We selected Rodrigo Dos Reis’ essay, titled “Some Journeys Stay,,” as the winner of our inaugural (mini) flash nonfiction essay contest (you can read it here), but we received so many fantastic submissions that we wanted to share more.

So, without further ado, here are six more short pieces (remember it was a 300-word restriction to encapsulate so much) that surprised us and gave us all the feels. Thanks to all those who shared their gorgeous, vulnerable writing—we had so much fun reading them all!

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For our 15-year anniversary, Katy and I went to an all-inclusive resort in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. She was 62 and I was 50, and we went on a day trip with a group of strangers. The excursion included zip-lining through the jungle into acavern filled with water. After that, we rappelled down a short distance into an underwater cave system, which we then snorkeled our way through.

A photographic moment was offered as two people, most of whom were heterosexual couples, had the option to stop halfway down and kiss, creating a yin-yang type formation. We witnessed it happen a couple of times, and I wondered what we would do. Would we kiss? Would we just keep going?

We hadn’t discussed it, though we did exchange a look after seeing it happen the first time. As we lowered ourselves down, we reached the point where the picture would be taken. Without a moment’s hesitation, Katy maneuvered toward me and we exchanged the most tender of kisses, full on the mouth. It lasted several seconds, not just a quick peck.

We could almost hear the astonished surprise of the guides as the photographer clicked away. Others may have been surprised by our kiss, but I had long learned of Katy’s boldness when it came to declaring that yes, we are a couple. Ironically, I’m the one who always knew my preference was for women. I had decades of history living life as a lesbian. But it was Katy, who came out later in life, that never hesitated to proclaim the nature of our relationship out loud. I couldn’t love her more for it.

###

Jackie is an indie author and lifelong writer. Her most recent book, Losing Katy: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Living Grief, is available now. Katy died in July 2020. You can read more of her work at JackieDisch.com

One wore a purple, button-down shirt with three buttons undone. The other? I can’t quite remember. Yet, evident in their entwined fingers and bright eyes, they both were incandescent for the coming evening.

“Just a couple of wild and crazy guys,” they laughed toward me with big, open smiles. I couldn’t stop looking at them. Their joy infected me.

My family met the men in a group taxi in Freeport, Grand Bahama. It was one day shy of my eighth birthday, and we were on vacation. We pointed ourselves toward dinner; these two sought nighttime adventure. I really hoped they found it.

Dad’s face was funny as the adults made small talk. He was polite enough to them, but their joy infected him negatively. I couldn’t understand why. Smiley, nice-smelling men with cool clothes were virtually nonexistent in my life. Like the rare, beautiful flamingos I loved at the zoo, these men—tall, confident, and entirely not of my world—were entirely different from me (a shy, awkward pigeon).

Later, Dad made jokes at their expense that I didn’t find funny. Worse, he convinced himself that I had been disgusted by this couple; that’s why I had been staring.

Dad still tells this story, and in the punchline, I’m the one appalled at the two gay men we met that time in the Bahamas. I’ve corrected him many times, but the truth would ruin his narrative. He’s not a homophobe. Never has been.

At 36, I finally let myself recognize that I’m agender. Perhaps Dad’s disgusted reception of two gay men’s pure joy is part of why it took me 36 years to come out. Maybe, their joy partially explains why I’m thrilled to finally be me—not a pigeon at all, but a colorful, vibrant Black-throated Mango.

###

I’m driving 300 miles south to Ashland, while Gavin drives 300 miles north to Portland. At some point, assuming physics works out, we will pass each other on I-5, have the opportunity to give each other an air hug at 70 miles-per-hour. Gavin and I have shared so many hugs over the years: hungry hugs, cuddly hugs, crying hugs. We’ve hugged each other as dykes, and as fags, and as the non-binary super duo, “Butch and Boy Moving Co.” (Do not ask us to help you move. Though we’re adorable, we will accidentally break your shit.)

This particular hug will be at warp speed because we’re apartment swapping for the long weekend. I live in gay-ass Portland. Gavin lives in the wilds of Southern Oregon.

When we were young, we dated the same polyamorous trans guy. Then we each broke up with him. Then a few weeks later Gavin answered my Craigslist ad. Gavin pretended to not know it was mine. He didn’t tell me that until years later.

