid my soiled gaze. 

Put not your trust in princesses,
(Whose lusts I pickpocketed with two fingers)
Who attempt redundant reconciliation
After we, running asunder, assume different devotions. 
For this life must have cost me, 
And her, 
The price of many a dead dove.

Medical Miracle

Then, you gallop but your hands have no motion
Because paralysis is a villain,
Peeling life—poor, droning mother
—ajar, ruining routine syndromes,
Calling flu to pass into truck-tripped venison.

Pain excites more cycles,
Lumps burn, noses gush,
Rank symptoms sugar your hands.

Is cerebral-choking our King’s Curse?
He names us vital—dubs us death.
Angels never do surprise 
But Vandals colonize King’s periscopes.
Killing or dying, the saints stay still.

Now, on Sundays, I tape raspberries to you,
Summoning summer renewal
As both creatinine and creator have failed us.

Is this freedom or destination?

For each monthly poetry drop, we are aiming for 5-10 poems.

We are interested in work that focuses on questions, confusion, discovery, and revelry in your queer identity, whether that be in your professional, personal, or sexual lives; celebrates growth, even if that growth is hard-won, messy, or difficult to reckon with; delves into the sexual, the erotic, the desired, the desiring, and the pleasurable; examines hurt, pain, grief, and (hopefully) the ways you can work with and through that pain; applauds and finds queer beauty, even and especially in not-so-beautiful places.

All topics are welcome as long as all animosity and hate speech are left at the submission door. If your work includes hate speech that you encountered that you feel is necessary to tell your story, we will review and discuss.

We will consider themes and parameters with time, but at present, we would simply like to see poetry that revels in its own queer glory.

Length and parameters: Send up to three poems, no more than 30 lines each.

We are welcoming poetry in all forms, but be aware that the more complicated the line breaks and original spacing, the harder it will be to replicate on a prose-based platform like Substack, though they have some poetry features.

• Format: Please share all files as PDFs. If you have artwork that accompanies pieces, please send those along as well, with clear notes and descriptions. By submitting, you recognize that all poems are subject to suggestions and edits that will be discussed and finalized with your, the poet’s, consent before publication.

• Original work and first serial rights: The Queer Love Project will have exclusive rights to the piece for two years if accepted. You can publish elsewhere as long as you link to the original piece published on QueerLoveProject.substack.com.

• Excerpts and previously published work: We do publish original work that is excerpted from chapbooks, zines, books, and anthologies and will provide pre-order links and other citations to the originals if requested.

• Do you provide edits? Yes, expect to work with an editor in a collaborative way. We often give top edits (general constructive ideas) as well as line edits and copy edits to help you get your piece in shape for publishing. We see it as a generative process, and we hope you will too! That said, send us your best draft, but don’t stop yourself from submitting if you are a new or emerging writer who still needs support. We have published many first-time writers and love doing so!

• When to expect a reply: We hope to reply within 5 days from first submission. Do not follow up before that time. We hope to offer feedback and edits for your essay. If you haven’t heard back within 7 days, please feel free to reply to your original email so that it is threaded with your original pitch email.

• Email us at queerloveprojectsub@gmail.com

• You must be a subscriber to pitch! (It’s free, so go ahead and click that button if you haven’t already.)

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We do not publish any content that was written by or with the assistance of generative AI.

I’ve been involved in health and human services, lobbying, and journalism, editing and literary pursuits, having been published in more than 100 publications, including The Village Voice, Gay & Lesbian Review, Raw Story, ABC.com, Huffington Post, POZ magazine, LA Weekly.

My book, Passionate Outlier: Gay Writers and Allies on Their Work (Rebel Satori Press) has done well and been reviewed favorably nationwide. I founded Central Voice, a bimonthly LGBTQ newspaper that published from 2003-2021. My home city, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, named me a Living Legacy in 2010.

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What is your age, where in the world do you primarily live, where did you grow up?
I’m 74 and grew up in the Anthracite Coal Region of Pennsylvania. Two streets, two alleys, coal breakers—that was the whole show.

How do you define yourself on the LGBTQ+ spectrum?
I’m a cis-gender, white male.

What is your relationship status?
My partner is my rock, my foundation. And our Shiatzu Sherlock is the best. Why Sherlock? We love everything Sherlock Holmes.

Do you have an “ideal” relationship status?
The one I have now.

What is the biggest misconception about being single or in a relationship?
We tend to think of single people as always lonely or abandoned. Some people aspire to be single. With relationships, we mistakenly think one person will satisfy all our needs. That’s not the way it worked for me. In my book, Edmund White, Felice Picano, Andrew Holleran, and others discuss queer relationships in their many manifestations over the years as we carved out basic civil rights that are now under serious attack.

When was your first intimate moment (holding hands, kiss, etc.)? Was it with someone you liked? Did you feel pressured into it?
High school was a time of joys, sorrows, the works. But isn’t the high school experience that way for all of us no matter who we love? I had crushes, received a clandestine passing of a note from a school mate who heard I “may have the same problem.”

Please realize there wasn’t always safe space out there. GSAs didn’t always exist. There weren’t always faculty members, queer or straight, willing to take the heat for being supportive. Those of you who experience safe space now are enjoying the work of those who came before you. I don’t point that out to make you feel bad. I mention it so you know it wasn’t always there. Please keep it alive as we all age.

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How would you define love? Is it the thing you work at for a long period of time? Or is it the strong feeling you feel for someone right from the beginning for no reason?
Love to me is knowing the person you’re with is the one you want to spend all your time with no matter the circumstances: on a holiday, and ordinary day, any day. You don’t have to rescue yourself from the one you love. They accept you with all your foibles. And you accept them as they are.

When did you come out to family, friends and others for the first time?
Coming out is not a one-and-done experience. There’s coming out to your mom, or your dad (or both), and siblings—but maybe not all of them at once or at all. All these “coming outs” do not occur at once or in a scheduled sequence of events. It’s a process. And then you leave home and there will be bosses, co-workers, and your neighbors. Eventually, it all calms down but think about it as a longer-term rather than shorter-term endeavor.

Did you have any LGBTQ+ role models as a child or teenager? What do you remember about images of same-gender or queer relationships or messages you gleaned?
I had no role models growing up. I’m old enough to have looked up “homosexuality” in the dictionary. As a child, I knew I didn’t exactly fit the model.

Are there any pivotal pop culture moments that you credit for teaching about love and/or relationships?
I was 18 years old in 1969 and already navigating a world that wasn’t built for me. Born in 1951, I came of age in 1969, the same year as the Stonewall Rebellion and Woodstock. They were moments that reshaped American culture and queer life alike. Across the country, I and young people on college campus, cities, everywhere protested the Vietnam War, questioned authority, and pushed for greater personal autonomy.

The introduction of the pill and landmark Supreme Court decisions on birth control further expanded conversations about freedom, choice, and bodily sovereignty. It was a big stew of personal autonomy and boiling-over political issues that still resonate today. Those times taught me how to push forward in a world that didn’t make space for people like me. Or you. Each generation fights its own battles. My generation suffered, then helped secure protections. Now younger queers are fighting to hold them—or to restore them.

Do you have a Chosen Family?
In addition to my immediate biological family, my chosen family includes long-time friends, a cousin, and neighbors. Our dining room table and summer deck have been the gathering space for holidays and special occasions for year.

What is your relationship with your biological family (if any)?
I have a wonderful relationship with my biological family forged by always quietly being myself. It’s important to remember that just because we’re queer we’re not special. Like you expect others to calmly listen to all your whys and wherefores, provide that same courtesy to all others, to elders straight or gay.

What do you (did you) like about dating as a LGBTQ person? What do/did you dislike?
Moving forward from Stonewall in 1969, men, especially men, made gay liberation all about sexual liberation, and only about sex. That did not serve us well. And, yes, I am a Sex Positive individual. Again, my book addresses this theme in many of the interviews.

As a result of the AIDS crisis, I launched Positive Opportunities, a nonprofit providing employment counseling and job training for HIV-positive individuals. At a time when stigma frequently barred access to stable work, the program helped countless people reclaim dignity and financial independence.

Historically, my HIV journey took me everywhere. In 2004, I joined 85 HIV-positive individuals who posed nude at bistro Florent for photographer Spencer Tunick’s Positively Naked, commemorating POZ magazine’s 10th anniversary. Restaurateur Florent Morellet posted his own CD4 cell count on the specials board. In 2001, I produced Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart in his home region, where the two discussed Kramer’s political awakening and the founding of ACT UP. I’ve lived with HIV myself most of my adult life.

Has race, ethnicity or cultural differences been a factor in who you seek out?
Race, ethnicity or cultural differences have never been barriers for me. I’ve worked with migrant workers, in local and state jails and prisons. It’s a big world, and I’ve been lucky to crisscross with much of its humanity.

What’s the most surprising thing you have learned about relationships from your perspective?
That indeed love is love and it manifests itself in so many wonderful ways.

Have you experienced heartbreak?
Of course, the person says they didn’t is lying. It’s part of life in love affairs, work, and friends.

Do you have any moments of joy, happiness or pleasure that you can share about being in a same-gender or queer relationship?
The holidays when biological and chosen family are smiling, laughing, loving!

Are there any things that standard heterosexual relationships have that you feel are out of reach or that you wish you had or could achieve?
I do wish the planet was over “queer” already. Just get used to us already. Then sit down and shut up.

Have you ever been in a polyamorous relationship or would you like to be in a situation that doesn’t involve just two people?
No. And no.

Any good/bad advice you received from a friend or queer elder?
Relax. Breathe. Accept your imperfections and those of others. We’re all a challenge sometimes. The world is never perfect, and neither are we. But if you contribute what you can, support others when they need it, and strive to be self-actualized, there’s a sense of purpose and possibility.

Any advice you’d give to someone younger than you who thinks it’s impossible to find love?
Do “you” the best you can.

BONUS:

We all need more inspiration. Recommend something that influenced or helped shape you significantly that you’d recommend to someone else.

Book: A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White

TV Show: My Three Sons

Movie: The Pope of Greenwich Village

Song: “Disco Inferno” by The Trammps

Play, Musical, Other Cultural artifact: The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me by David Drake

Email us at queerloveprojectsub@gmail.com to take “The QLP Questionnaire.”
Plus, find out how to submit your original personal essay to The Queer Love Project.

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We pay our contributors, so your subscription and support is valuable! Thanks for reading.

I was barely 11 years old when I came home from school one June afternoon and discovered that my father had done the unimaginable. Dad, the same man who had been driving the same car for over 30 years, who insisted that all leftovers had a three-week lifespan, and who still wore the same brown suit he wore to his wedding in 1975, had betrayed his legacy of frugality and surprised our family by splurging on digital cable.

This wasn’t my father’s attempt at keeping up with the Joneses. He couldn’t have cared less about how he compared to his neighbors. What my father did care about was baseball and basketball. With digital cable, our decades-old TV in the living room went from offering 30 channels to something like 900, allowing my father to watch all the sports things, all weekend long.

I was not as enthralled by the bulky black box that now crowned our TV. Though my parents had named me after Steve Carlton, a pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies, I was less interested in playing and watching sports things than I was in playing the piano and filling notebooks with Happy Days and The Nanny crossover fan fiction.

Still, I was a blossoming 11-year-old homosexual in suburban New Jersey, and I soon learned that the bulky black box was going to get me through that seven-year journey from small-town misery toward queer glory.

Shortly before that summer began, I found out that I was maybe a little weird, and that being weird might not be something to aspire to. I had convinced my fifth-grade teacher that we needed to do something for Passover, despite the fact that most of my classmates came from Irish and Italian Catholic families, and I was...not Jewish either. Nevertheless, I organized a magnificent, nearly authentic mid-afternoon Passover meal. We ate matzo with grape jelly while watching The Devil’s Arithmetic, a made-for-TV “historical fantasy” movie starring Kirsten Dunst and Brittany Murphy, in which Kirsten Dunst’s character faints at a seder and wakes up in a Nazi concentration camp. (OK, perhaps it wasn’t the most appropriate film for the occasion.) I was in my element, sharing something I was really interested in with my classmates, when Kyle, a boy I thought was my best friend, whispered in my ear, “You know no one likes you, right?” Well, if I hadn’t known it before, Kyle, I definitely knew it then!

Kyle had opened my eyes. Before that day, I never thought about the clothes I wore, whether or not my cowlick was under control, or if the things I loved were the things other 11-year-old boys loved. From that point on, I could only see myself as Kyle, and apparently everyone else, saw me: all the deficiencies, mutations, and peculiarities that marked me as different. And now I knew that the things I loved and the way I acted made me different, that different meant weird—and that weird was not something that people liked.

I spent most of that summer at home, seeking comfort in whatever the bulky black box had to offer. I wasn’t practicing the piano anymore and normal boys didn’t have crushes on Arthur Fonzarelli or fantasies of working in a bridal shop in Flushing, Queens, so TV now became my only hobby and my best friend. I watched MTV2 a lot, numbing myself by watching the same music videos over and over again. Soon I ventured further into the vaults of digital cable and discovered Channel 305, HBO Comedy.

There must’ve been a wise gay man in charge of programming over at HBO Comedy, because in addition to the fabulous and campy gay classics playing during the daytime, like The Bird Cage, Heathers and John Waters’ Hairspray, the late-night programming was dedicated to comedy specials featuring gay, lesbian, and straight women comedians. This was way before RuPaul’s Drag Race was mainstream, good old American entertainment. HBO Comedy was the only place where I could see reflections of myself that weren’t caricatures, tragic figures, or the butts of jokes. During that summer, when I needed them the most, comedians like Bob Smith, Eddie Sarfaty, Alec Mapa, Wanda Sykes, Wendy Liebman, Judy Gold, AND Judy Tenuta paraded into my life and pushed me onto the splendidly weird path back to myself.

Every week, I lived for Saturday nights when my parents would go out bowling. I’d turn on HBO Comedy, and hope for something gay, or at least gay adjacent. There were usually several, back-to-back half-hour specials with someone like Eddie Sarfaty, who told quick-witted, sometimes silly jokes like, “My father and my boyfriend have the same name: Daddy!,” which I didn’t really get at the time, but I was transfixed by his barrel chest, olive skin, and, his easy humor full of allusions to a gay culture I was just beginning to understand. While watching Eddie, Alec Mapa, and Bob Smith, over and over again for the next decade, I took detailed mental notes about trips to Provincetown, summers on Fire Island, and bands of gay gal pals trading quips and Bette Davis impressions. I watched both of Ellen DeGeneres’s hour-long specials more times than I can remember, but the women comics that spoke to me the most were a little kookier, like Judy Tenuta, the accordion-playing, toga-wearing petite flower love goddess who wanted to convert you to her religion, JUDY-ism, or Wendy Liebman, a neurotic bundle-of-self-deprecation who once found $20 in her bra...in quarters.

Bob, Eddie, Alec, Judy, and Wendy all dared to be themselves. By some mysterious alchemy I was desperate to learn, they took the parts of themselves that spilled over the edges of the box. Too loud! Too flamboyant! Too weird! And turned them into laughter. They looked at themselves through the eyes of others, and they embraced the anomalies they saw, and then they laughed with themselves. On these Saturday nights spent in my living room, they taught me that there was a priceless value in being a little different, a little weird, and a lotta gay.

Of all these comedians, the one who made an indelible imprint on me was Bob Smith. Born in Buffalo, Bob spoke in a charming, down-home Upstate lilt, with flat, stretched vowels, and a dry humor that made everyday banalities, like arguing with his partner about whose turn it was to clean the pasta twirler, delightfully funny. Bob was a pioneer among openly gay male comics, beginning his career in the mid-80s when straight male comics still dominated the scene and peppered their punchlines with the “f” word. This was also the middle of the AIDS crisis, when the gay community didn’t have much reason to laugh, but fought tragedy with humor anyway. Bob’s routines weren’t aggressively political, but they were political in how he showed, through comedy, that the daily struggles of gay men weren’t all that different from the daily struggles of straight men and women. They were just a little more fabulous.

In 1994, Bob performed on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and became the first openly gay man to perform on a late night talk show. He opened with his coming out story. You can hear the audience gasp when he says the word “gay” as a matter-of-fact proclamation of identity, not as an insult. But from the beginning of his five-minute set, Bob already has the audience laughing with him, as if they too had come out to their parents at Thanksgiving.