It’s many more years later now. I’m driving deeper into the woods, with my partner’s hand on my thigh, no reception. Gavin is driving to Portland for a play party. He has a key to my apartment dangling from his keyring; I have a key to his place swinging from mine.

As a teenager, when I longed to be a queer adult, this is precisely what I had in mind: to be in relationships that straight people have no vocabulary for, to take trips separately while you share a path, to know your partner is about to fuck you in your ex’s bed, and that your ex is about to pull on their boots on your couch before being engulfed by leathermen. To be loved in multiple cities at the same time.

###

Driving down a Costa Rican highway, still an hour out from Jaco, I think, The good thing about dating me is that I’m thrifty and proactive. The bad thing about dating me? The “thrifty” flights I proactively booked got us into Puerto Rico at 10 p.m., put us at the rental car place at 11, and at a cash-only toll booth with $17 USD, two credit cards, and zero Costa Rican colóns at 12:30 in the middle of the night.

An attendant lets us pass, but he warns, in broken English, about the two tolls ahead that we likely won’t make it through. It’s the first time I’m embarrassed around Andrew, my boyfriend of only a year. In my exhaustion, I’d forgotten cash. Now, we’d be stranded and sloths would slowly drag us into the jungle. And it was all my fault.

“Pull off here,” Andrew says, signaling to an off ramp.

Pulling into the parking lot, I say: “I don’t know Spanish.” He shrugs, exiting the car. “I don’t know Spanish!” I repeat.

A small crew enjoys drinks at an outdoor bar. I approach and pull out my pockets—in the way a white man who only knows English (and five semesters of French) does out of desperation. Then Andrew starts speaking in tongues, quickly and deliberately. The people start pulling out coins and paper, putting them in my hand. “De nada,” I say, realizing I’ve chosen the wrong phrase and gratefully make my way back to the car.

I suppose I had become so used to not knowing Spanish that I never considered that someone else might.

“I can’t believe I remembered that,” Andrew says, smiling and pleased with himself. We don’t pass another toll booth all the way to Jaco.

We crossed the post-stamp parking lot, dodging surfboards and waving at children. The sand crept up the concrete ramp as if it was trying to escape the beach. Walking along the surf, we got as close as we could without getting our feet wet. I gestured to the jutting sandstone rocks that towered over the water, telling you about my trips here as a child. The dune never seemed to diminish in size, even as I grew.

I wondered how it appeared through your eyes. I could recall the taste of Oregon summers; blackberries plucked from bushes and clam chowder served in sourdough bread bowls.

Without all that background, how would the coast of my childhood compare to your own sun-kissed Atlantic summers?

I promised the end of the hike just around the bend. When we crested the hill, we emerged through a handful of trees to the lookout point. We stood together, my back pressed into you, and watched the waves crash against the pale red and brown rocks.

You pointed to a smaller rock, at the base of the huge sea stack, questioning where it had gone. We yelped when we realized that it wasn’t a rock, but a whale. Hands shielding our focused eyes, we stood for ages, counting a whole pod of whales roaming in the water below. In all my years visiting, I had never seen whales on that beach before.

You emptied your pockets and I carefully stowed each item as we prepared to descend the dune. At my encouragement, you ran down the slope, allowing gravity and sand to propel your body toward the beach waiting below. We laughed like kids, like I had as a kid in that same place doing the same thing so many years before.

###

She said she was going to a wedding in New York. I said I was visiting my dad in Florida. Together, we flew to New Orleans.

Our love was new, bright, and raw; our collision years in the making. In northern Michigan, my ancestors are buried in a cemetery she drove by every summer as a child.

“I have a friend I think you’d like,” she was told by a mutual friend after moving back to the Bay Area from New York City; the suggestion left on the table, unexplored.

When we were younger, we both worked at the dykey cafe in Oakland, our stints not quite overlapping. When we met, finally, the feeling of “there you are” was overwhelming. “Here I am,” we told each other with our eyes and hands and mouths.

Decades of decisions lead us to the Big Easy. Fingers dusty with powdered sugar, lips stained with red wine, we stumbled through the city at night; pens in hand and cameras in our bags, we wrote at cafes during the day.

For a moment, we forgot our lives back in San Francisco, where we worked together. That reality was a million miles away. The shower in our Airbnb was covered in a wild mosaic, proudly created by the gay man who owned the apartment. Bright, broken pieces of ceramic framed a doll’s head over the handles. We imagined a life in that apartment, the doll head greeting us each morning, music on every corner lulling us to sleep at night.

We knew that we were on the cusp of a future set in motion generations before us. We followed that feeling, and in October flew back to New Orleans to celebrate 10 years married, our eight-year-old daughter at our side.

Thanks again to all those who submitted your work. Even if we didn’t publish your piece in this round, don’t see it as a rejection: You’re all winners to us!

Remember, that we’re always open to essay submissions. Plus we recently launched our poetry section (read Riley’s manifesto on her plans and submission guidelines), and we are interested in publishing other interviews, reviews and think pieces that center on various aspects of queer love.

If you haven’t been listening to the Queer Love Podcast, the latest episode will be available soon, and you can catch up here.

You can also subscribe to the podcasts via your favorite platform—including YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

As you know, we keep all of our words free, and if you want to support our mission, please consider upgrading to the annual paid tier:

It’s only $30!

Laura Leigh invited me to join as a guest on the (Un)seen podcast, which has the tagline “queer, millennial life unfiltered.” Well, as someone who has always identified as Gen X (although now we have a micro-distinction of being a “Xennial”), I was happy to chat about the Queer Love Project and more.

You can watch or listen to the episode here:

I was eager to have Laura Leigh and her co-host, Erica Bacon, join me for our latest episode, recorded during LGBTQ+ Pride month and now available to get you in the mood for whatever parade, party or celebration you are preparing for this weekend.

First, I was curious why these friends, both queer mothers with children, launched a podcast together.

“I think, especially as female-identifying queers, you reach this age and—as a woman—nobody gives a shit about your voice, your opinion, any of it,” Laura Leigh explained. “So I think a lot of starting this podcast was: If we feel like we’re not part of the conversation, there’s probably a whole queer community out there, people of a certain age. We’re not the young ones anymore. We’re not hip who also feel that way as well.”

Erica agreed, saying that she never fit into the typical gender binary, the butch-femme choices. “I am a female gay boy,” Erica said. “There’s no other way to explain it. And I don’t see a lot of myself represented; people my age. … So I think visibility is really important as well. And just taking a risk and putting yourself out there and saying what you need to say. If we can impact and change the life of one person, I think it’s meaningful.”

We had a wonderful conversation that touched on why Laura Leigh uses “sapphic” as an umbrella term rather than lesbian, being queer mothers entering middle age, the “power of failure” and what Pride month means. Erica also explained why she launched PinkRobinShop and how it’s evolving.

“I had this idea that I really wanted to have a marketplace for queer-owned brands, vendors, you’re selling something online. I wanted to put it all in one spot to make it easier for people to find and support queer people,” Erica explained. “It turns out that’s really hard. So I spent a lot of money building out the platform, and I do have this brilliant day job that does pay my bills. It took a lot of time, and I couldn’t see it turning the corner without something else giving. The more Laura and I talked about building up this podcast, I’m like, ‘You know what? Maybe it’s more about the conversations. Maybe it’s more about written material. Maybe it’s more about having a podcast, maybe the online magazine that we put out there.’ But I still think it’s in toddler stage of what it’s going to grow into. And it’s just a matter of keep pounding the drum and getting our names out there and getting people to follow.”

I ended the episode with a new “rapid-fire” question segment, so you don’t want to miss Laura and Erica’s responses, which begins around the 30-minute mark.

Thanks again for listening to the Queer Love Podcast. You can also like and follow the podcast on other platforms, including YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts (as well as other podcast platforms).

We also have an Etsy page where you can find some of our merch!

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We received so many fantastic submissions to our inaugural (mini) flash nonfiction essay contest. Since it was restricted to a 300-word count, it was no easy assignment! We selected Rodrigo Dos Reis’ essay, titled “Some Journeys Stay” as the winner (you can read it below).

But we couldn’t stop there. We plan to share several other submissions that surprised and delighted us in a separate post in the coming days.

We asked Rodrigo to respond to the QLP Questionnaire as well (which we will publish in full shortly), and we wanted to share a few things we learned from his responses.