Throughout the ‘90s and into the 2000s, Bob was a leading figure in the world of gay comedy, performing at the inaugural We’re Funny That Way gay comedy festival in Toronto, filming his HBO Comedy and Logo specials, touring with the all-gay comedy troupe he founded, writing for MadTV and the Big Gay Sketch Show, as well as publishing three books of essays that tell his story as a son, a brother, a comedian, a husband, and later as a father in the same self-deprecating humor and laugh with me warmth with which he performed his stand-up routines.

Bob came into my life again eight years after he had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease, which he turned into a joke, saying “But I don’t even like baseball!” By the time Bob and I started talking through Facebook Messenger in 2015, Bob was rapidly losing his ability to walk and speak. In our conversations, he encouraged me to read more gay literature, something I had never committed to before, and I devoured the entire Tales of the City series as fast as I could.

He sent me copies of two of his novels, both of them loosely, fantastically autobiographical: Remembrance of Things I Forgot, about a middle-aged gay man who travels back in time to stop his sister from committing suicide, and Selfish & Perverse, in which a low-level TV writer trades L.A. for rural Alaska, has an affair with a closeted movie star, and learns how to fish for salmon.

Selfish & Perverse inspired me to quit my dead-end, part-time admin job and in September of that year, I left the country for the first time ever to spend two months writing in the Republic of Georgia. I would send Bob the essays that I wrote every day in the ex-pat café on Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue, and he would read them and write back with words of encouragement. I was once again more than a little lost, having banished myself to a country where I could just barely decipher the alphabet to feel out if I could be a writer and Bob was there, as he had been before, reading my work and telling me, “You can do this! You’re a writer!”

Bob and I never met in person. A few months after I returned from Georgia and flung myself into freelancing, Bob was hospitalized. A year or so later, he released his final book, Treehab, which he had written on his iPad using his one remaining functioning hand. But my message of congratulations to him went unread. On January 20, 2018, Bob died, and his Facebook wall—which had been silent for so long—was flooded with memories from his family, his friends, and countless fans, like me, whom he had touched with his humor and selfless need to give and support.

Sometimes the 11-year-old boy that no one liked escapes from his cell in the back of my head and pays me an uninvited visit. He sits in the space behind my eyes and takes inventory. The octopus ring on my left hand, the portrait of Anna Akhmatova hanging on my neck, the Ukrainian shawl draped deliciously over my narrow shoulder blades. These are some of the weird amulets I’ve collected over the decades, the things that mark me as different, something that still frightens the little boy into hiding. Then I remember the things I learned on my Saturday nights, alone but not lonely. I think of Eddie, Alec, Judy, and Wendy, and I think of Bob, and everything he taught me through his humor and his brief friendship at moments when I desperately needed them.

I blink, and the little boy and his judging eyes recedes into darkness. I look at myself again, twist my ring, toss my shawl over my shoulders, and then I laugh with myself.

Last year, we published an essay by Katrina titled “I Was Gay, and He Was Understanding,” which is a companion to her memoir. It starts with the line: “In my 46th year on this planet, I found out I was gay.”

She’s now 56 and is living in Lexington, Kentucky, so we jumped into what it meant to have this beautiful story out in the world for others to engage with at this point in her life (and during this complex political moment in the United States).

As a mother of four, Katrina faced the gut-wrenching task of balancing personal liberation with family upheaval. As she writes in Hurricane Lessons:

At first, Katrina’s ex-husband, who knew she was attracted to other women, suggested an open marriage as a compromise. This strategy failed. Katrina deftly relays how differing expectations of "freedom" exposed deeper power dynamics and underlying control issues within their relationship.

When she was helping her husband fill out his Tinder profile, she said, “The Catholic girl in me was screaming, ‘What are you doing?’” She ended up meeting women and men on the apps as well—something that is difficult for everyone, but especially in midlife.

Katrina said the most difficult thing she ever did in her life was coming out as gay to her kids. (You can hear her explain that at the 16:50 mark.) She said her children haven’t read the memoir (as far as she knows), but they all have a good relationship at this point. Although she did point out that her “catalyst” was her daughter’s friend’s mom and that made things rocky between Katrina and her daughter for a time.

I was curious if she had any advice for others who may find themselves in a similar situation, whether that’s a mixed-orientation marriage or someone navigating the decision to open their relationship to other physical or emotional possibilities. Especially since, as she emphasizes in her memoir, the first real betrayal in a late-in-life coming-out story is actually the "betrayal of self."

“My former husband used to say to me, during our divorce, ‘You’ve built your entire life on lies.’ And I never agreed with that,” Katrina explained. “Because I never truly understood who I was. And it does feel like a betrayal to my self. I obviously don’t want to go back—because I have these four wonderful kids, and I wouldn’t have gotten them without living the life that I did—but I did betray myself in a way by not knowing who I was better. Or not delving deeper. Or not agreeing to acquiesce all the time. I just became who everyone else wanted me to be.”

We also spoke about Robert Fisher’s book, The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden, because Katrina cited him in her memoir because he writes about how Sanskrit has 96 words for love, ancient Persian has eight, Greek has three, and English has only one. As Katrina writes:

“He surmises that the reason we have only one word for love is because we don’t give that realm of feeling enough importance.

“Ninety-six words for love. Love for significant others. Love for friends. Love for sexual partners. Love for children. Love for ideology. Love for animals. Love for the land. For food. For air. For the salty sea. For the wind in our hair. So many kinds of love. So much love. But the ones that describe that essential human relationship—be it man/woman, man/man, woman/woman, or any other genders—those become blurry for me. And not indistinguishably blurry. I have female friends I’m not one bit attracted to physically. But when all those attractions converge?”

So I asked Katrina that rhetorical one she poses in the book: “When spirituality, intellect, and skin collide, how do you distinguish in love from love?”

“You’re not allowed to ask me that,” Katrina said. “That’s rhetorical!”

You’ll want to hit play and listen/watch to find out how she explained it (that’s around the 26:25 minute mark).

The memoir also highlights extreme domestic retaliation, including gaslighting, threats, and an involuntary psychiatric commitment, which we discussed. As she explained, there’s not a lot of great advice out there for people who may be navigating similar situations, so she wanted to publish this memoir.

“Make sure you understand your finances,” Katrina advised. “And make sure you have control over those things. … And I had so much guilt that I didn’t fight for anything. Looking back, I think there’s a lot of things I could have done to secure my own future better. … Of course there’s gonna be guilt, but it’s important to stay true to yourself.”

Hurricane Lessons is a harrowing read at points, especially to witness how Katrina’s community and institutions weaponized her mental health crisis against her queer awakening—but I hope you’ll read or listen and find out how she survived to share her story with us and offer a roadmap for others.

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Justin Elizabeth Sayre is an award-winning playwright and performer who Michael Musto called, “Oscar Wilde meets Whoopi Goldberg.” A fixture of downtown cabaret, Sayre is the writer and creator of The Meeting of the International Order of Sodomites (Bistro Award winner and two MAC nominations), New York’s longest-running LGBTQ variety show.

As a playwright, Sayre’s work has appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Wild Project, Celebration Theatre, Dynasty Typewriter, and La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Sayre most recently became director/mentor of La MaMa’s Experiments in Playwriting Fellowship.

Sayre has written a series of YA novels—Husky, Pretty, and Mean—released by Penguin Books, and From Gay to Z: A Compendium of Queer Culture from Chronicle Books. Sayre has written for television, working with Michael Patrick King on his hit CBS comedy 2 Broke Girls and Fox’s The Cool Kids. Sayre also appeared on HBO’s The Comeback with Lisa Kudrow. They are an NYCLU artist ambassador and a 2023 MacDowell Fellow. You can follow Justin at:

Next up: The 14th annual Night of a Thousand Judys—the Pride concert to benefit The Ali Forney Center written and hosted by Justin Elizabeth Sayre—will be performed at Joe’s Pub on Monday, June 1.

Anyone who cannot attend the event can still donate to The Ali Forney Center HERE.

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What is your age, where in the world do you primarily live, where did you grow up?
Oh, honey, at this point you’re going to have to cut me open and count the rings. A lady never tells, but spiritually I identify as a “40-year-old woman,” someone who knows who they are and finally has the tools to make it happen. That’s more accurate than a number. I split my time between New York and London, so I guess I’m bi-continental, if that’s a thing. And I grew up in a little town in Northeastern Pennsylvania called Forty-Fort, yes, Forty-Fort. It was named after a massacre, and that’s how I felt about it.

How do you define yourself on the LGBTQ+ spectrum?
I always say gay, but I guess that’s not entirely accurate. I’m Queer, Non-Binary. I use They/Them Pronouns. Sexually, I think I’m somewhat pansexual. Spiritually, I feel like Carol Channing at The White Party. I could be there, but should I?

What is your relationship status?
I am married. I got married last year to my beautiful, brilliant, talented partner Mari Berner-Moriarty; she’s even listed that way in my phone. We’ve been together for three-and-a-half years, and married for one.

Do you have an “ideal” relationship status?
I very much like being married. I never thought I would be, so it’s a shock, but I love the challenges and the joys of being with someone I love and watching us both grow.

What is the biggest misconception about being single or in a relationship?
About being single, I think there’s a misconception about how deeply you have relationships with friends and soul mates. I have people in my life who are soul-deep loves, who I’ve never been intimate with or dated. Those relationships are often trivialised in our world because there’s such an emphasis on marriage and romantic partnership. I think the biggest misconception about being in a relationship is that you’re done or you’re settled. That’s always the ending of the movie, you know, the big wedding. Hooray, story over, when in truth that’s just the beginning. That’s the demarcation point. From there, you face a whole host of challenges and trials, but also a great deal of gifts and unexpected joys. It’s a rollercoaster still, and you’re always finding yourself in it, all the new versions of yourself and all the new versions of your partner.

When was your first intimate moment? Was it with someone you liked? Did you feel pressured into it?
My first kiss was with Jill Rosenthal in the second grade. She’s a lesbian now, so I guess we were figuring each other out, even then. Boys came into my life later, and at least, at first, in a negative way. I think, like a lot of people who experience trauma early on, especially sexually, you repeat a pattern of denial or cruelty, because it’s what you know. I think it took a long time to kiss a boy, or even have sex with a boy, that felt like a celebration. That probably happened after college.

How would you define love? Is it the thing you work at for a long period of time? Or is it the strong feeling you feel for someone right from the beginning for no reason? Love is an act of all-consuming grace; it is reckoning with sorrow and choosing joy; it is finding anger and responding with patience, it is an act of giving when you don’t know how to receive and receiving when giving feels like a trial; it is a continual opening of the heart, regardless of what secret pains and hurts you will find there, with the hope that the exposure to light will in some way make them heal. It is a wonder of the world, something like electricity or light in a way, a force and an energy, a pull and a push toward and outside yourself. It’s a feeling and an action. It’s something I obviously think about a lot.

Does the relationship fill your deepest needs for closeness with a person? Or do you prefer not to share every part of yourself?
I think to be in the kind of relationship I want, the one I very fortunately have, I have to share all parts of myself. I want that deep sense of intimacy. But I’ve also had that, and have that in friendships. I like to go there. Life is too short and too fragile not to be known. I also think of a quote from Tennessee Williams, “If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels too.”

I make a lot of mistakes, I can be brash, moody, and harsh. I can also be honest, supportive, and thoughtful. They’re both part of similar impulses, so it’s often about balance. People who love me see both, accept both, and rightfully tell me when they can’t. I appreciate and am grateful for both.

When did you come out to family, friends and others for the first time?
I had a tough time coming out. I was clocked for being gay, even as a very small child. Even as a toddler. Well before I had any conception of sex at all. What they were seeing was my love for femininity, so it was very hard for me to reconcile my love for women and femininity with this foreign concept that one day I would like boys, who seemed at that time, and sometimes even now, like gross little burp and fart factories.

I also had really deep and loving relationships with women. Relationships that involved sex, so when people denied that or told me that those relationships weren’t real or important, I really balked at identifying as gay, because to me, it negated powerful parts of my life that first exposed me to love and deep respect.

In college, there was no way I could really get away from this. I tried to be bi, but no one was buying that, and then came out to friends in college, and my family a few years after. I think my non-binary identity started to shift things for me, because that felt and feels like the most accurate. I feel myself very much when it comes to gender, I’m just this person, all that this person is, and this person can have love for a lot of different people. That’s not been as dramatic a journey, but it’s been an easier and gentler acceptance for which I’m very grateful.

Did you have any LGBTQ+ role models as a child or teenager? What do you remember about images of same-gender or queer relationships or messages you gleaned?
Not really. There was a lovely gay man who lived up the street from me, who shared with me a lot of movies and books on old Hollywood. That was a supreme gift. But I was living in a small town. The first gay man I ever saw on television was dying of AIDS. I come from that generation that grew up as witnesses to a world disappearing before my eyes, who grew up searching for the shreds of it remaining. I think of us as AIDS orphans. As I grew up, those examples started to shift. I remember Ricky on My So-Called Life and Pedro on The Real World. But I don’t think I found my gay people, or my role models, certainly, until much later.

Are there any pivotal pop culture moments that you credit for teaching about love and/or relationships?
Well, Billie Holiday was the great hero of my youth. She was my emotional support, for I think as a young person, I so badly wanted to be loved. She was the artist I went to with that pain and that grief, and she released those for me. Or gave me permission to release them for myself. I don’t know, I hate feeling pandered to, so you know like, big gay moments on TV, or in film, I went to see them, but I don’t know that they informed my conception of love.

I think reading James Baldwin’s Another Country, there’s a chapter early on about two lovers that made me see a softness and an ease that I knew I wanted. I never really saw that in big gay cultural moments. Now, when they happen, in things like Heartstopper, I find myself looking for something deeper. I hope that doesn’t make me sound pretentious. I absolutely am, but I don’t want to come off that way.

Do you have a Chosen Family?
Absolutely and I’m deeply grateful for all of them. They’re a rag-tag group, but they somehow all get along.

What is your relationship with your biological family (if any)?
It’s actually quite close now. It’s been hard won, but that’s mostly because I think we didn’t want to be vulnerable with each other for a long time. I didn’t want to let them into my life as a queer person, and they didn’t want to show me just how new and different and scary that was for them. I think when we both got to a place of real honesty and forgiveness, from that a whole new acceptance and love started to grow. I’m really grateful that I’ve had the chance to get there. Not everyone does.

What do you (did you) like about dating as a LGBTQ person? What do/did you dislike?
Oh, it was hell. I mean, can we be honest about that? Absolute hell. I think a lot of it comes from dating men. We don’t teach men to nurture. We don’t teach them care, so when you’re gay, you have two men, who often don’t know how, or have had that part of them, that truly empathetic part, that soft boy caring part shamed out of them. So, my god, how does it work? Somehow it does, but it takes a lot of work. A lot of honest, deep work. It’s hell, yes, and you can’t tell me otherwise. But if you get through it, it can be an amazing gift.

Has race, ethnicity or cultural differences been a factor in who you seek out?
No, never. I’ve dated all over the map, and it’s never been a factor.

Have you had any difficulties dating or finding/keeping a relationship?
Oh yes, I mean until my partner, yes. Some of that was me. Well, probably all of that was me. I mean, I chose people who were wrong for me, often. I took one attribute or feature and made that the thesis of why we were together. Just because someone knows who Elizabeth Bishop is doesn’t mean they have the emotional maturity to understand her, if you get my meaning. (See, pretentious) But I had a tough time, because I wanted to be in a relationship quite badly, but I didn’t want to be in the wrong relationship, so the minute I knew it was wrong, I was out. I had a tough go of it, no tougher than most, but tough. I think that’s why I knew my partner was the right fit, I guess, because once I met her, I knew I never wanted to leave.

What’s the most surprising thing you have learned about relationships from your perspective?
That there’s work to them. Not necessarily hard work, but there’s investment. There’s a great deal of care that has to be a part of them. And what that care can look like is different for every relationship. There’s no one way. There’s no great answer on how to love someone or be loved by someone. We’re all making it up and hopefully making it work as we go along.

Have you experienced heartbreak?
Gurl, how long have you got? Absolutely. I don’t know that I could be an artist, creative, gay, non-binary, thinga-ma-whatsit without knowing heartbreak. But the old Scarecrow was right, that’s how you know you have a heart at all. They’re meant to break. The healing makes them stronger.