First, here’s his short bio, in which he explains that he primarily focuses on poetry:

“I grew up in Minas Gerais, Brazil, where the region’s rich cultural heritage, historic landscapes, and quiet beauty shaped my creative perspective from an early age. Later, moving to São Paulo exposed me to a vibrant world of fashion, art, and diversity, expanding my understanding of design and self-expression.

“Today, living in Germany, I draw inspiration from the intersection of cultures and the constant dialogue between existing and living. My journey across these places influences both my work in fashion and my passion for writing. Through design and words, I explore themes of identity, movement, memory, and beauty, seeking to create meaningful connections between my Brazilian roots and the international experiences that continue to shape my vision.

“I find a deep sense of peace in writing poems. For me, it’s a way to give shape to fleeting emotions. Each poem is a bridge between my inner world and a shared human experience.”

I was married when I met him. Maybe that’s why everything felt doomed from the start. There was no love left in my marriage, only silence and fights.

It was a cold night in Berlin. We had already talked before through an app. He wore a leather jacket and cowboy boots. We met at a Christmas market, too brightly lit to feel real. The lights reflected on the melting snow, everything slightly feverish. He looked at me as if he already knew who I was before I even opened my mouth.

When he kissed me, snowflakes melted between our faces, and for the first time in a long while, I felt my body come back to life.

The next morning, I woke up before him. I remember his boots thrown near the bed and his blue eyes crossing the white light of the room when he opened them. We didn’t have much time, but enough to love.

We traveled to Paris as if changing cities could erase guilt. We walked through narrow streets, stepping into thrift stores to escape the cold. Between one kiss and another, we tried on old coats, imagining who had once been loved inside them before us. At night, we danced through empty streets until I forgot my own name.

I remember spinning under the green light of a pharmacy, as if I could fly. In that moment, I understood something simple: I was still capable of being loved.

But our love didn’t last. Maybe it never could. Yet some journeys stay in the body like snow that takes time to melt. Even today, I remember the light of that pharmacy drawing a circle in the sky while he held my hand.

***

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Thanks again to all those who submitted your work. It was no easy task to select just one—and you’re all winners to us!

Remember, that we’re always open to essay submissions. Plus we recently launched our poetry section (read Riley’s manifesto on her plans and submission guidelines), and we are interested in publishing other interviews, reviews and think pieces that center on various aspects of queer love.

If you haven’t been listening to the Queer Love Podcast, the latest episode will be available soon, and you can catch up here.
You can also subscribe to the podcasts via your favorite platform—including YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

As you know, we keep all of our words free, and if you want to support our mission, please consider upgrading to the annual paid tier:

It’s only $30!

Subscribe now

In a universe where James Baldwin’s sentences, uplifted from seven books, swirl like tides, it was somewhat unfamiliar, exciting in its newness. For a few years now, fans have been re-posting it on social media. I’ve seen it in all types of memes: colorful fonts encircling his wise face, photos of embroidered pillows, framed calligraphy, always acknowledging the words as Baldwin’s:

The warm words remind us of love’s capacity to inspire, to redeem, to heal. For me, they spur memories of the discovery, so many years ago, of my own “clear-eyed loving person.” The words make me want to fall in love again, or rediscover the love I already have. All my friends and various strangers connected through social media are right to share its hopeful idealism.

The problem is: The words aren’t Baldwin’s. They don’t even sound like him. Maria Popova wrote them in an essay about Baldwin, titled “The Light Between Us,” in The Marginalian. Her words about the gentle and steadfast and life-saving work of love reflect her experiences as a contemporary white woman, a Bulgarian native living in the United States, a beloved public intellectual.

While I admire Popova and want her to get credit for her words, I can’t stand it when they’re misattributed to James Baldwin. He would never have written those words. “This quote is by Maria Popova, not James Baldwin, but she was writing about him,” I responded to a post from my friend Mary. Eventually I keep this sentence in a Google doc so I can import it when others make the mistake.

After nagging about it over a dozen times, I admonish myself. Stop correcting people! Stop being an annoying perfectionist! Why does it matter so much? Since the upsurge in reliance on large language models like ChatGPT and Claude to write for us, threatening to so many artists, I feel an even greater urgency when it comes to honoring a particular writer’s distinctive voice. If you plug the quote into ChatGPT, for example, and ask it to tell you where the words originated, it will tell you it’s Baldwin—it’s “deeply Baldwin-esque in spirit”—although there is some question about the true author.

Like so many of his readers, I have loved and read and re-read James Baldwin since I was in high school. Especially in the last few years of racial violence, global extremism, and war, my astonishment at his prescient wisdom has grown. He has lighted the way for understanding when I was overwhelmed, even on occasion bestowed a flash of hope that humanity can redeem itself through the power of language. (Nicholas Boggs’ recent biography, Baldwin: A Love Story, has been hugely popular for a reason.)

Baldwin was a queer, African American firebrand during an era when both identities were targeted with contempt and violence—and how much, really, has changed? His literary fingerprints, his authorial voice, reflect that. Part of the annoyance I feel when I notice another misattribution is that the mistake dishonors his work, his struggles, the expansive, unflinching, never unfeeling vision that streamed into his hard brilliance. It’s a moment when he is strangely not seen, talked over, when so much of his work was about shedding light on what is invisible, unspoken, and ignored. The irony is intolerable.

Let’s look at those fingerprints. The style is the first clue.

The drum thump of those two broken phrases and the third that carries the rhythm and starts the next sentence reflect the nuanced sensibility of a poet like Popova. It’s marked with a flash literary sensibility, the era of the burst, the tweet, the single word exclamation. I’ve scoured Baldwin’s work to see if he ever wrote in such fragments. He didn’t. What he usually did was craft intricate sentences pulsing with drama and emotion, echoes of Sunday sermons in Harlem, a near-symphonic melding of language and urgency. That’s why we love him. But like most midcentury writers he wrote in complete sentences.

The reference to a “clear-eyed loving person to beam it [love] back” betrays some of his philosophical and experiential differences from a contemporary writer like Popova. Baldwin wrote a lot about love. He had compassion for characters who were searching for it, vainly, against forces of moral convention and racial prejudice. “Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up,” he tells us darkly in Nobody Knows My Name (1961).

I’ve read the tragic love story Giovanni’s Room about 10 times since I was in high school. There is no more absurd mission than to pick it up again, intent on finding a beaming, cleareyed, loving person. Set in Paris, the 1956 novel—controversial, nearly unpublishable in its day—explores the forbidden love between a bisexual white man, David, and an Italian man, Giovanni.

Early in the novel an older queer man, Jacques, tells David: “Somebody, your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour—and in the oddest places!—for the lack of it.” The reader hopes his bitter words won’t be true, but, sadly, it describes every romantic relationship in the novel. In this midcentury world, so much of it based on Baldwin’s experiences as an expatriate, the pursuit of same-sex love is enshrouded in shame, lies, obfuscation, and terror. A hostile overlay of homophobia, alluded to without being explicitly identified, except as “illegal” and “immoral,” makes it difficult to see anything apart from the societal rules the characters violate. Not only is that beaming, clear-eyed, loving person absent, but the opposite is abundantly painfully apparent: a world saturated with shame and its counterparts: distortion, irony, lies.

Still in Giovanni’s Room, I went looking for examples of “Gentle work. Steadfast work. Lifesaving work”—evidence of pure romantic devotion and commitment—but that was as futile as looking for the clear-eyed, loving person. While on the surface David is conflicted and impulsive about his same-sex desires, at a deeper level he’s just understandably terrified of the social repercussions. There is no “life-saving work” in a story which begins gloomily with the certainty that Giovanni, behind bars, set to face the guillotine, will die by the end.

Is there a pasaage about love that is most truly reflective of Baldwin’s voice? I might choose this one from Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968): “Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.”

In a hostile world, with racial contempt and homophobia as available as oxygen, this more muted statement—love trembling in the distance like a mirage, obscured in a haze of shame, the hope of another generation—is closer to his truth. Whether it’s friendship, family or romantic relationships, for people on the margins, in a world saturated with shame and contempt for who we are, it’s a painful lifelong struggle to see ourselves or others clearly.