How would you term your sexual relationship with your primary partner? Has that changed over time?
We are primary partners. I think it always shifts. I learned from Patrick Duffy, yes, that Patrick Duffy, from Dallas. I was writing on a show, and he guest-starred. His wife had just died. They’d been together for a very long time, and they were very much in love. He said the key to it was to remember that sometimes you’ll be lovers and sometimes you’ll be friends, and when you’re in a lovers period, there’ll be a friends period after that, and vice versa. You wait for one, while you’re in the other. You’re patient with the one, while the other is on its way. You love throughout, but how you love or how you show it changes, and both have their purpose and their benefits.

Do you have any moments of joy, happiness or pleasure that you can share about being in a same-gender or queer relationship?
Daily. I love being queer. I love having a very queer relationship. I love that my partner is Trans/nonbinary. I love that we’re always figuring out language and roles. I love that we’re making it all up as we go along. I love that we’ve had to find our own path. That feels like an adventure. I couldn’t be happier.

Are there any things that standard heterosexual relationships have that you feel are out of reach or that you wish you had or could achieve?
Not in the slightest. In fact, I really dislike that now that I’m married, straight people feel safe around my relationship. I hate that kind of respectability politics. I think straight people have a whole history of their relationships being honoured and prized, and yet I think they still totally struggle, deeply, spiritually to make things work out. Queer people have the opportunity to do a great deal of work on themselves. If they take it, they can know themselves in a deeper and more fulfilling way.

Have you ever been in a polyamorous relationship or would you like to be in a situation that doesn’t involve just two people?
No, I don’t have the stamina. But bless those who do. You’re on a new frontier.

Are you married? Have you ever wanted to be? Whatever the response, explain why and what your hopes, dreams and journey has been like.
I am married, yes, and I’m very pleased. I like it. I like the commitment of being with one person. I’m still learning what that means, and what challenges and joys come with it, but so far, my goodness, it’s been more wonderful than I could have imagined.

Have you had a difficult time navigating the “roles” you should play in a relationship?
Yes, I think so. I think somewhere deep down, I had the idea about being the man, being the guy. A lot of that came from a sense of putting my own needs on the back burner, because I wanted to take care of someone, but being in a relationship is about caring as much as it is about being cared for. It’s something I struggle with, but I’m learning, and I’m very grateful to have a partner who is so committed to loving me.

What is your philosophy about relationships?
They’re all important, and they all matter. How you love your friends, your parents, your pets, your work, your world. All of it matters, and all of it is an opportunity to practice love. Love is an action; it’s a verb. It’s a philosophy of kindness and giving; it is an understanding of reciprocity and sharing. It’s a way of being in a world, not a destination. Not something you have. It’s something you do for yourself and others.

And since it’s a process, since it’s something you’re always doing, you’re always finding new ways to do it and new ways of finding your part in the doing of it. We’re here to connect. We’re here to be a part of the world and to be a part of people’s lives. It’s the only clear purpose that we can see. So do it. Do it well. Connect. Love. It’s the thing to do.

Any good/bad advice you received from a friend or queer elder?
So much good and some very bad. But love is a hard thing to advise on. It’s like teaching someone how to see blue. How can you ever know what they need or how they feel? I think also, there’s so much trauma that people treat as fact. The world changes. It heals, too. Don’t make your sorrow or your pain a reality. It’s just part of the story. I think the thing that I love about queer elders, and I’m very lucky to have loved so many. The ones who have taught me the most are those who still search, still look, still take the action of love with curiosity, wonder, and newness. Bitterness is passé, don’t you think?

Any advice you’d give to someone younger than you who thinks it’s impossible to find love?
At the core of it all is kindness. Be kind. To yourself and to others. That’s the root of it all. Everything else will become clear from there.

BONUS:

We all need more inspiration. Recommend something that influenced or helped shape you significantly that you’d recommend to someone else.

Books: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran; Poems by John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley; The Door by Magda Szabo; On the Road by Jack Kerouac; Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman; anything by Goethe or Emerson.

TV Shows: The Mary Tyler Moore Show; The Golden Girls; I Love Lucy; Mad Men; The Leftovers; The Good Place; Dark Shadows.

Movies: Auntie Mame; Female Trouble; The Color Purple; Being Julia.

Songs: “A Song for You” by Carmen McRae. “Ain’t No Way” by Aretha Franklin. “Gonna Take a Miracle” by Laura Nyro and LaBelle.

Play, Musical, Other Cultural artifact: A Streetcar Named Desire; King Lear; Sunday in the Park with George; Angels in America; Elaine Stritch at Liberty.

The 14th annual Night of a Thousand Judys—the Pride concert to benefit The Ali Forney Center written and hosted by Justin Elizabeth Sayre—will be performed at Joe’s Pub on Monday, June 1.

Anyone who cannot attend the event can still donate to The Ali Forney Center HERE.

Email us at queerloveprojectsub@gmail.com to take “The QLP Questionnaire.”
Plus, find out how to submit your original personal essay to The Queer Love Project.

Email Us

We pay our contributors, so your subscription and support is valuable! Thanks for reading.

My ex-husband and I are driving our toddler to swim class, sharing war stories about dating apps. When we started dating over 12 years ago, Tinder hadn’t even been born. He tells me about his policy of no talking over the apps, telling women if they wanted to get to know him, they’d have to do it in person—a tactic I think sounds serial-killerish and am not afraid to tell him.

He shrugs. “It works.”

I tell him about dinners at good Italian restaurants and daytime dates going birding in local parks. I don’t go out often, but when I do, the women are chatty. Nice. People I can be friends with.

“So, are you lesbian now, or what?” he says.

I blink, breaking as the car in front of me slows for a red light.

What the fuck, I think.

The back of the truck bed was hard and cold under my shoulders. Keith Urban or some other generic stadium county star was filtering in through the open windows of the cab. The lake was a dark, silent pit beyond us.

To my left, the girl I loved was under a blanket with the boy she loved.

Above, the stars winked slowly, aided by the cherry vodka sitting heavy in my stomach. First time drinking, check. It made everything feel sticky and more dramatic.

“Wanna make out?”

I tipped my chin up to look at the boy seated in the corner of the truck bed, water bottle of booze between his fingertips. He was carefully not looking at the blanket or its occupants, but his mouth was slouched. Sad. I’d wondered if he was in love with the boy under that blanket, and I felt like it kind of confirmed my suspicions.

“Sure,” I said.

Two queer teens kissing each other, trying to ignore the fact that the people they really wanted to kiss were kissing other people. Small town rite of passage.

“I was, like, really drunk,” she said. Loudly. For the fourth time.

I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to say. Sure, we’d indulged in a Tuesday evening box wine, but we hadn’t partied like we did at the frats on Saturdays. It wasn’t even the first time we’d kissed like that.

“Want to watch a movie or something?” I decided on.

“Sure!” She pulled back the comforter on my bed and slid in with the ease of familiarity. “Your bed is so much more comfortable than mine, oh my God.”

For a moment, I felt awkward. It was my dorm room, my 10,000 pillows and posters and stuffed animals, but now I wondered if I should stick to the rigid stiffness of my desk chair.

She raised her eyebrows at me and wiggled so there was a little more room under the blanket. “Are you coming?”

I still wasn’t sure what the rules were, and I didn’t know how to ask. But this something was better than nothing.

“Anyway, it’s called asexuality, I guess,” I finished lamely.

We were an hour into our trip to the beach, my engagement ring heavy on my finger. I stank of nervous sweat, all my Tumbr research coming out fragmented and stumbling.

He nodded and put the car in park in front of a gas station.

“I think I’m asexual,” I said. To be clear.

“I know,” he said. “Do you want a snack or is this just a bathroom break?”

“You—wait. You know.”

“Yeah,” he said. He turned and looked at me fully, his expression calm. “I googled this, like, years ago. Maybe a year after we started dating.”

“And you didn’t tell me?” I felt hot and clammy all at once. This was not at all how I thought this conversation would go.

“Kind of felt like something you needed to figure out for yourself.” The corners of his mouth tensed a bit, like he was bracing. “And it doesn’t change anything between us, right?”

“Right. Not for me, anyway,” I said.

“Not for me either.”

He leaned over and kissed me before grinning. “And I was there in college, remember? We kissed the same fucking girl.”

“I’ve never needed anyone to complete me,” I said into the microphone, trying to keep my voice steady. “But I’ve found someone who accepts me completely.”

He grinned, his eyes bright.

I got through the rest of my vows, only breaking once to wipe my face. The pastor wrapped things up. We kissed.

The guests went wild.

Seven years later, we walked through Gettysburg, the same place we had our honeymoon, discussing the end of our marriage.

“So that’s it, then?” he asked.

“We should end it before we hate each other and can’t work together.”

At least until she’s in college, I didn’t say.

“That’s fair.”

We wandered through shops, ate at our favorite places. He drove us home, and we talked about finances, custody, logistics.

All in all, it wasn’t a terrible trip.

I opened up Hinge, fully prepared to delete the app, when their profile popped up. Their photos were fun but not forced. The top prompt was “What are you ordering for the table?” Their response: A potato. Any kind of potato.

I swiped right immediately.

I deleted Hinge officially after our first date.

Their text said: If I made you a first date playlist, would that be cute or cringe?

Their text said: I really love that both of us have made it into bed by 8:35 on a Friday

Their text said: Your hair is giving Danny Phantom in the best nonbinary way possible

We went to bookstores and walked neighborhoods and binge-watched Bridgerton. They listened to me yap about trends in cover designs for traditionally published books. On Valentine’s Day, we sent each other Heated Rivalry memes. Winter ebbed away and we sat outside an ice cream shop on a chilly spring evening. We talked about summertime farmer’s market trips and going dancing and a dozen other little things that meant this is moving forward, this is going somewhere.

Their text said: I can’t wait to see you

Mine said: Ugh SAME

“So, are you lesbian now, or what?” he asks.

I carefully don’t look at my ex-husband, reminding myself not to be reactive, not to be annoyed by his (very pointed) comment. A mean part of me wants to say maybe you turned me off cis men forever, but our friendship is standing on shaky, starving legs. I don’t want to take it out at the knees.

In the backseat, our toddler yodels along to the Spotify Sesame Street playlist.

“I’m not a lesbian. I’m asexual. I always have been,” I say instead.

“Yeah,” he says, in a tone I can’t read.

The light turns green, and I press the gas.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve talked to authors and creators, including musician Roddy Bottom—and we even published several essays focused on the power of music in our love lives. But I had yet to zero in on one of my passions—to analyze how pop music has affected our way of perceiving, interpreting, and finding queer love.

Since the beginning, music has been a force for change for some marginalized groups. The simple act of creating music at all can be a form of speaking out against an unjust world, whether it’s a party song or protest song. Music has power.

Of course, there’s a long history of musicians using their voices to demand a better world or just carving out their space within it. And who better discuss that with me than veteran music journalist and a pop culture critic Barry Walters.

He’s documented the intersection of mainstream and LGBTQ+ culture for over 40 years. He began his career at the Village Voice, where he famously came out publicly in the 1986 review of the Pet Shop Boys. He continues to write about how queer artists and fans have reshaped mainstream music. So I was thrilled to have him join me on the Queer Love Podcast to discuss the ins and many, many outs of all this.

The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Jerry: Did I get all that right?
Barry: Yes, you got it. I have been thinking about that Pet Shop Boys review, because I received two fan letters from that. One was from John Ginoli who wanted to start a band. This is 1986, I think, and that band eventually became Pansy Division.

Oh, I’ve interviewed John about Pansy Division. I’m so excited that that’s actually what spurred it.
And also, I got another fan letter. I believe he was in college at the time, and that was Rob Sheffield, who ended up at Rolling Stone.

Yeah, I love that. We both know Rob. I’ve learned so much from him. He’s been generous enough to say I taught him some things. I don’t think that’s true, but he’s at least nice enough to say it. So, we’ve overlapped it and worked at various publications—Out, The Advocate, Rolling Stone—but we’ve never worked together. This is the first time we’ve ever talked, so I’m really excited about that.
Great. Yeah, me too.

Obviously we’re talking about the fact that you have this amazing new book: Mighty Real. It’s encyclopedic. So I just want to know why was so important for you to publish a book like this for people to discover at this moment in history?
Well, I’ve been working on it for quite some time. I believe it took me nine years. I can’t quite fathom how I lived through it. So a lot happened to America during nine years, but some of it’s personal.

I had some issues with my heart, hereditary issues, but I had four surgeries. I didn’t know if it was going to work, and I wanted to leave something important behind. I have a stepson—I’m married—and through my marriage, I have a son. I don’t know if there’s a word for this, but an adult child who identifies as nonbinary, and they have a trans partner. So I want to leave something for them and the generation after them so that they understand what was gay life like when I lived it, and how we, more importantly, how we related to music, how the audience and the performers created a culture through hints, codes, interpretations, ways of getting around the mainstream.

Yeah. So let’s dive into that because, in Mighty Real, you talk about music not just as entertainment, but as a survival tool and a language for liberation and love. Being in San Francisco during a time when there was a lot of joy and a lot of pain and a lot of death, I am just curious how you’ve experienced this. A lot of our listeners might not remember this. I came of age in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, so I was on the fringe, but I didn’t experience all of the heartache that many people who were survivors of that period did.
Sure. Well, I’d like to start a little before that. I grew up in a suburb of Rochester, New York. Nearly everyone’s dad worked at Kodak or Xerox. Nearly everyone was white. And being that it was very much a two-business town, there was a strong drive to conformity, and I saw the people on TV and the musicians that I listened to. I have an older brother and sister, and my sister had a dance studio. So I was surrounded by music. I experienced it through them. So I started very early, and I went to New York City for college and lived there from ‘79 to 88, and then moved to San Francisco in some ways as a result of interviewing Sylvester. He died in 1988.

I interviewed him a few months before he died. I came out here to interview him because I had heard that he was in the “People With AIDS” contingent of the Pride March in San Francisco, and that was the very first time that someone said a celebrity, someone that you would have in your record collections or you saw on TV that said, “I have AIDS.” that was a revolutionary act, and I wanted to celebrate him while he was still alive. So I interviewed him. I came out here to do that.

So the AIDS epidemic, it began while I was just getting settled in New York and coming to terms with who I am, and then there’s this big epidemic, and then I came here and San Francisco being smaller and the gay culture being more open, I experienced it in a very powerful, strong, immersive way. I had friends in New York who had AIDS, but this was really, it was a whole community who did in a way that was more out in the open than it was. I mean, I would see people who were close to death on a regular basis. So I was already in ACT UP, but that drove me to make my work as political as I could, given that I wasn’t Randy Shilts, who was here. I knew I wasn’t Vito Russo, who I knew in New York, and he moved out here for a while. Those people were very inspirational to me.

However, I could when talking about musicians like Madonna… It happened really when I was moved out here. And so those performers gave me an opportunity to write about LGBTQ music and sort of politicize things for a daily paper. That’s

The San Francisco Examiner, correct?
Yes. The San Francisco Examiner was a Hearst paper at the time. It was a prestigious paper. It was an afternoon one, but we sort of prided ourselves in being a little more progressive and thoughtful. I would go to concerts and come back to the office and write up the review that night, and they would be in paper the next day. And that demanded a lot of independence because there were no fact checkers who would know the facts that I was writing about. There was no internet that I could check a lyric on. I had to know it. I had to know who the musicians in the band were and the background singers and all that stuff.

All in your brain! You were the expert.
Yeah. Well, I knew it quite a bit before I moved out here, but it was a school for me.

Let’s talk about Sylvester. I mean, he’s obviously an icon, but at the time, disco was definitely not cool. And even to write about disco, right? I mean, Rolling Stone was known for shitting on disco, and we had the Disco Demolition Night and all that. Yet Sylvester is really such a trailblazer, a pioneer. Now he’s getting this appreciation. I’ve seen a musical based on his life and music. There’s a lot of love. But I would say that probably when you’re going out there to write, there’s still people who are like, “Ugh, disco, right?”
Well, yes and no—because disco is connected to R&B. In the ‘80s, it was connected to New Wave and well, of course, Blondie even in the ‘70s. So when I came here, the examiner reprinted my Village Voice article, and people, the paper, took notice.

So you were giving your readers access to music that other people might not be reporting on?
Yes, that’s right. They were used to just the music coverage mostly being about the San Francisco acts. And I did that too. I wrote about Metallica, who I really did enjoy during that period. There was a band, Jellyfish, that I was incredibly fond of before I moved to San Francisco. I saw a show by Depeche Mode at Madison Square Garden, which was extraordinarily gay as I get into in that book. And the opening act was Voice Farm, even gayer. They had dance routines and real choreography outfits, really quirky lyrics. No one in New York knew who they were, and they were being played on the radio here.

We obviously have the New Romantics, and we have things that were very queer-coded, and yet people let them pass. We have bands like Queen that you have these dudes who are loving this band that’s so queer-coded, but nobody seemed to question. And then even what you’re talking about: Just seeing Dave Gahan on stage, strutting around, is the gayest thing—even though he is not.

But tell me, for you personally, you talk about music as a lifesaving recognition, and I wonder if there’s a specific song or artist that gave you the language to understand yourself before you had the words for it. Is there a sort of the music for you that you were like, “Oh, this made me gay?”
Well, I would say I grew up with my sister and brother’s music, and they would alert me to things. So as a kid: Monkeys Beatles, Jackson Five, Partridge Family. But then, when I turned 11, I read this article about a performer. I’d never heard of David Bowie, and it said that he was bisexual. I didn’t even know what that meant, but he looked so amazing.

And I have to say, maybe by this time, people started to mistake me for a girl, and that was when I look at photos from that period, my hair was just slightly longer, but my clothes were brighter. And then when I discovered David Bowie, that was more real to me than the people around me really. I mean, I had friends, but he gave me a path and an image and a language that I discovered on my own through him.

My brothers and sisters were not a part of that. So I think if you have brothers and sisters, older brothers and sisters, when you discover an act on your own, not through them, it becomes like your music. And through David Bowie, while I heard he produced Mott the Hoople and wrote “All the Young Dudes.” And whoa—that’s an amazing song!

Slowly, I think I fathomed what being gay was because I learned about it through songs like “All the Young Dudes.” I learned about it through “John, I’m Only Dancing” and a kind of androgyny that was very pervasive in Hunky Dory and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.

It’s interesting. I think it’s actually such a complex thing to unpack, and we can’t go into it in great depth, but I’m curious what you think, because I know, me being a little bit younger, that so many people around me were given permission to maybe be a little gender queer. I had teachers, friends who—and later when I saw The Runaways biopic about them originally going and seeing a Bowie show and then feeling like they can can explore their gender expression—it created a queerness that gave a lot of people permission.
Right? Well, it depends on how old you are. If you’re in junior high, which I consider the most volatile place—

The sponge absorbing.
Yeah, the Netflix show Big Mouth, I think it really gets it right. And your favorite act is David Bowie, and you’re into Queen and Roxy music and all this androgyny stuff that—if I was a big city kid, it wouldn’t have been a big deal that I’d liked all that stuff. They would’ve heard it on the radio; they would’ve known about it, too. But it made me stand out, and that was both good and bad.

I had to figure out how to make my difference a positive rather than a negative. And I knew that it was because, ever since I was a kid, teachers would tell my mom: “Oh, your son’s really different. He’s really special.” And so I got some of that. But when all the all androgyny came in, that specialness became a real problem, and I was bullied severely. Gym class was no joke.

So there’s always that reaction to it too.
Right? So in a sense, it put me on the path, but it made things, when I say glam, androgyny, pop culture, it made things more challenging. But it also made me feel like there’s a place out there for people like me. And if you are younger, you experienced the second wave of that stuff through the people that are my age that he touched when performing on England’s Top of the Pops when, coming over here, of course, the New Romantics: Boy George, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, The Eurythmics, and then Depeche Mode, Erasure, and all that.

So Bowie really sort of liberated a generation, not just the gay ones, but the straight ones who were told that masculinity must be very narrow. And also femininity must be very narrow because people like Annie Lennox who were doing really creative stuff with gender.

She was fucking with gender in other ways. I remember my mom basically using Annie Lennox as an example of trying to explain to me why one of my teachers was a lesbian. And it was a very complicated thing, which she probably is wrong. Later I understood why she was so confused by all this: the buzzed hair, the dyed hair, all that. But that’s part of what I want to talk about, this coded resistance and the defiance, There’s this radical thing happening, ut also trying to stay safe. Even Bowie recanted the bisexual thing, and it was complicated.

Then Elton was going back and forth, “I’m bisexual, I’m not,” all this stuff. Then, later in the ‘90s we get somebody like Kurt Cobain also saying, “I’m bisexual and I wished I was gay.” So it’s like these artists are pushing the envelope, but then they’re also trying to—maybe it’s their managers and agents—but they’re trying to also keep something that is confusing to us. Just be a hero! I don’t don’t know: You were reporting on this.
Well, something I guess I failed to mention in the book—because I’m sure it was different from record company to record company and management to management and whatnot—but there used to be entertainers who were beholden to contracts that dealt with morality. So they couldn’t do something that was considered immoral. Right? And gayness, of course, was, and I’m not sure exactly when that ended, but that is also why disco happened. It was the result of the illegality of just merely dancing with someone of the same sex. You had to have someone of the opposite sex with you, or at least nearby, that you could just pull toward you when the cops came, if they were to raid a nightclub. I don’t know if that was a vice law specific to New York, but I’m pretty confident that those kind of vice laws were in place throughout the country.

They stayed on the books much longer than people realize.
Yes. And they were enforced longer than they were really on the books. So the first nightclubs were really sites of revolution. What we do in bed is still illegal, but at least we can do this thing [on the dancefloor]. And you can do it with people of your own people. And also, I think that the utopianism of the hippie movement really, it sort of got commercialized and watered down in the ‘70s, but it moved into disco in a way. Because people were coming together who were all different races; because disco had a broader appeal than rock & roll as it was in the ‘70s. I mean, going back, people like the Beatles were played on R&B stations—they were on the R&B charts at the very beginning—but things got segregated when the record companies, the entertainment business saw Woodstock, and saw all those white kids and just wanted to target them and push the R&B into something else.

Let’s just keep talking about the disco for a second. There’s Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder and the sexualized part of that, and then how people felt conflicted about that. You have orgasmic soundsm and you’re listening to this music that sounds like fucking.
Right. Yes. I remember being, there was a record that predated that: Jungle Fever by the Chakachas, I think. And it had heavy breathing on it. It was, I believe a Belgian studio act pretending to be African. And I didn’t know what it was, but I thought it was amazing. I had that 45 and would play it, and I was just—

Turned on!
Oh at 10, 11 years old, I didn’t know what it was, but I liked it. And it’s interesting that Donna Summer happened in, she was an American in Germany, that music that was Germany’s version of what was happening in Philadelphia with the Philadelphia International label and people like the ojs and also Barry White. So that was their version of Black culture, and it was often fronted by Black women and played by white musicians and whatever Black musicians they could find.

You touch on so many genres in the book—and I want to get to the punk of it all because that’s a complicated one—but let’s talk about house music and the euphoria of the dance floor. I met my husband actually on a dance floor. It was a New Year’s party, and there was a lot of house music, I won’t even go into it, but I’m curious about that sort of collective joy that music can bring about and the social change and that we do find so many of our intimate moments on the dance floor.
Well, those things, they’re not specific to house music, but really how music sort of took over it gestated in the mid-‘80s, because what happened was that dance music got whiter and whiter as the ‘80s progressed. And the stations that would play dance music, they were still playing dance music. But I have to say that there was a Latin presence that wasn’t there just a couple of years before. Acts like the Cover Girls Exposé and a few more that came out of either New York or Miami for the most part. But I would say that crack had impacted Black music right at the mid-‘80s point, and things got more segregated. The R&B stations got more R&B and less fancy. It got more about slow jams and people like Anita Baker and Sade, who I love, but those people didn’t have many dance tracks.

And house music had to happen because the Black people, the musicians, were getting pushed out and house music was like their version of punk really, because you didn’t have to take music classes to make a house track. You just had to understand rhythm. And really, a lot of them were based on disco riffs. And so first they started with doing underground remixes of disco tracks, and then they learned how to make their own records, and they put them out on their own labels. And that just energized things once again. And of course, it always happens: The major labels come in. House music was really a big deal in England first and in Europe before you could hear it on the radio in America, it was in the Top 40, which is people need to remember, understand that. And then they sold it back to us just like they did with rock & roll.

So what do you think? I mean, I was going out to clubs, dancing, we were getting the remixes, we were doing all these things, and it was a very gay-oriented type of thing. And then we’re going to kind of switch to the other thing that was happening during this time, which is the Indigo Girls and the sort of folk revival of things happening. So why do you think that happened? I mean, we’re also dealing with the AIDS epidemic. People are needing to have some joy.
Right? Well, I mean, I knew there was this very specific person that I knew at Polygram, and he was working in the reissue department. He liked the stuff I was doing at the Village Voice, and he had me do notes for his compilations. I’m sure he was out, but he died. And when gay men like him died in the major labels, they weren’t replaced by other gay men. They were replaced by straight guys. Also, dance music labels, dance music, publicity, that there were dance music departments when disco was a big deal because they had to have gay people come in and teach them how to sell records to a gay audience—but a gay audience that they knew would be the stepping stone to the mainstream because this was happening over and over. I guess I forgot to mention when we were talking earlier that records were happening in the discos so strongly that they would sell in the hundreds of thousands before radio got on board.

And when radio got on board, then there were million-selling hits. And gay people were hired to promote records in the gay discos because the straight guys didn’t know the first thing about it. And they probably thought, I don’t want to do that. And so that whole network got dissipated through the ‘80s.

And by the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, gay participation in popular music started dwindling. However, the women were coming up and starting to get signed by major labels. Chris Blackwell, who signed Bob Marley and U2 and produced Grace Jones, produced B-52s. He saw Melissa Etheridge in a lesbian bar and signed her as a result of that. And the first draft of her first album was not that the producers were trying to make her something she wasn’t, which often happened to women because they just didn’t have the clout.

And Chris Blackwell said, “Oh no, this is not good. I want the woman in the T-shirt and the jeans and the leather jacket. I want that Melissa Etheridge.” And so they rerecorded the record, and that was what people heard and responded to. That record was a big rock radio record, her first album. And then if you went to the concert, then it was really powerful and you would see other women in the audience. And the same thing was happening with k.d. lang, who was on Sire Records, a label associated, not just with Madonna, but Talking Heads, Ramones, Echo & the Bunnymen—a whole galaxy of queer actes. And there was a gay man behind it, Seymour Stein. And he signed a lot of acts that were either queer or were acts that we like Depeche Mode.

It’s funny that you haven’t mentioned the two biggest, which is Clive Davis and David Geffen. But they were doing their own thing.
Well, they were really, I mean, Clive Davis, he had Whitney Houston and he had Barry Manilow. Initially, he also had, for a time, he had Lou Reed and he signed Patti Smith as well. But he also had this flip side of extremely mainstream acts, like Air Supply. You can’t get any more land and mainstream than Air Supply. And really Sire Records did not have any kind of Air Supply on their label. Their bread and butter became Madonna, and yet they were still signing left-of-center acts like k.d. lang, who was doing country but it was both punk and performance art.

Because she was very male-presenting and had this swagger.
She had a swagger that was—she was kind of Iggy Pop and Elvis Presley. So when I would go to her shows and well, I saw her first in New York, and then when I came here, I saw her do a New Year’s Eve show, 1988 into 1989. I had only moved here in late November. And so it was the first time when I went to a show and it was almost exclusively women and almost exclusively lesbian and a smattering of gay guys. It was like a queer revival meeting. It was so powerful. And she was so good, and her band was so good. I knew something really extraordinary was happening.

The same thing happened at Indigo Girls shows, where people were singing along to records that had only been released a few months ago, and they knew all the words. And I also have to say, singing along at concerts now is a de rigueur thing. It was not happening back in the late ‘80s—except in these shows where it was like the closet door was open.

I have to admit that I’ve probably seen the Indigo Girls live more than any other act. And also because I went to college in Atlanta, I had many opportunities. So yeah, they’re definitely very close to me, and it’s incredible to see that they have staying power in it.

You give people this lineage, and I don’t want to force it too much, but one of the things I’d like to talk about is creating family and heritage for queer people since we don’t have that through our actual family of origin. So we often do it through our sexual partners or our relationships. But in this, you kind of create this musical family tree. And I was thinking, it’s 10 years since I started working at Rolling Stone in 2016, I was there in January when David Bowie died. I was there in April, 10 years ago, when Prince died, and then later in the year when George Michael died. It was a pretty intense year for us in a lot of ways. I’m just curious about the sort of lineage.

Do you actually feel like Bowie and these people are connected to people like Lil Nas X and Kim Petras? Or is that too much of a stretch for us? Yet, I remember talking to Brandi Carlisle when she was just starting out and how big of a fan she was with Elton John, and now she has an album with them. So you actually do see this connection.
I do think there is a lineage, and I do think a sense of freedom gets passed down. When I spoke to Amy Ray, she said, seeing Patti Smith when she was just a teenager opened a door for her and made her feel like, “OK, I can be myself.” We didn’t have words like genderqueer or pansexual. Those words didn’t exist. So that opened the door for her. So David Bowie opened the door for Boy George and Marc Almon. And those people opened a door for—I do know the house music people loved the English synth pop and the androgyny that went with it. And some of them, I assumed that, I can’t remember who, Jamie Principle—he sounded so gay, and I believe he’s actually straight—but has said gay people allowed me to be myself.

So I want to pivot slightly. I want to get your take on one of the things that I keep exploring and that I’m always curious about: Does pop music skew our perception of love by distilling complex long-term human connections to these intense bite-sized emotions? We have these lyrics: You’re falling head over heels, that kind of thing. And even though it captures that universal feeling or whatever you want to call this mania that happens.

One of the questions I ask all the guests for the podcast is how people define love. And because we’re talking about music, I’m curious what you think. Is it that thing that you work over for a long period of time, or is it that strong feeling that we hear in pop songs? “I fell in love; I’m lost; I’m just crazy for this person.” So many of the songs are about being crazy, and that’s what so many people think love is. And I’m just curious from your perspective of listening, your whole life being embedded in this, and also just being a man who’s fallen in love, what do you think? Does the pop song set us up for failure?
Well, I’m just flashing back to, I once went on a couple of dates with a guy. I worked at Tower Records that had just opened up in downtown Manhattan, right near NYU where I was going to school, and I dated this guy who had been the manager of a gay bathhouse. Something I wouldn’t have done if I’d been just a little older; I would’ve known I was getting into a situation over my head, but I was into this guy. But he had, I don’t know, a kind of detachment that I think was typical of gay men that were just a few years older than me. That you don’t settle down with one person; you spread yourself around.

And he recommended his therapist, and I saw his therapist and he said, well, my therapist is, she’s lesbian. And I don’t know how he framed her as socialist or anti-capitalist. And I remember her saying, “Oh, well, love isn’t like it is in the Motown songs. That’s just fantasy.” Well, sometimes it is.

I mean, certainly the Motown songs—and I deal with this in the book—that a lot of them dealt with the more painful side of love, and yet the music was very upbeat. And I think that’s a very gay response to the world that we, I’ve had this argument with people who’ve said, “Hey, straight people aren’t so great at relationships. Look at the divorce rate; it’s not like they’re doing all this stuff all that well.” But a lot of us didn’t date men of other boys in high school. We couldn’t do that. Maybe we could do it in college depending on what college we went to. And also, if you went to a college that was far away from anyone you knew back, but by college, your straight peers have already had several years of dating and figuring out what works and what doesn’t work.

So I think, I’m not going to say that gay people have an extended adolescence, but I do think we often have to work things out in our twenties that some of our straight peers worked out in their teens. We make some of the mistakes that we would’ve not made, like me dating a former bathhouse manager, he had a very different idea of relationships. So I would say that I was also drawn to people who wrote about love in a more complicated way, like Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music. It was very romanticized, but also the opposite of the romanticism, that there was kind of, it was intellectual and romantic at the same time.

I totally agree with you. I was more of a Smiths/Morrissey guy. And so I think I related to that yearning and that longing and also the idea that you could say, “I want to die by your side…”
Right. Yes, I’m glad you’ve mentioned Morrissey. This is a perfect example of it. He didn’t go to college yet. He was self-taught, and he read a lot and he read a lot of lesbian feminist literature that shaped his worldview. And he wasn’t all that active in the dating scene if we were to believe his autobiography in the song and what he has said. So he would present a very romanticized notion and deconstruct it in the very same song. And I think that was very attractive to people who wanted a mate, wanted to have things work out, but also was smart enough to know that it doesn’t often work that way—especially if you’re gay and have to hide your feelings, and maybe you are got your heart set on some straight guy.