So I keep gently correcting people. I want to honor the experiences that formed James Baldwin—and his righteous anger about those experiences—that made love so riddled and unreachable. By naming the shame and self-loathing and terror that characterize the doomed romance between David and Giovanni—forces that also weighed heavily on him—he helps all of us, queer and straight, to transcend its limitations, to break free, for the more expansive, light-filled forms of love that Popova describes. That everyone deserves.

Wayne Scott is a writer and psychotherapist in Portland, Oregon.
His memoir, The Maps They Gave Us (Black Lawrence Press, 2025) was a finalist for both a Lambda Literary Award and the Oregon Book Award.

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My name is Sandy Sahar Gooen, he/him or my name’ll do. I’m a freelance theater maker in NYC. Sometimes I’m onstage, mostly off as a music team member/writer/SM/other hats as needed. I do advocacy for trans musicians with TEMPO (@theetempo). I am a big lover and supporter and involved in other orgs including Broadway Cares and RISE. My shows include It Takes a Village, Pass/Fail, friEnDs, and, the current project, Twink Piece. I also write on Medium about theater and queer and Jewish stuff. Sandysahargooen.com

Getting Close

Trans Thought Leader: The Complex Politics of Being a Man

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How do you define yourself on the LGBTQ+ spectrum?
The language I most often use is queer man of trans experience. I’m somewhere on the bi spectrum but primarily “gay” and the gender label I use is “man,” but my experience of that is informed by being queer and trans.

Do you have an “ideal” relationship status?
I do. My ideal relationship status is with Shawn Mendes. I’m just kidding. Unless. No, seriously. My actual dream relationship is a primary partner with some form of open understanding around physical things, or as I like to call it, a “monogamish gay marriage.” I also think it’s important to have close friends as other loved ones but for me I’d love to find one special romantic someone.

What is the biggest misconception about being single or in a relationship?
That being in either arrangement determines a sense of being complete/incomplete.

When was your first intimate moment? Was it with someone you liked? Did you feel pressured into it?
I was dating in preschool. Nearly all my friends as a little kid were boys, and I was lucky that kissing boys wasn’t nearly as stigmatized for me as my masculinity was. I received pressure for other activities later in my life, but when it came to my very early years, I was just a very affectionate kid, who eventually had to rein it in.

My early sex life was a lot of sneaking around… a lot of “Am I gay? Am I bi? What’s up?” And it’s only when I got my gender settled that sexuality made more sense.

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?
Ok so. Hear me out. Love is neither of these for me. Here are a few words related to these examples given of effortless feelings for someone or the things that are the result of working for a long time.

Infatuation and limerence are both forms of intense desire. Infatuation isn’t deep, and it isn’t based in much. Limerence is a little more deep, but it’s all in one person’s head. It can often look like an obsession, a crush, unrequited feelings. And both of these are NOT all love is.

A relationship is what you work at; we have relationships in so many different shapes. And the depth and work to which you are alluding is built on intimacy, a closeness and trust, and commitment, a bond and active pursuit of connection and responsibility to one another.

Love is the feeling that underscores all these things and more. Love takes many shapes, too. For example: familial love, platonic love, romantic love, admiration, lust… Love is a relational thing, these other things are how love manifests and is expressed.

Does the relationship fill your deepest needs for closeness with a person? Or do you prefer not to share every part of yourself?
I wish I could have every need met. It would be really cool if one person met them all. I’m finding it’s realistic to hope more needs are met and that maybe they will not all be met by a primary partner.

When did you come out to family, friends and others for the first time?
Ongoing journey since I was a tween, taking some stops on the full spectrum.

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 will share that while I have many icons, I haven’t felt like the people like me have relationships like I want. Maybe Elton John is close?

Do you have a Chosen Family?
I do! I have queer elders and queer siblings and am a queer mentor/parental figure to some folks. I feel very connected to a greater network. And that love runs deep.

What is your relationship with your biological family (if any)?
I’m the stereotypical mama’s boy. We’ve had our ups and downs but she is the person with whom I am the closest. I definitely have relationships with much of the rest of my family but we love each other a LOT.

What do you (did you) like about dating as a LGBTQ person? What do/did you dislike?
I like finding ways to express ourselves authentically and beautifully. I dislike feeling like I’m not enough partly because of who I am, and the experience of “compare and despair.”