Yet it appealed to all those emo boys, too. I mean, they were trying to rip his clothes off even though they were straight.
That’s right. And Morrissey has plenty of lesbian fans, too. I mean, I think if you like more than just what’s on the radio, most of us get all sorts of ideas about love through all sorts of musicians. You get all this stuff simultaneously. And now that’s even more true of the kids who grew up with streaming where just the history of popular music and not so popular music, it’s all accessible, all simultaneously, and so they can access it.

Well, I hope they discover your book and it screws with their algorithm and they start listening to some other music as well. I actually have a friend named who has a Substack called The Lost Songs Project. And what he does is he actually writes about things that were Top 10 hits, but now no longer get streams. And so he’s trying to uncover and rediscover for people who are younger, like, “Oh, this is music that people used to really love, but no one’s listening to it anymore.” And I think there’s a bit of that that people will get from Mighty Real. Is there anything that you want to make sure your readers get from this or that you hope that they learn?
I have really broad tastes in music. If you read my book, you can probably figure out what I really am enthusiastic about. And there’s very little in this book that I’m not really enthusiastic. And so I am hoping it’s designed to be very accessible to people who are like, “OK, I want to read about Donna Summer or learn about disco and learn about it through a queer perspective.” And the book’s called Mighty Real, which is a Sylvester song, but I’m hoping that they read about Patti Smith and Phranc.

And then I’ve woven in as much as I could, some obscure acts that really, if you’re gay, this music may speak to you even if it’s not particularly your cup of tea, the kind of thing you listen to. I was just thinking how in the post-punk chapter, it’s not really post-punk, but it’s definitely this Canadian group, Parachute Club, and they had this huge hit in Canada called “Rise Up.” And if you are gay, particularly if you are lesbian, you are going to hear this song as a lesbian anthem. And I would say less than 1% of the people who will pick up my book will know that song…

I don’t know it.
Right. Well, it got some dance club play. I was into it at the time. But if you hear the song, there’s no doubt that this is like a lesbian empowerment song. And it won the Grammy for Best Song. I mean, the Canadian Grammy, the equivalent of the Canadian Grammy in the same year that they were big hits by Bryan Adams and Men Without Hats and Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night.” This won! And this person, I believe the songwriter behind it, she’s won a distinction of honor from the Canadian government for her participation in bringing female and lesbian concerns into the mainstream. So that’s a pretty amazing thing that just about no one outside of Canada is going to know that.

Did you create a playlist for this? Or are you planning to, because if not, I’ll create one!
I am, I’m right now having conversations… Readers should know that my book has 60 chapters, and some of those chapters, like Madonna has her own chapter, and Michael Jackson has his own chapter, but then there are several chapters that have many different acts in them. So there are, I don’t know, a couple hundred, but

You could give us your definitive Barry Walters playlist.
Yeah, well, I just had this discussion. They want to keep it to 100 songs, so I will not be able to represent every artist in that playlist, but I do want to have enough so people understand this book is not just about Elton John and Queen and the acts that they know about—that no matter what kind of music you are into, there’s something for you to discover. And I’m hoping that you will rediscover the stuff that you do know. And everyone who has read this book and has talked to me about it has said they would put the book down and go on YouTube and be like, really? Is it that gay? And then watch the video and like, “Oh my God, this is so gay! I didn’t quite get it when I was eight years old.” Or whatever.

I love that. And I agree. This has been good. Thank you so much for giving me all of this new knowledge and sharing all of this. I’m excited for people to read. And also you narrate the book—so they can listen.

Speaker 2 (33:34):

Yes. I recently wrapped up approximately 140 hours of recording in a studio that just so happened. It’s called Different Fur Studios. It’s run by queer women, and it’s entirely queer staffed, and it’s actually inspired by the synthesizer work of Wendy Carlos, who is trans. So the audio book is something that comes out of a queer background, and I just sort of stumbled on it. Bob Mould, who’s a friend of mine, he’s recorded there, along with Devo, and maybe, I’m sorry, I spoke, he mixed one of his records there.

For anybody who’s worried, the audio book’s only 13 hours at the end. I just confirmed.
Is it? Wow. Wow.

Barry, I’m going to let you go. This has been great. Thanks for joining me, and I just want everyone to know that they should find Mighty Real.
Well, thank you. I’m really happy the reception this book is getting. It’s really exciting. It’s what I hoped for, so thank you.

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I thought my struggle to find love in Nigeria had ended when I met my last boyfriend, but that relationship ended abruptly. In fact, it barely lasted more than a month. Still, the experience taught me something. I came to understand that queer love can be fickle, and we who are living in it are often not interested in building anything tangible to make it work. Perhaps this is a truth about most relationships these days, especially with our easy access to people around the globe?

I am very monogamous by nature, and when I become emotionally attached to someone, they become fully part of my identity and dictate my life. They begin to shape how I define myself, and letting go is difficult. Letting go of this person was made easier by the lack of communication. As someone who values closeness, I was able to release him because the most important thing, “conversation,” was missing, and we lost ourselves.

As a gay man who is both a creative writer and freelance journalist—and who deeply values queer spaces—I don’t trade them for anything. Whenever I have the time, I make the effort to participate in community events, especially by volunteering or being part of the burgeoning conversations in advocacy spaces in Lagos about how to move forward.

One day, I saw a post from Obodo Nigeria, a queer, non-governmental organization that programs for LGBTQ+ individuals in Nigeria around art and culture. It was Queer Mobility Month, and queer people gathered every week, always on Saturday evenings, with a facilitator who used art as a form of realism to drive advocacy.

Obodo is located at the Human Rights Hub in the urban part of Lagos, known as Lekki Phase One, Lagos Island. It’s one of the calmest and safest spaces in Nigeria, and it allows queer people to gather without feeling unsafe. Before that Saturday, I had been skeptical about attending the event. I had registered, but I kept thinking about the logistics of traveling to another state for the yearly African Pride Celebration, an LGBTIQ+ conference for queer Nigerians. It is an annual gathering that also hosts a few stakeholders from other African countries and Black LGBTQ+ leaders in the West. The 2025 APA featured Demarc Hickson, executive director of Us Helping Us. I wasn’t ready to spend my available cash on an outrageous ride to the island.

Eventually, I changed my mind, and I went because I understood the selection process required to attend these events and the importance of honoring them. If I wasn’t ready to attend from the outset, I shouldn’t have registered and taken up space meant for someone else. I am a trusted person in the community, and I didn’t want to lose that trust, especially from the individual who extended the invitation. So, that day, I left my house and headed to Lagos Island, where I would sit among other queer people of different identities. I arrived just before the event started, but as with most Lagos events, it didn’t begin immediately. We were served light refreshments—tea, snacks, and apples—and I sat beside someone I didn’t recognize. Although I couldn’t make out his face, I could tell something was building between us, though it was mostly emanating from me.

This was how I met Charlie last summer. I knew I wanted him, but Charlie wouldn’t be the first guy I had felt this way about at an event, and things never clicked in the end. The session slowly progressed, and throughout it, I assumed this would be the same. He would be one of those men I met, gushed over, and never progressed with. Because everything always ends in stalemate.

Except this time was different. We were paired together for a group activity, and at some point, we held hands, and something formed. This soft intimacy had an impact. His hands were warm, and while I sat with this unexpected feeling, I wondered if he felt the same way. Then, he led me upstairs to a closed room, where we locked lips and affirmed what we were both beginning to feel. Though we thought we would be a one-time thing, the love blossomed and has stood the test of time.

I came to understand that second chances truly exist. Days slowly slipped into nights and weeks folded into months. Charlie left Lagos for Port Harcourt a week after we met because he wasn’t based in my city. He had visited Lagos to while time away in his brother’s house after the death of his father. Despite the distance, our love didn’t dwindle—the morning and night texts, the calls that stretched into silence. Charlie finally made me feel what I had been lacking: a man who was genuine and put in the energy and made deliberate efforts to make love work. He understood that love is delicate and should be handled with care. For me, love on the rebound became a learning curve, a way of understanding what should work and what shouldn’t. As the days passed, even with the love bombing from both of us, we remained friends with benefits.

When December arrived, it felt like the happiest season of my life. He landed on the 19th, and he planned to see me on the 20th. I struggled to sleep as I waited to see him. The anticipation of seeing him felt impossible to survive. I wanted to hold the man I had loved for four whole months, a man I had not seen since our first meeting.

When he arrived at the lodge, he looked exactly as I had preserved him in memory. The same tall, lean, 6-foot-3 man whom I fell in love with at first sight. The afternoon he arrived was the best time of my life, and he asked me to be his partner properly with a flower, a necklace, a handwritten love letter, and he sealed it with a warm kiss.

That night, sleep no longer evaded me. Time began to move too quickly, and each day I wished it would stretch a little longer. The sex in all its tenderness and urgency was good, but more than that, I craved him. We spent four days together in a hotel in Lagos until Christmas Eve. It was my first mini vacation with someone I loved and wanted to build a future with. The first time I had ever been with a lover for 24 hours a day, waking beside them, sleeping beside them. It showed me the future I wanted, fully in my identity. Someone I could share a bed with every night. I wanted to wake up next to him for the rest of my life.

On Sunday, we attended a Yoruba Muslim wedding on a university campus. I wore tight shoes and walked a long distance because there was no public transportation to the hotel, which was 15 minutes away from the reception. While helping sort out guests, my feet began to ache, at first faintly, then intensely after the event ended. Charlie stood by me, massaged my legs, and led me gently to the restroom. When we were alone, he held me in his warm embrace without letting go.

Those five days felt both endless and fleeting, a lifetime condensed into a moment. Charlie made me believe in love again. Since we made our relationship official, it’s been a few months, and we have woven ourselves into each other’s dreams. He calls me “my heart”; I call him “my own.”

The day he left Lagos for Port Harcourt, we booked a ride from the hotel to another hotel close to the airport. Emotions swirled inside me. It felt like I was losing the most valuable part of myself. When my ride eventually pulled away, he stood there, the softness of his face carrying a goodbye I wasn’t ready to receive. We arrived at the lodge in the afternoon, and I waited for a while until we made out, and I booked a ride to my house.

Since we started dating and exploring together, we have bonded over many things, especially music. It’s funny because we belong to two different corners of Western pop culture. I love Beyonce, and he loves Taylor Swift, but in between this, somewhere, we share love song playlists filled with other artists’ songs, especially Celine Dion. Music became our middle ground, our quiet bridge.

Every day now feels like a rehearsal for a shared future and what it holds for us. We plan meticulously for future hangouts, future trips, and what life might look like when he eventually moves to Lagos. The future, when we speak of it, feels soft and almost cute in its simplicity. Second chance has become a charm, and love was found on the rebound. They say the third time is the charm, but for me, the second time has been enough to warm my heart, and I go every day reminiscing on someone genuine to me. For most of my life, my understanding of romantic relationships was theoretical, but a second chance has taught me something beautiful and practical. Finding love has also taught me something about intentionality and principles shaped by observation, longing, and imagination.

If I want the queer future I crave, I now know I must actively make the effort to build it. I cannot keep subscribing to a gay culture that prioritizes endless flings and emotional detachment. And there is no change without requiring conscious disruption, even when that means resisting the fast, disposable patterns of internet love. Online, you are exposed to too many options with no options. In person, it allows you to perceptively see people fully and genuinely build a better connection.

It’s only been six months, but in that time, he’s taught me that love can be soft and solid. That communication is not just about talking endlessly but about intention, about choosing your words carefully, especially in a country where loving like this is illegal. We have even slowed down our conversations at times, choosing depth over frequency, intentional pauses over noise. And somehow, by speaking less, we have understood each other more.

My recent chat with Lindsey Danis about her queer travel book—along with publishing Char Breshgold’s short nonfiction essay, “Not Our Love Poem”—inspired us to launch a flash nonfiction contest with a travel theme to see what you’ll submit. Plus, we had so much fun working with writers on last year’s roundup, which you can check out below.

It’s easy to get started, so here’s how it works!

Theme/Topic: My Perfect Day (of Travel)

Deadline: May 30 at 3 a.m. ET / Midnight PT

How to Submit: Email us at queerloveprojectsub@gmail.com and attach your story as a Word doc, paste it into the body of the email, and/or link us to a Google doc.

Please note: This will be a “free post” (meaning we won’t be paying contributors upon publication as we do with other essays) but you will receive a copy of Vol. 1 or 2 of The QLP Quarterly zine or a T-shirt (your choice).

IMPORTANT: You must be a subscriber to submit
(it’s free so not a difficult request)

Subscribe now

We will publish your flash nonfiction essay in June 2026 during LGBTQ+ Pride month and make sure lots of people read it!

For more information about submitting essays in general, visit this page:

Email us at queerloveprojectsub@gmail.com to take “The QLP Questionnaire.”
Plus, find out how to submit your original personal essay to The Queer Love Project.

Email Us

We pay our contributors, so your subscription and support is valuable! Thanks for reading.

Email us at queerloveprojectsub@gmail.com to take “The QLP Questionnaire.”
Plus, find out how to submit your original personal essay to The Queer Love Project.

Email Us

We pay our contributors, so your subscription and support is valuable! Thanks for reading.

The day Nick and I were getting settled in our new house in Baltimore, snow was in the forecast. The same house where I’d proposed, along with a big surprise party on move-in day. The shiny “Congratulations!” banner was still on the living room wall, sporting our loved ones’ well-wishes in magic marker.

We hoped the impending blizzard would create space for us, maybe even keep us home for a few days. That way, I could skip rehearsals for the production of Hamlet I was directing and Nick could take a reprieve from the guitar lessons he taught. We’d cuddle and rewatch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Nick could touch up my buzz cut at the kitchen sink.

“We can make hot chocolate and watch the snow fall,” he said, never too cool or grown-up to be excited about a snow day.

Instead, I woke up to his absence in my bed and his body, now cold and unknown, in the next room. By the time the promised blizzard arrived, I’d already fled the false start of our lives for my parents’ house, leaving his battered sneakers where he had left them at the bottom of the stairs and beginning my mission to find the bottom of every bottle I came across. The snow fell, and I stayed home for days and days, with people I loved who had raced to my side to find only emptiness, and the silence of endless white.

I was never open to the idea of “moving on.” Devastating was too small a word for Nick’s death. At 23, I went from a little young to get engaged to far too young to be a widower.

It took six weeks for us to learn what happened: a heart attack, likely related to hypertensive cardiovascular disease he didn’t know he had, the type of thing that shouldn’t drop a 34-year-old cold. His death plunged me into a world where safety was an illusion, and I could barely comprehend the idea that years would pass without him. Culturally, the most romantic way to be a young widower was to devote myself forever to my departed love, looking at photographs of this too-young man until I became old and withered. I was entirely prepared for that path.

Besides, Nick and I ended as successfully as a monogamous relationship can: We promised to love each other until one of us died, and we kept that promise. I barely survived the first success story, and turned to alcohol to cope. I had always been a heavy drinker, but getting the shakes is hard to find an excuse for. Three months after Nick’s death, I landed in inpatient rehab and a recovery house for six months.

As opposed as I was to “moving on,” I still ached for intimacy and connection, and for anything that could keep me from having to sit with the horrifying reality of my grief. I dove headfirst into messy entanglements with men who lived high-risk lifestyles: those who were coming out of heroin addiction, prison, and homelessness. These men could not surprise me with their deaths, because they seemed so close to certain.

I didn’t have language then about polyamorous values, but I had heard of open relationships and used this concept to drive a wedge between me and my partners. Non-monogamy was a signal I sent them about my disinterest in large-scale love, my inability to share my full self, the parts of my heart that withered in Nick’s absence, and which I never intended to revive. I raced from partner to partner, staying long enough to distract myself and fleeing before anything deeper could take root. I saw my relationships in black-and-white: Either these men would escalate to the kind of love I had for Nick—which I was not open to—or I needed to keep them at an emotional distance. Which I always failed at.

Despite my best efforts, I fell in tangled, complex love by using scraps of my tattered heart that I was willing to share. My ex who overdosed on heroin in a grocery store and took six shots of Narcan before he was revived was the same person who held me as I cried after finding Nick’s copy of his favorite book, and found a ride from his halfway house to come rescue me when I had a flat tire in downtown Baltimore at midnight. The ex who called me post-breakup from the psych hospital to tell me he’d been thinking of me was also the one I called after taking my first shot of testosterone. He’d watched the early changes to my body with me, celebrating the small changes and commiserating over the long process. I pushed away thoughts that I might be treating these men worse than they deserved.

But when a married man I met on the apps made me feel safe enough to slow down, to be exactly where I was, I finally realized I had to start exploring other options.

Jess started as a sweet, straightforward hookup, one of my first on the gay hookup apps after transitioning. We exchanged pleasantries before and after, and I slowly learned more about him. That he was the kind of person who would say “I work in visual effects,” when he was actually an executive at a major studio. The kind of guy who wore a math pun T-shirt to our first threesome. He was born and raised in Los Angeles in a Mexican family who had been in LA County since California was part of Mexico. He felt real. He felt solid. There was no pressure to be anything other than what we were, to exchange anything other than pleasantries and sex.

I had always moved like lightning, but Jess and I grew slowly. We were happy friends with benefits for eight months before our relationship escalated, and it was another five months after that before we named it and admitted out loud that we were falling for each other. Jess was in an “open just for sex” marriage, an extremely common arrangement among gay men that generally works—until it doesn’t.

Polyamory offered us tools for our relationship to look any way we saw fit: Jess didn’t have to rush front-and-center into my life in order to be a meaningful connection. We didn’t even know what would be possible for him, so my fear and uncertainty about what kind of relationship I felt capable of was a welcome part of the conversation. Jess’s marriage ultimately fell apart, but in the process, we started learning more about polyamory and discussing the type of relationship that might actually work for us: for who we were then, and who we might become over time.

Non-monogamy is often like a book club, and my therapist had recommendations ready. I expected reading about polyamory to give me some ideas about how I could move forward with this particular partner, but I did not expect these books to speak, for the first time, to the deepest part of my grief.

Polyamory offered me a way to be in love—without “moving on.” Practicing polyamory created a safe space for Nick and Jess to both exist in my life. As we learned how our relationship structure might change and grow with us, I saw just how deeply Jess and I would both need to transform to love each other the way that we wanted to. We did not pretend our relationship would be impervious to change, or that it would never end. By discussing the potential of our relationship to end if we grew incompatible over time, I was able to bring my terror of loving a mortal human into the conversation. Finally, I had tools to envision a love that can be beautiful even for its uncertainty, not just in spite of it.

There was so much we didn’t know, but I felt held in this not-knowing, not so caught up in telling him what he couldn’t be for me that I missed what he was. Loving Jess feels joyful, even when it is painful. As our connection expanded slowly, my widower’s heart allowed me to move at its own careful pace as we each transformed toward one another.

On the eighth anniversary of Nick’s death, there was snow in the forecast again. It was my first time being on the East Coast on his death day since the very first anniversary of his passing, since I was living there for a nine-month artist residency.

Jess prefers to take redeyes to minimize his time away from the studio, and by the time his plane landed on the morning of January 19, a calm blanket of snow had already fallen. On our drive home from the airport, I could feel Jess’s delight as he looked out the window: He’d seen snow up in the Sierras, but he’d never seen it softly round the edges of a city like Philadelphia.

We took a photo when we arrived at my temporary home in South Jersey, our faces happy as fat flakes fell. We played games on a video call with Nick’s parents and best friends, who were all meeting Jess for the first time. They all delighted in learning that Jess worked on some of Nick’s favorite superhero movies.

Nick is still missing. What I have learned from polyamory, however, is that I have room for the fullness of Nick’s absence and the beauty of Jess’s presence. Neither negates the other. I can imagine what my dear loves might say to each other, the questions Nick might have about the visual effects process, or which of Nick’s songs would be Jess’s favorites.

I even get to see Nick’s parents, part of my extended family still, embrace Jess. It happens when I have a play open in Baltimore and they come to support me—even though it’s a lesbian sex comedy and they’re devout Catholics in their sixties. They help me hold the pain of the certainty of Nick’s ending alongside the joyful uncertainty of my ever-beginning Jess.

I make a model for this myself: When I chat with Jess’s other partners about finding a trans-friendly gynecologist; or the joys of queer nude beaches, and why every trans gay seems to be taking up crochet lately; or what they thought of the livestream of my queer musical that they watched with Jess while I was traveling. Just as I get to share space with men who appreciate my partner like I do, Jess gets to be a new member of the community that misses Nick, that loves Nick even in death.

I am a sucker for symbolism. I want to remember Nick’s love of snow when I see it falling, and I also want the flakes to welcome Jess. But what I have discovered, in my attempts to survive widowhood, is that I must let it be both. In polyamory, on this eighth anniversary of Nick’s sudden departure, the snow can fall for Nick and for Jess just the same.

Most recently, he has channeled his journey from a Mormon upbringing in Utah to fatherhood in New York into his debut solo album, If The Stars Were Mine. You can stream it on the platforms and it’s now on vinyl from Center Stage Records and available for purchase on his website.

It happened to be Mother’s Day, and Clay explained that his son Bo decided years ago that he would celebrate one of his father’s on that day, so this year it was Clay’s turn to have “Papa’s Day.”

This may be a spoiler for some, but Clay’s character in Gilded Age looked like he was about to get love with Oscar van Rhijn (played by Blake Ritson), the man he’d been having a clandestine relationship with. And then he was tragically killed! (This took place in Season 3, episode 6 if you’re curious.) I wanted to know what that was like—both portraying an authentic male-male romance in the late 19th century, as well as knowing he was doomed. Clay had thoughts…

OK, yes, there is a lot of musical theater talk on this episode. But can you blame us? Clay said that he and his older gay brother used to sing musicals together as kids, and they had a particular love of Judy Garland and Edith Piaf. Oh, and we also talked about the queer joy of Cats: The Jellicle Ball, the revival of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that was recently nominated for bunches of Tonys.

Of course, Clay got the QLP “Big One”: Based on the QLP questionnaire, I asked him how he defined love? Is it the “strong feeling” that hits you instantly, or is it the “thing you work at” over a long period of time?

You’ll definitely want to listen in and hear his answer, along with his advice for those who are looking for love. He doesn’t say STAY OFF INSTAGRAM, but he does comment on how we get too involved in other people’s relationships and the way they are telegraphed on social media.

He also explained what his older sister said when he brought his first boyfriend home, and how he and his husband, Eric Rosen, decided to become parents and navigated surrogacy to become dads.

I was curious to learn more about his City of Strangers initiative, which was born from a random $200 gift that changed his life. In particular, I wanted to know if, in the context of queer community, viewed that kind of "stranger-kindness" as a form of platonic love? Turns out, he’s now friends with the guy who gave him that money all those years ago!

We also discussed his latest role as the dentist in Little Shop of Horrors, which he joins on May 26 in New York City. Before that, one of the chat questions was about playing “unsavory” character Jackie in The Wild Party. Clay said he liked playing villains since that’s now how most people typically see him, but his son Bo was not allowed to come see him in that production—but will be invited to see him as Dr. Orin Scrivello in Little Shop.

By the way, here’s the complete track list of his If the Stars Were Mine album. As Clay explained, the album tells a complete story, but he did reveal which song was his favorite (at this moment) before we let him enjoy the rest of his Papa’s Day.

Thanks to everyone who joined our conversation live. You can find the vinyl of Clay’s album at his website and learn more about his City of Strangers initiative as well.

Email us at queerloveprojectsub@gmail.com to take “The QLP Questionnaire.”
Plus, find out how to submit your original personal essay to The Queer Love Project.

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We pay our contributors, so your subscription and support is valuable! Thanks for reading.

I am a multidisciplinary artist of Cuban and Syrian descent based in Chicago. Spanning fiction, nonfiction, and visual art, my work explores identity, memory, and cultural inheritance through a Queer lens. I’m the founder of The KindaSuper Project, a philanthropic initiative providing free photography and video services to underserved communities.

Beloved Disciples, out May 12th via Amble Press, is my debut novel!

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What is your age, where in the world do you primarily live, where did you grow up?
I am 37 years old, which as we all know, is Gay 23. I grew up outside of Chicago and live in the city proper again after nearly a decade in San Francisco. For manifestation’s sake, I’m required by the universe to say that I dream of one day owning a farm in Scotland to start a senior animal sanctuary.

How do you define yourself on the LGBTQ+ spectrum?
I experienced the very standard “bi in high school” to “noticeably homosexual to strangers” pipeline many Midwestern Queer youth navigate. The beauty of the LGBTQ+ spectrum lies in the capabilities for us to settle into whatever transitional/ombre area feels right for us at the moment. I personally love to identify as Queer, because it encompasses my sexuality along with my gender expression in the truest way.

What is your relationship status?
I am married! Mike and I have been together for 14 years, married for almost 9 years. For the first five years of our relationship, we were not legally allowed to be married, so I always make sure to point that out when people ask. Our right to marriage equality is still very new and more vulnerable than ever.

Do you have an “ideal” relationship status?
Exactly where I am at. I love Mike more than anything in the world. He is my favorite person, best friend, and has always supported me and my art and every other crazy idea I’ve ever concocted (there are many). And I support him just the same. As Queer people, we don’t always have an abundance of examples to follow, and I feel like the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure we’ve been on has been hard and beautiful and always exciting.

What is the biggest misconception about being single or in a relationship?
The biggest misconception about relationship status is that other people’s opinions of what you do with your time, your emotional energy, and your sexual desires should influence you in a way that goes against how you feel in that situation. Whether you are in an unconventional relationship or you choose to not be in a relationship at all.

People will inevitably try to force their timelines and expectations on you and what your life should look like, but this is your journey. It’s your money, your time, your genitals. And it’s a big BYE to anyone that tries to tell you otherwise.

When was your first intimate moment? Was it with someone you liked? Did you feel pressured into it?
My first intimate moment was right after I turned 16, and I got my cousin’s old ‘98 Chevy Blazer. My best friend Maria and I fooled around in the backseat. We’d known each other since kindergarten, so it wasn’t weird at all. A few months later, I lost my virginity to my first boyfriend in that same backseat.

How would you define love? Is it the thing you work at for a long period of time? Or is it the strong feeling you feel for someone right from the beginning for no reason?
Love is a nuanced little creature. It can often hold us back or make us scared, propel us to do insane things, short circuit. But it also has the unique ability to shapeshift and change not only itself but us along with it. There are so many versions, iterations, and mutations of love.

Many of us are trained from a young age to constantly be searching for your “one true love,” and I feel like that really blinds us to all of the love happening around us every second of our lives. There is young love, love at first sight, unrequited love, friendships that grow into something else, romantic and platonic loves–the list goes on and on.

Ultimately, love is a limitless resource. There is truly no end to how many people and places and things (nouns!) you can give your love to. I think love should be defined by the boundless and limitless nature of our abilities to create and share it in so many different and beautiful ways if only we allowed ourselves to.

Does the relationship fill your deepest needs for closeness with a person? Or do you prefer not to share every part of yourself?
I overflow with love. When I feel it, I will always tell you, and you will have already known before the words left my mouth. There is no point in holding back how you feel. Life is so short! To love and be loved is the best feeling in the world. The negatives come when we put conditions on it or allow expectations and assumptions to poison it. I feel most whole when I am true to and honest about my feelings, especially in a relationship.

When did you come out to family, friends and others for the first time?
I’ve always known I was gay, but I came out to my friends when I was 16. I’d known most of them since we were in the single digit age range, and I had no doubts they would accept me.

Then I slowly came out to my family as opportunities presented themselves, culminating in me telling my dad at 20, after I had already been in a relationship for two years with my first love, Esteban. He also accepted me unconditionally, and all of my fears of being a Cuban disappointment disappeared. I am very privileged to have been surrounded and supported by all of them, and I am forever grateful to them.

Did you have any LGBTQ+ role models as a child or teenager? What do you remember about images of same-gender or queer relationships or messages you gleaned?
There weren’t many to be honest! And certainly none in my real world community. Will & Grace premiered when I was in third grade, and I vividly remember watching that with my family and constantly looking at them to see how they responded to the jokes and situations. I remember feeling sad watching it because Will and Jack never seemed to find anyone to love them (until Vince came along in later seasons, of course!). I turned to books in middle school and high school to find characters that I could identify with even if they were veiled in varying degrees of opacity.

Are there any pivotal pop culture moments that you credit for teaching about love and/or relationships?
Oh, honey, I was the kind of kid to stare out the window while it rains and sing my heart out. I’ve always loved female artists/vocalists, and the fact that their songs had male objects to the desires was likely a driving force, but my dad always had Salsa music, Disco and Motown playing. These are the trifecta for love, loss and DRAMA if you know anything about it.

In the age of LimeWire and KaZaA, I eventually pirated gay movies (sorry) that opened up a whole new world of passion and possibilities (like body dysmorphia!). The Broken Hearts Club, Beautiful Thing, Eating Out, But I’m a Cheerleader, Trick—I could honestly keep going. These films might not all stand up to the test of time, but they gave me my first dose of not feeling so alone.

Do you have a Chosen Family?
Oh yes, and it has been essential to my survival in so many ways. I have a very large Given Family–on my dad’s side alone I have 16 aunts and uncles, and they all have children who now have children–and I love them beyond words.

But to me, your Chosen Family is one that you build as you are finally figuring out who you truly are, and they are there for the formative years much like straight, cis-people experience in their middle school and teen years. We have to delay so much to keep up with the lies to stay hidden/protected, and your Chosen Family are the first ones to see all of you as you truly are. Highly recommend. 10/10.

What is your relationship with your biological family (if any)?
I’ve touched on this before, but I love my family very very much. I come from a very diverse background, and I attribute their acceptance of me as a direct result of this very wide world view.

What do you (did you) like about dating as a LGBTQ person? What do/did you dislike?
To be fair, I have never dated in the age of The Apps, so I think my old school view of dating as a Queer person might not feel relatable to many current daters. Though Facebook did exist, I didn’t have a smartphone yet, so I only accessed it via desktop LOL.

When I first started dating, it was still when you’d be scared for your well being, so you didn’t hold hands, you kept room for the Holy Spirit between you, you often went out in mixed groups, anything to not bring attention or put a target on your back. The ability to be more open and act freely now seems so beautiful, and I hope the toxicity of the apps doesn’t take away from that.

Has race, ethnicity or cultural differences been a factor in who you seek out?
Never. Though I must say that the other party’s response to this was always very important to me. My family is a wonderful mix of Latino, Syrian and Black people. My maternal grandmother was white, but her family mostly disowned her when she married my grandfather, so I do not have any room or willingness to allow bigotry or fetishism into my or my family’s lives.

Have you had any difficulties dating or finding/keeping a relationship?
I’m a serial monogamist. I want to feel secure, both physically and emotionally. Not everyone has that priority when dating, so I have had some wonderfully fulfilling relationships and some very damaging ones too. It’s all part of the journey, figuring out what you need and how that matches up with what the other person needs.

What’s the most surprising thing you have learned about relationships from your perspective?
We’re all just human. We come to a partnership with all of our experiences and expectations; the other person meets you with their versions of those things too. I always assumed I would meet someone, and there would be sparks and then happily ever after starts!

But the biggest joys I have experienced in my relationship have always come from meeting or exceeding my partners expectations, or finding a solution that honors both of our experiences. I can look back and see that all of the things I thought were non-negotiable for me were honestly irrelevant and obsolete within the first three years of being together. And by valuing what we came into the relationship with as survival/earned experience rather than baggage, you learn and grow with and from each other.

Have you experienced heartbreak?
Oh yeah. In the moment, the heartbreaks seemed like the end of the life I was building toward. Each heartbreak was catastrophic. It wasn’t just the person; it was the whole future I’d arranged around them. But looking back, they taught me so much about myself and what I deserve and what I will and will not allow in my life.

Do you have any moments of joy, happiness or pleasure that you can share about being in a same-gender or queer relationship?
Our wedding contained thousands of moments I will carry with me until I die. To see both families, given and chosen, together dancing to Merengue, Salsa and Bachata. All of their smiles and tears as Mike and I turned around hand in hand after saying our vows. Our straight friends and family saying that it was the best wedding they’d ever been to (even years later we still hear this). The interactions between the two worlds were surreal and still get me choked up.

Are there any things that standard heterosexual relationships have that you feel are out of reach or that you wish you had or could achieve?
Ease of life! Quite often, I see heterosexual couples that just do not make sense, yet they are accepted without question. As Queer people we are constantly forced to make our own rules and navigate life outside of the typical/ordinary prescribed set of goalposts we were constantly exposed to. We have to put in an exponential amount of work to show people we are a family when, and I’m just being honest, I have never seen another straight couple that gets along or has as much fun with each other as most of the Queer couples I know. The love is palpable with The Gays.