Have you experienced heartbreak?
The most profound experiences of heartbreak I have had stem less from the loss of romantic or sexual partners, and more from the loss of friends, mentors, others I have held close… in some cases, people I have spent several years loving. Heartbreak is one of the reasons I struggle to form intimate relationships.

Do you have any moments of joy, happiness or pleasure that you can share about being in a same-gender or queer relationship?
T4T is in many cases used to refer to relationships where both partners (or more, if that’s what floats your boat) are trans. I am not exclusively T4T, however, in many contexts, I love what it stands for. A sense of equality and mutuality, the underlying love and respect and understanding. T4T can be applied to friendships, to colleagues, to looking out for one another… but in many cases, T4T is also about sex and relationships. The sex is incredible (sorry mom and dad). T4T also liberates me from the quest for cis men’s approval, a quest that I definitely hope to outgrow.

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 not feel a desire to be explicitly heteronormative, but I have to fight the impulse to be homonormative, aka: fit the “respectable gay” models for being.

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’ve done the open relationship thing, and been a “special guest” for others more often… I don’t think I can do a polycule.

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’d love to get married. I had the fortune of going to two LGBT weddings of chosen family members this past year, and I was part of the ceremony for the one between two lovely men I am close to. I’m big on spiritual and cultural things, and I hope to find a way forward someday.

Have you had a difficult time navigating the “roles” you should play in a relationship?
I have! Prior to transition, I was constantly being told I didn’t measure up to what a woman “should be,” but now I do not measure up to what a man, trans or cis, “should be” either, and I think that I want to do away with any of that recreation of cis or hetero stereotypes.

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: I have endless lists… but the ultimate collection of stories that I recommend to anyone who is even remotely adjacent to gay men is Why are F*****s so Afraid of F*****s by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and the trans guys specifically need to read We Both Laughed in Pleasure, which is the collected diaries of Lou Sullivan. Also, A Trans Man Walks into a Gay Bar by Harry Nicholas.

TV Show: There have been many TV shows, but the BBC’s Beautiful People is forever that show for me.

I first encountered Emma Copley Eisenberg’s writing through her debut novel Housemates. The novel is many things: a love letter to Philadelphia, a road trip narrative, the story of two generations of queers artists figuring out how to look at the world and at each other. It’s a story which asks its readers to consider the question of if art can be the thing that saves us. It’s not an easy question to answer, but Housemates guided me in forming my own beliefs about art and salvation. It’s true art can be the thing that saves a person (I know it saved me), but it cannot be the only thing and it cannot be an act which happens in isolation. It has to be paired with investment in our communities, attentive curiosity to the world around us, and continuous care toward the people in our lives. Those are the things that keep our art and our souls alive.

Needless to say, reading Housemates launched a deep love and commitment to Eisenberg’s work, including her first book The Third Rainbow Girl, her short stories, her essays, and her Substack Frump Feelings. Eisenberg’s latest short story collection Fat Swim, released April 28th from Hogarth, is built on so many of the things I’ve loved about her previous work while being its own uniquely vibrant project.

Buy 'Fat Swim'

The stories follow a collective of linked characters dealing with questions of embodiment, love, queerness, and power in the greater Philadelphia area (a city Eisenberg has continually committed to bringing onto the page for all of her readers). The cast of characters and the threads that connect them speak to a wide range of human experiences: a Boomer mother works to understand her queer polyamous child; an aspiring essayist follows a brochure to a mysterious place known as Camp Sensation; a young trans research assistant helps his older boss find men to have sex into order to fuel his creative process (author side note: can we please have more older queer sex in fiction?).

Each of these characters has their own lives, experiences, and ability to make decisions (some good, some bad). But they are unified by a set of questions. Where does our self begin and end? What happens when we are asked to distance ourselves from our bodies? And perhaps, most importantly: What might it look like for us to come back?

The title story, “Fat Swim,” follows an eight-year-old girl named Alice living in Western Philadelphia falling in love with a group of five fat women who come to swim at her local pool. I don’t say the word love lightly. I say it because that’s how she describes it and that’s what it is. Love. We see these women as the beautiful vibrant people they are, something rarely given to fat characters in fiction. So often when fat characters are described they are composed of rushed details, simplified down to their weight, and cast with judgemental renderings based on warped moral assessments of what their bodies “should” be. This is when they even appear at all.