Are you married? Have you ever wanted to be? Whatever the response, explain why and what your hopes, dreams and journey has been like.
I always dreamed of getting married and having kids, but I knew that was not allowed. I think that was one of the hardest parts to come to terms with as a young Queer person. Growing up with “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the Matthew Shepard murder on the news, I understood that I wouldn’t get to have the happy moments that the ordinary kids would eventually have.

Even a couple of years into my relationship with Mike, I never thought we would have the right to be married in this country. It’s scary to think what damage the current administration is doing to the LGBTQ+ youth that were born into a world thinking they would be accepted and then having those protections taken away.

Have you had a difficult time navigating the “roles” you should play in a relationship?
Knowing that we are choosing the life that suits us has saved Mike and I from ever feeling like there is a predetermined role we have to fill in this relationship. We are aligned in the trust that we will both always make the effort and decisions that feel right for us.

Any advice you’d give to someone younger than you who thinks it’s impossible to find love?
This life is yours. YOU get to choose everything you do. You will learn a lot of lessons, and the outcome will most likely not be exactly what you imagined, but at the end of the day, this life is an adventure that you are in control of. Don’t be afraid to follow your heart. Don’t be afraid to LOVE. Remember, it’s an infinite resource. Share it when you feel it.

BONUS:

We all need more inspiration. Recommend something that influenced or helped shape you significantly that you’d recommend to someone else.

Books: Singing From the Well by Reinaldo Arenas; A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham; Guapa by Saleem Haddad

TV Shows: In Living Color, Strangers With Candy, Downton Abbey

Movies: Labyrinth, Drop Dead Fred, C.R.A.Z.Y. by by Jean-Marc Vallée, Weekend by Andrew Haigh

Songs: “Young Hearts Run Free” by Candi Staton; “Lovin Is Really My Game” by Brainstorm; “Love Come Down” by Evelyn Champagne King; “Somebody Else’s Guy” by Jocelyn Brown

Play, Musical, Other Cultural artifact: The Wiz, Hello Dolly, Singin’ in the Rain

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It is her idea to have a date at the Japanese Garden to see the fall colors. I wanted it to turn into dinner and a sleep over, carrying glasses of wine or neat shots of whiskey up to the bedroom. With the lights off and the shades open, the three, ceiling-high windows would let the moonlight and the shadows of the forest in.

She hates to disappoint me, but she can’t do a sleepover. She texts saying “we can read poetry in the garden.” Is she kidding? Is this a metaphor I wasn’t getting? Gail hasn’t said “I love you” yet. We are both treading lightly, it’s only been eight months. I’m also struggling with the ending last year of my twenty-two year relationship. I thought I would be with her forever.

We stroll amongst the way-too-many loud people taking selfies with scarlet leafed maples. I notice we are also talking a lot. I’m impatient with the tourists, but remember we are all tourists. We sit on a bench in the Zen Garden. People tend to not linger here. It’s spare and, well, zen-like. I take in her spiky bright, silver hair, her blue eyes, her smile and those crinkly lines around her eyes that got me from date three. She pulls out a small, paper bound book with a pink cover. Love Poems by Pablo Neruda.

I am deeply touched by this romantic gesture. That she owns a Neruda book, and she knows to woo me with words. We turn toward each other. She opens the book. There is a heart shaped, folded piece of fuchsia paper stuck to the inside cover. It says To Gail. She flinches as if there was a flattened bee pressed between the pages. It flutters to the ground, and she reaches to pick it up.

I instantly know. This book was given to her by an ex, one of many she has. I try holding in the laugh that explodes out of me. She turns bright red, clearly having forgotten all about the heart-shaped Post-it living these years inside the Neruda. She reads it, reddens more and names the ex, one I only learned about recently. “I was supposed to choose my favorite poem and send it back to her.” We laugh again; she is flustered. And, she knows that I know.

I understand exactly how these things happen when you might be falling in love in your sixties. We’ve done it all before with someone else or with many others. She smiles at me again, looks down, turns the page and reads me a poem.

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I’m Alexander Leon, a writer, teacher and facilitator, based between Europe and Australia. I write the newsletter post-pride, which reflects on issues of queerness, belonging, and place (and accompanies me through the experience of relocating to my homeland). During the day, I freelance as an activist trainer, working with community organizers, charity workers, and politicians to support them in their changemaking work—from teaching communications strategy, to conflict resolution, to understanding oppression.

What is your age, where in the world do you primarily live, where did you grow up?
I’m 34 and have just returned to living in Sydney, where I grew up, having just spent 10 years away living in London and Lisbon.

How do you define yourself on the LGBTQ+ spectrum?
Functionally gay, culturally queer. Still recovering from the devastation that I am not bi in some way, as all the best people I know seem to be.

What is your relationship status?
I am single. I am in a period of intentionally focusing on my friendships as the most precious, sustained connections in my life. I have an eye open to romance, but just the one.

Do you have an “ideal” relationship status?
A friend of mine recently described himself as a “relational junkie,” in the sense that he is endlessly curious about the myriad ways that human beings relate to each other and is always hungry to explore the various complexities of how that shows up in his life. I loved his framing and I think I’m similarly inclined. I have no ideal relationship status, as long as I have a life full of rich, complex, imperfect relationships. I do enjoy romantic partnership, as it seems to be the domain where people are most likely to think intentionally of a relationship as a project that needs tending and care.

What is the biggest misconception about being single or in a relationship?
I think we’ve created a false binary in our culture where being single confers freedom and being in a relationship confers stability, with the latter being more valorized. The reality, as far as I have lived it, is that every human being is constantly walking a tightrope between these two needs, and your relationship status is just one of the contributing factors in that dance. You can be in a relationship and be “free,” and you can secure stability and safety as a single person. Essentially I’m saying: Beyond the economic realities, I wish we’d all accept that being single or in a relationship gets to mean what you want it to mean, rather than having some preordained cultural meaning.

When was your first intimate moment (holding hands, kiss, etc.)? Was it with someone you liked? Did you feel pressured into it?
Somewhere between 14-15 making out with a girl called Alice from my afterschool drama club whose entire mouth was scaffolded with a complex orthodontic mechanism which I’d never seen before or since. We went to the cinema, sat in the back row and experimented with kissing as soon as the lights dimmed. Bizarrely (because this was in vogue at the time) we had intentionally bought a packet of lemon drops to pass between our mouths as we kissed. Like most teenage memories, it’s ghastly, blood-curdling stuff.

How would you define love? Is it the thing you work at for a long period of time? Or is it the strong feeling you feel for someone right from the beginning for no reason?
I don’t profess to know. Love has hit me over the head, crept up on me like a sunset, simmered into a slow boil over a decade. I have loved things as deeply as I’ve loved people. I’ve had moments where I felt so wrung out on love for the ocean I’d just plunged into or the wild animal that’d come across my path.

I sometimes wonder if love is an experience that only comes to be when you speak it out. I always remember the first time I chance an “I love you” with a close friend or partner, and it often feels that in the moment of confession, or disclosure, the love becomes more coherent somehow. So maybe love becomes love when you notice it and it speaks itself into being. But who knows.

Does a relationship fill your deepest needs for closeness with a person? Or do you prefer not to share every part of yourself?
It can and it has often for me. But I think this is deeply culturally prescribed and I’m curious about what vulnerability looks like in relationships other than a primary romantic one. This seems particularly hard to do in male friendships, but I’m experimenting with my queer male friends on how we model vulnerability between us and create that closeness more intentionally.

As for sharing every part of ourselves—do we ever have the choice to share everything? How do we share the parts of ourselves that are unknown to even us? I share with my loved ones as much of me as I think they can or might want to hold, and regularly push myself (or am pushed!) to query my assumptions.

When did you come out to family, friends and others for the first time?
I deployed the Band-Aid technique and told everyone significant in my life within a 24 hour period at the age of 21 with a kind of reckless abandon. I’d been in a deep depression, and after a sleepless night during which I ran through the same calculation I always had (either I become straight or find a way to stop existing), something miraculously shifted and I just accepted that I was gay and a lifetime of pushing against this fundamental truth would eventually ruin me. So I chose to live. I rehearsed all night and then burst into my parents bedroom at 6:30 a.m. and—between sobs—got it all out. A few stunted phone calls, text messages, ill-conceived snapchats and hurried meet ups later, everyone I cared about knew.

Did you have any LGBTQ+ role models as a child or teenager? What do you remember about images of same-gender or queer relationships or messages you gleaned?
Honestly, no. I was so repulsed with myself as a child and teenager that the existence of anyone queer in my life or on TV felt like a stab in the guts. When deep shame lives in your belly, seeing someone overcoming that shame feels violent because it pokes at the festering wound within you. I treated queer adults with suspicion or contempt until it exhausted me, so deep was my conditioning. It makes me sad now, but it’s what I lived.

Are there any pivotal pop culture moments that you credit for teaching about love and/or relationships?
Music has pushed me through the other side of every break-up I’ve ever had. Kali Uchis, Ariana Grande, Caroline Polachek. I am terminally, irrepressibly gay.

Other than that, I credit queer Black writers like , , and for writing fiction that has taught me that gay sex and relationships can be messy, banal, plodding and not necessarily culminating in the death of us all in the end. Also it is important to see characters that you relate to being in love. It shows you that you can love, too.

Also, James Baldwin. Because, of course.

Do you have a Chosen Family?
I think of my close friends as an extension of my family, with all of the expected baggage. Sibling love is scrappy and conflict-laden and singular. My best friendships have a similar energy. We fucking love each other, and we aren’t afraid to rattle each other a bit, because we know neither of us are going anywhere.

What is your relationship with your biological family (if any)?
I love them, deeply. They accept me, they frustrate me, my parents have loved me in the most exquisite way in line with what they were capable of, with the expected hiccups along the way. I have spent much of my adult life away from my family, which has meant that I’ve been able to assess our relationships from afar as well as up close. I am lucky.

What do you (did you) like about dating as a LGBTQ person? What do/did you dislike?
I like that we get to make up our own rules. Straight dating seems awfully paint-by-numbers to me, whereas my dating life is sort of wacky and fraught because there’s no script to follow. Is this a date, is it just sex, what will that mean to us, what are we gonna co-create together without the guardrails of heteronormativity? It’s exciting!

Is it too pick-me energy to say I dislike “men”? Ha. No, I like us, I swear. I do find it harder to find men who are willing to externalize their sensitivity without a lot of patience and warming up, which sometimes gives me pause. Maybe it’s just having held so much in for so long, but I find that I’m quick to show parts of me that others need more of a ramp up to. I cry a lot. I don’t tend to have the same tension with women in friendships.

Has race, ethnicity or cultural differences been a factor in who you seek out?
I have only ended up in serious romantic partnerships with other people of color. This has been more serendipitous than intentional, but it’s nice to not have to explain. I just tend to be drawn to other people who have navigated migration, or racism, there’s a quiet kinship there. Plus we are so hot! So hot.

Have you had any difficulties dating or finding/keeping a relationship?
I’m wondering if a relationship is a thing to enjoy more than to keep? I don’t subscribe to the idea that the longevity of a romantic relationship is a marker of its success. I have had two serious boyfriends and I think of both of our entanglements as successes, despite their endings. I grew, they grew, we loved each other hard and learnt a lot. We moved through the grief and came out the other end battered but enriched. What more could you want?

What’s the most surprising thing you have learned about relationships from your perspective?
That there is freedom and joy in accepting that your relationship will end. Even if you find someone ostensibly perfect and spend the rest of your earthly days in partnership, one of you will die eventually, and leave the other to fend for themselves. People think of this as a kind of glum, I think it’s beautiful. I pursue relationships in the way I pursue life—celebrating that they are finite, striving to luxuriate in the moment, grateful for them when they are a part of my experience.

Have you experienced heartbreak?
Terribly. But I have had my heart broken enough now that, even at the apex of the grief when my world feels like it’s coming off its hinges, I can hold onto the quiet wisdom that I am learning through the loss, transforming into a better version of myself. And crying, a lot of crying.

Do you have any moments of joy, happiness or pleasure that you can share about being in a same-gender or queer relationship?
Showing affection in public was a last frontier for me in reckoning with some internalized shame. The first time I dared to hold hands with a partner, I was having a conversation with the most scared, wounded part of me the entire time. But I find a lot of pleasure in the defiance now. People stare and I like to think they’re ogling, because all goods things are worth ogling at.

Are there any things that standard heterosexual relationships have that you feel are out of reach or that you wish you had or could achieve?
The only thing I envy is the ease around family planning. I am fully prepared to, should the experience seek me, have a family one day in the way that queer people are able to. But I do think there’s something romantic about having a child with someone you love, and having that being be made up of parts of you both. But not all heterosexual people have access to that either.

Any good/bad advice you received from a friend or queer elder?
In the throes of heartbreak, a wise friend, 10 years my senior, prevented me from mass deleting photos of my ex boyfriend from my phone. I wanted them gone, convinced that the memories would only unearth pain if I kept them within reach.

“There’ll be a time where you’ll want to relive loving that hard again, and it will feel beautiful rather than harrowing,” he said.

And he was so right: I look upon that relationship now with such wonder and awe. I’m so glad I still have evidence to sift through and reminisce.

Any advice you’d give to someone younger than you who thinks it’s impossible to find love?
Any love worth pursuing should feel impossible, and sneak up on you like a small miracle. There’s power in waiting for the person who will see all the component bits that make up you and say, “Yes, this, please,” without you having to ask. Love is a great teacher, but so are many other things. The more I’ve really allowed others to love me, the more I’ve had the courage to see how it might feel to love myself.

BONUS:

We all need more inspiration. Below, please recommend something that influenced or helped shape you significantly that you’d recommend to someone else.

Books: Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde; Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin;
The Overstory by Richard Powers; Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

This essay is an excerpt from the forthcoming, inspirational memoir, Search for a Blessing, co-authored by Daniel Shenk, with Joyce Maxwell (Pandora Press, Canada, 2026)

In the late 1980s, at the same time that I was working as a scattered-site chaplain for Bailey House, a home for gay men with AIDS, I co-ran a weekly support group for people with AIDS and their caregivers. It was successful; people came from all over the city. On average, six or seven people came to a given meeting. In the course of five years or so, about 16 people who came to our support group died, including several I was very close to.

One day, a good-looking young man of medium height, fair-haired with brilliant blue eyes, walked in, and he made an immediate impact on me. And he kept coming back; he stayed. Edwin would change my life in so many ways in the short time we had with each other.

Because I was a leader in the group, it wasn’t professional for me to be open to a relationship. Although it wasn’t a professional group; I wasn’t paid to lead it. We had formed the support group as part of Judson Memorial Church’s pastoral outreach to people affected by the AIDS crisis.

But, about three months after Edwin joined, I stopped fighting my attraction to him and said, “You know, we should try to get together away from the group.”

He immediately responded, “Yes, yes, we should do that.”

We met up at Judson Church on Mother’s Day that year. He had a Volvo, so after the service we drove out to the Delaware Water Gap, about an hour-and-a-half outside the city, and went hiking through the woods. It was a bit rigorous, uphill most of the way. A stream ran alongside the path the whole way up.

Edwin had been sick a few months before, but by now he had his normal weight back. He was still a bit weak, and kept saying, “I can tell I’m not where I used to be physically.” But it was a wonderful day, a great way to formally begin our relationship.

Another reason that I had been resisting getting into a relationship was because I saw what was happening with everybody else who had AIDS. They were dying. And I didn’t want to go through it with somebody close. I tried to hold back, but being with Edwin felt so right. It was so good that I eventually stopped thinking about all these concerns and went for it. It was the beginning of a profound experience.

Edwin’s former partner had died in 1989, less than a year before Edwin and I met. Our being together so soon after the death of his former partner bothered Edwin. It piqued his conscience. He was afraid he wasn’t respecting his former partner enough. I never tried to argue about that at all. I let him run with that feeling because, at the same time, our being together felt so right.

One time, we were in a restaurant eating, and he suddenly broke down and started crying, saying: “It’s so different. Being with you is just so different.”

I think at that moment he was mourning the life he’d had with his former partner. I could have felt hurt, but on another level, it was a relief to be with a man who could love deeply and take relationships seriously.

At one point, Edwin went down to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to visit his family, and I followed him a week or two later. His family liked me, which was fortunate. He took me to see his former partner’s grave, which was in Raleigh, about 30 miles from where Edwin’s family lived. Edwin had taught at the University of Mississippi, and his former partner had been one of his students. It was a mutual, loving relationship that lasted until his partner’s death 10 years later.

At the time we met, Edwin had already survived his first bout of pneumocystis, the parasitic kind of pneumonia prevalent among people with HIV/AIDS. As I’ve said, it’s one of the key opportunistic infections, something that emerges when the immune system is compromised, but it can be treated. Edwin had come through his bout with pneumocystis and was regaining his strength. I had met him when he was on the upswing and had almost fully regained his health.

When Edwin got sick again, we had an experience where it became apparent to both of us that I was going to stick it out with him. At that time, I was working full time as the scattered-site chaplain with Bailey House. I had flown to Pittsburgh for an AIDS-related conference and returned in the evening after dark. I cabbed it from the airport to the hospital.

He was receiving treatment in a hospital in upper Manhattan at the time. When I walked into his room, he was lying on his bed with his back to the door. The curtains of the huge window were completely open. And he was lying on his side, looking through the window at the blackness. The minute I walked in the door, I saw his body tense—because he saw my reflection—and he smiled. I saw it mirrored in the window. He said later that was the moment that he knew we were together. And that’s pretty much the moment when I felt the same way.

Edwin was sick, he was hospitalized, but he was so happy to be with me. One evening I was massaging his feet, and he had this blissful smile on his face. A visiting friend asked, “Are you happy, Edwin?” Edwin just smiled.

Edwin was feisty and could be acerbic, prickly. For some reason, that side of him did not frighten me or put me off at all. But he was also nurturing and giving. He was quick to say exactly what he thought of people. But everybody who truly knew him also knew that he was a caring person.

I grew up as the child of Mennonite missionaries and had to leave that church in order to live an authentic life as a gay man and be ordained as a chaplain. So many straight people recoil from accepting gays in the church, and I wonder if that has to do with more than the perceived scriptural prohibitions. My sense is that their perception of sexual relations between same-sex couples is that it can only be gross and messy. But to be honest, is it not true that heterosexual sex can have its messy moments, too?

In committed heterosexual relationships, the sexual act is not always the most important dynamic between loving couples, and the same is true for many gay couples: The emphasis is on the emotional aspect that goes hand-in-hand with the physical. My observation is that when churches refuse to bless same-sex relationships, this contributes to the tendency towards promiscuity on the part of gay people. When religious communities don’t support same-sex relationships, a negative result is that LGBTQ+ people sometimes end up being more promiscuous. A young gay person belonging to a community of faith that affirms their same-sex attraction and blesses their same-sex relationship is more likely to be monogamous.

My relationship with Edwin did not involve genital sex. But to be sure, our relationship was sensual. I held him almost every night. Once, when he was sleeping and I was lying beside him on my back and holding his hand, I thought: “I can’t imagine him not being here.” At that moment, his presence and our love for each other was just so solid, so concrete.

Yes, our relationship was sexual in the broad sense of the term—sensual and playful. I believe that healthy sexual relationships consist of a fair amount of play. And sexual activity covers a broad range of expression—even bringing flowers to somebody that you love and are attracted to can be sensual.

Sometimes I feel that some people just don’t want to consider how beautiful and caring same-sex relationships can be.

Edwin lived in the upper reaches of Manhattan, way uptown. Inwood was (and is) a neighborhood where a lot of musicians live. Edwin was an accomplished bassoonist, a top-tier musician. He had taught music at the University of Mississippi right out of grad school. Then he moved to New York City, where he joined a group called Quintet of the Americas. They traveled all over the country giving concerts. Then his sickness forced him to leave the group; he couldn’t keep up.

During our three-year relationship, I kept my apartment on the Lower East Side and continued to pay rent but essentially stopped living in it. He wanted me to move to his apartment. He disliked my neighborhood. He saw it as too abrasive; drugs were being sold openly, right on the street.

Edwin and I took a trip to the Southwest together and explored open, spectacular areas that reminded me of the Rift Valley where I grew up in East Africa. To me, it was a deeply spiritual place. I felt like the land was alive—almost like it was seeing me. The land felt “present.”

I first wanted to see Bill McNichols, a good friend who had moved to New Mexico to apprentice himself to an iconographer named Robert Lentz. We had a short visit with the two of them in Albuquerque one evening, and then Edwin and I took off and did our own thing.

The Anasazi, who had lived in the area until around the 13th Century, were cliff dwellers. They built their homes in cliffs, and a key marker of their civilization can be found at Chaco Canyon. Their places are beautifully constructed. The stonework is impeccable. The stones fit perfectly with each other to the point that mortar was not necessary.

Going to Chaco Canyon had an energizing effect on Edwin. At certain places, you can climb without too much risk to the mesas. We hiked up to the top of one mesa and sat together. Edwin wore a red shirt that day, and he suddenly got up and ran across the plateau. I didn’t follow. I let him do his thing. He came back around 45 minutes later. He was just in this wonderful, transported place. We didn’t talk about it, just left it like it was. It left me feeling happy and lighthearted.

In only a few short weeks, Edwin once again became very sick.

Edwin had a long hospitalization at Roosevelt Hospital, the second one after I met him. Every evening, I went to the hospital after work, and I usually gave him a sponge bath. He sat in a chair close to the sink in the room he had to himself. I bathed him, and he kissed my body while I was sponging him.

After he was released from Roosevelt Hospital, he wanted to go back to Mississippi, where he could rest and be comforted by his mother’s home cooking. In his mind, he was going to regain his strength. I helped him get to the airport. I carried his luggage on board because he was really fragile. But he was able to walk on his own. He didn’t have a wheelchair, although he did make use of a cane. I got him on the airplane, and off he went. We communicated every day. Within two or three days of reaching home, he clearly was becoming much worse. He said that he wanted me to come down.

Edwin’s nephew picked me up at the airport when I arrived in New Orleans, and we drove straight to Hattiesburg and to the hospital.

Saturday night was rough. I was with him, just the two of us, through what was a restless night. At one point, he said to me, “You know, we really do have to talk. Know what I mean?” I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I nodded. He said, “Like when I was in Roosevelt Hospital, the way you used to bathe me every night, we were really close, weren’t we?”

And I said: “Yes we were.”

I concluded that by “really talking” he meant that he wanted to go back through the things that had happened with the two of us. We had been extremely close.

His older sister, Faye, arrived at the hospital early Sunday morning. I told her it had been a rough night, that he’d had a headache and difficulty breathing. Then I left, ostensibly to get some sleep. Edwin’s family came and woke me about two hours later to return to the hospital. Faye must have put the word out because, when we got to Edwin’s room, the family was all there, and immediately they motioned for me to come up and stand close by his head.

At one point, I was moved to simply say, “Thank you.” He didn’t speak but he looked at me quizzically as if to say, “For what?” And I said, “It’s really been good, hasn’t it?” And he nodded. There was no question about it. It really was good.

His siblings, his aunts and uncles were there; everybody who was supposed to be there was there. And that made it easier for everyone, especially for his mother. At one point, his brother said to Edwin, “We’re all here. We love you.”

When people are approaching death, often their breathing quickens because they are trying to get enough oxygen. A little after midday, less than an hour after I arrived, he died.

Edwin, much to the initial chagrin of his mother, had stipulated that he wanted to be cremated.

Right after Edwin died, we waited in the hospital room for the director of the funeral home. Edwin’s mother knew him well—it was a tight-knit community—and she had even served as a hostess for many funerals there.

When the funeral director arrived about 45 minutes later, we made it clear that cremation was Edwin’s wish. The director said it was possible but would involve sending his body all the way to Biloxi on the Gulf Coast, where the closest crematorium was. We would be required to retrieve the ashes a day later.

The arrangements were made, and then the director motioned everyone to leave the hospital room. Neal, Edwin’s youngest brother, was a tall, muscular man who had been a football star at the University of Southern Mississippi. As the others left, I motioned for Neal to remain in the room. I wasn’t ready to surrender control of Edwin’s body. Together, Neal and I covered Edwin’s body and transferred him to the gurney while the attendants from the funeral home stood by. Together, we wheeled him out of the room.

When we entered the hallway, Faye put her arm around her mother, and they fell in right behind us. We wheeled Edwin’s body into the elevator and down to the waiting van.

Two days later, Edwin’s nephew and I drove to Biloxi to bring back the ashes. The Mississippi countryside in the spring was beautiful. We took back roads the whole way down, and all the blossoms were out on the apple trees.

We returned just before a family gathering in the home of the grandparents. I gave Billie, his mother, the box with Edwin’s ashes, which were still warm. People had been asking where the ashes were to be scattered. One of his great aunts had come up to me and said that they should be at a place where Edwin’s mother could go and be able to say, “Here they are.”

I had taken on the role of moving things along. So, the day after the gathering, I got up early and walked around his grandparents’ property and found an open area beside a pond. It was shielded from the main house by a road and a clump of trees. I had taken a shovel with me, and I dug a hole there, close to the water. That afternoon, his sisters, Faye and Lynn, and his mother, Billie, and I placed the ashes in the hole and covered them with dirt.

I felt so privileged to be close to three such amazing women whom I was growing to love and respect. It was good.

At the memorial service, I spoke. I said that Edwin hated being sick and, more than anything else, up to the very end, he wanted to be physically healed. But when it became clear that this was not going to happen, I explained how he seemed to embrace a new awareness, which was how best to care for his family who were surrounding him with their unqualified love and concern. Because of this love, I said, Edwin’s last days were full of love and presence rather than abandonment and grief. Edwin’s last words to those who had gathered around him (which I committed to memory) reflected this reality:

“Will you be OK?” he said. And then, “I love you.” After a bit, he said, “I’ve come to realize just how much I do like all of you people.” He added: “I want all of you to know just how much I appreciate you.”

These are not the words of a bitter and isolated man, I explained at the memorial service. In his last moments, his concern was not about himself—it was about those he loved.

I’ve been in relationships before and since, but Edwin was the only one I truly loved. Even though what we went through together was at times very difficult, I’m humbled that we found each other. I’ll always be so grateful.

This essay is an excerpt from the forthcoming, inspirational memoir, Search for a Blessing, co-authored by Daniel Shenk, with Joyce Maxwell (Pandora Press, Canada, 2026)

We published Lindsey’s essay “Lost in Apalachicola” last week, which is an excerpt from the book, and details a time when Lindsey was traveling with a romantic partner and experienced some unexpected challenges during this unusual camping trip. As Lindsey writes:

“I’d fancied myself an adventurous spirit in need of toughening up, but instead I was dead weight. I had no useful skills to offer the group. I’d used travel like a magic trick, wanting liminality to hack my healing, but I wasn’t ready to let go of the past.”

In fact, I’d been on quite a road trip of my own when I spoke with Lindsey. I was tucked into my younger brother’s spare room in his new home in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I’d just driven up from my parents’ home in the Deep South where I’d also been busy guncling (I happened to see all five of my nephews and niece on this side of the family during this Southern sojourn).

I know the region of north Florida and South Georgia fairly well since I graduated from high school in Valdosta, Georgia. While it’s not a place I particularly thrive in, I do always find creative inspiration—from the storytelling culture to the food and hijinks that eventually ensue.

Later that day, I traveled to Nashville, where we were set to host QLP’s first live event in the South at The Porch on Saturday afternoon. I am thrilled to report that the event was a huge success, and I will share more dispatches about that soon enough.

Lindsey—who lives in the Hudson Valley of New York with her partner and two dogs and is always hiking, kayaking or cooking—and I talked about a lot of fun topics, including her honeymoon (and why I struggled suggesting destinations when I was an editor at OutTraveler), the distinct needs and struggles for trans and gender nonconforming travelers, and her favorite destinations around the world.

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I hope you enjoy the conversation. I’m curious what your favorite spots to visit are and if you have any hints, recommendations or travel stories you’d like to share. In fact, this chat inspired me to launch a flash nonfiction “contest” with a travel theme to see what you’ll submit. I’ll be sharing these details (and more prompts) in a separate post, but here’s how it works if you want to get started:

(Mini) Flash Nonfiction Essay Contest

Theme/Topic: My Perfect Day (of Travel)

Deadline: May 30 at 3 a.m. ET / Midnight PT

Please note: This will be a “free post” (meaning we won’t be paying contributors upon publication as we do with other essays) but you will receive a copy of Vol. 1 or 2 of
The QLP Quarterly zine.

Email us at queerloveprojectsub@gmail.com to take “The QLP Questionnaire.”
Plus, find out how to submit your original personal essay to The Queer Love Project.

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We pay our contributors, so your subscription and support is valuable! Thanks for reading.

As always, thanks to all who are supporting The Queer Love Project, which helps make the podcast available. We’re keeping it free for all since it offers valuable teachings. If you have the ability to upgrade to a Catalyst Member level, not only will you support this podcast and the rest of our mission, I’ll send you a copy of the QLP Quarterly zine and a T-shirt with our logo!

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is a bestselling author and a longtime contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He is widely recognized for his in-depth, narrative-driven journalism that explores complex American subcultures, identity, and social trends.I’ve followed his work for years, especially how he’s explored the complexities of gay marriage and how he’s been remarkably candid about his own struggles with sexual compulsion. His latest book is You’ve Changed: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation.

So I was thrilled to finally get a chance to have a deep dialogue with Benoit about it and his thoughts on other related topics.

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In the book, Benoit explores profound shifts in belief. Obviously all life is about change and how we adapt, but he had a specific question he was trying to answer. So I asked him to explain to our listeners why he decided to spend years researching and writing on this topic at this point in his career.

“I think, on the personal level, I have always been interested in this,” Benoit said. “I guess it started with addiction—because I wrote a book about addiction [America Anonymous]. It was mostly not about my own; I followed different people struggling with different kinds of addictions for several years. And I was really interested in this question of who gets better and who doesn't and why, and what's the difference and what are the techniques or what are the personality traits or the luck or what is it that means that some people recover and others don't?”

As Benoit continued to explain, his life got better in a lot of ways. “But there were these things that I was trying still to change about myself. I wanted to be able to be more open and vulnerable, both in my primary relationship and also I wanted to be a much better friend. And I wanted to connect to myself more.”

He’s been looking at identity for years, especially in relation to his former friend Michael Glatze, who he was an editor with at XY magazine in the 1990s. Benoit wrote a narrative journalism piece titled “My Ex-Gay Friend,” that was influential and even inspired a feature film, titled I Am Michael, starring James Franco and Zachary Quinto.

Because Benoit was interested in the ways “we broadcast our identities or hide our identities or explain them to others,” he interviewed experts and others (including his father) for the book You’ve Changed. At its core he was attempting to answer the questions: How much can we change, and what does it mean to change. And who gets to set the rules of what change is?

Since I'm curious about this kind of performative masculinity and friendship—and Benoit specifically brought up wanting to be a better friend—I explained that this type of queer love is one I’m very interested in too. What about platonic love with friends? Has there been a shift in that relationship that many self-identified men feel toward each other?

One thing that Benoit doesn’t go into great detail about in the book is his relationship with his primary partner. As he explained, both Benoit and his father married someone from the Czech Republic, which is an unusual coincidence. “I met my husband when he was randomly working for a summer after college in Boston, working as a lifeguard,” he explained. “And my relationship is very unusual in the sense that we are oftentimes not together. We work together as often as we can be, but he’s mostly in the Czech Republic, and I’m mostly here in Boston, although I’m there as much as four or five months a year during the summer and when I’m not teaching.”

The question of why his relationship has worked is one that Benoit is still curious about. “This kind of summer fling turned into 10 years together is really interesting. And I think there were so many things at the beginning that were like, ‘This is not going to work.’ There was the distance; there was the fact that we are completely different people. There’s the fact that we don’t share many of the same cultural references. I mean, there were so many reasons for it not to work, except that we adored each other and loved to take care of each other and laugh. But I don’t write about this in the book, but I do think it’s interesting, the power that I do write in the book that my therapist has been very helpful. And one of the ways that she was helpful is she let me talk for two years about I don’t think this is going to work.”

The next bit of insight is on that I want to make sure everyone pays attention to. As Benoit stated:

“The idea that we make a decision, that we choose who we’re going to love, and they make a decision to love us. I think we often talk about love as this kind of inevitable thing that happens, but there’s a decision that’s made. We make a decision. I’m going all in or I’m not.”

So that set me up to ask the question that I pose to all guests on the podcast and is at the core of our QLP Questionnaire: “How do you define love?” We started with the idea of romantic love, and Benoit took it in a fascinating direction, beginning by stating: “It is a feeling and it is a decision.”

My conversation with Benoit was so valuable, and we chatted about a lot of other important topics. I hope you’ll enjoy listening in and sharing your thoughts in the comments. You can order your copy of You’ve Changed at the link below.

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