Alice quickly becomes fascinated with the women, darting across her street each Wednesday afternoon to be around them despite her father’s concern. She’s at the age where the messages around “good” and “bad” bodies are pushed into the lives of children, interfering with their ability to establish a relationship to their body on their own.

In describing who these women become to young Alice, Eisenberg writes:

One of the many things I’ve come to admire about Eisenberg’s work is the way she values the wisdom and power older people can give to others as they are coming of age. Forces in this world are committed to making fat people feel their bodies are disgusting or unworthy. That’s an unforgivable thing to put on anyone, especially a child. The women Alice encounters at the pool affirm that her body is hers to live in, not a problem she needs to solve.

Alice’s infatuation with the women at her local pool is just one of the many types of underwritten love and human complication we see playing out across the collection. Fat Swim is packed with beautifully written descriptions of queer polyamory. It shows the ways a neighborhood business can bring people together with something as simple as a free birthday shot. Joy is baked into the bones of the work but, with those joys, comes the harder realities of the human experience. In “Beauty,” a middle school girl latches onto a fat makeup vlogger, forming a friendship which makes the vlogger examine her past being run out of the beauty business she helped start. In “Swiffer Girl,” a woman who wants to try for a baby with her partner spirals back into an obsession with a sex video made by a fellow high schooler in the early 2000s. In “The Dan Graves Situation,” a graduate student advisor is asked to follow up with one of her students after reports of harassment and comes to see the darknesses he’s been living with. Each one of these stories is delivered with an honesty and generosity we so often struggle to give to ourselves.

The brilliance of the collection is matched by the brilliance of Eisenberg’s advertisements for it. Back in September 2025, Eisenberg was awarded $5,000 dollars alongside an estimated 500,000 other authors whose copyrighted books were illegally downloaded and used by the AI research company Anthropic to train its large language model. Eisenberg used that money to rent a billboard in Philadelphia just before Girard Avenue on I-95 North. The billboard read: “Your gut is a terrible thing to lose.” The words were superimposed over a photograph by Philadelphia artist Devon Dadoly. The bottom corner showed the the website link she created with her partner Art alongside the collection’s release.

Renting a billboard feels like the most embodied way to advise a book and is reflective of the collection’s mission. AI wants to disconnect us from our bodies and our experiences as much as possible. It pushes us away from our minds and our process, trying to make us only see the parts of ourselves valued by apps and the powerful people that run them.

Reading Fat Swim and following Eisenberg’s work has been bringing me back into my body these past few months. In August of 2024, I moved from Ohio to the Bay Area, following a job and the mission statement of a particular school. Most people out here assume the regional change was an automatic positive and that I should be grateful to have left Ohio. People throw out the kind of judgmental comments and jokes that I find to be both boring and misguided coming from mouths that haven’t spent real time in the places they are putting down. It’s true I am happier now than I was two years ago, but that has everything to do with my job and nothing to do with the “lack” people project onto middle America. The truth is I was able to live in my body and in my brain in Ohio that I’ve felt slipping away since I moved to Silicon Valley.

To be clear, I’ve found a lot to love about living in California and the people out here. But so much of what and who I’ve come to love is being threatened. Each day I see the interconnected manifestations of big tech companies, diet culture, and late-stage capitalism weighing on my students, my friends, and my neighbors. Reading Fat Swim wasn’t a magical wand that took those forces away. But it was a reminder no one and no thing can force a gap between our bodies, our minds, and our humanity if we don’t let them. The self is worth fighting for.

Gen Greer (she/her) is a dog lover, runner, and slasher enthusiast. She’s dedicated the last few years of her life to writing a queer survivor-centered reimagining of Lolita from the perspective of Dolores Haze. Instagram: @doloresneverlolita

Find more of ’s writings at Frump Feelings~

Frump Feelings

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Hello from my couch where I am blissfully doing nothing this holiday weekend except scrolling through people’s public transactions on Venmo. I love seeing who is buying who a pedicure and which housemate is in charge of paying the rent…

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a month ago · 105 likes · 24 comments · Emma Copley Eisenberg

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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.

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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.

Email Us

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