The 2024 QLP Essay Roundup
Maybe you missed one (or a few) over the past few months. It happens! Now's the time to take a few minutes to dip into the lives and loves of these 17 personal essays.
Wow! It’s been quite a year, and I’m so proud of all that we’ve accomplished with The Queer Love Project so far. So many excellent personal essays, fascinating answers to the QLP Questionnaire, and a growing network of readers and supporters around the world. Since our subscribers have grown so much in the past four months, we wanted to share a roundup of all the original pieces we’ve commissioned and published since we launched.
And we’re just getting started. In 2025, you’ll be seeing us at live readings in New York City and Los Angeles (stay tuned for more details), we’re working on a zine that will be offered to paid subscribers and available at select locations around the country.
But most importantly: We can’t wait to read your stories! So don’t be shy, take a risk and write your truth and share it with the world. As Dorothy Allison, an amazing queer author we lost this year, once said: “Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you that there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked for me, I'll be naked for you. It will be our covenant."
Thanks for trusting us with your words and attention as we continue on this journey together. Below, you’ll find a mix of longing and laughs, some sexy encounters and some regrets. Above all, it’s a fascinating collection of wisdom and insights into how we put ourselves together despite all the difficulty we face.
Each week, The Queer Love Project publishes an original essay. If you want to submit your essay, you can find our submission guidelines and more here.
What Do You Know About Love?
by Jerry Portwood
Men love men distinctly and passionately. We love each other with equal parts stupidity and good intentions. We cause pain and pleasure and all the shades between. We don’t have the weight of millennia of rules and restrictions binding us. We don’t even have generations of examples, so are often fumbling to mirror what we see with our families and friends and so many sentimental stories and fairy-tale examples. That’s where my sister, and so many others, get it wrong: It may largely be unmapped, and the rules are unclear, but we do know how to love.
Read the full essay here.
Woodstock: My Queer Love Story
by Kate Walter
Three years after Woodstock, Joe and I were walking through the woods when he told me he liked men and didn’t want to keep stringing me along. He explained how he’d gotten out of the draft by telling a shrink he was gay. (I’d wondered about that.) He apologized for the deception and said he hoped we could be friends after I got over being mad at him.
Read the full essay here.
Brotherly Love, No Relation
by Michael Narkunski
First, we threw the blanket over our heads and told secrets in the dark. Then I asked him to show me his yearbook, embarrassing photos, and explain the stories behind the trophies. We performed tricks for each other with his old magic kit, even traced our common Jewish ancestries online, finding out my tribe was his tribe’s right-hand men. And soon, I discovered something else. Zack was always sweet and polite, but could also be restrained, stiff, a little snobby, and harsh on the things he deemed mediocre. But now, with the security of monogamy finally in place, it seemed to unlock brand new levels to his sweetness; in turn, unlocking mine.
Read the full essay here.
Please Don’t Touch My Fake Plastic Balls
by JM Garcia
On the one hand, I totally get that gay men can be turned off by even the slightest thing: a dirty fingernail, strange odor, man boobs, acne, nose hair, you name it. I'm not saying that's not valid. Since the cancer, however, I do want to say this: We're all sexual creatures and want our needs met. As part of that process, we also have a need to be wanted and desired despite our own imperfections and things we wish were different about our bodies. So, while I think I can handle it if my fake balls and talk of cancer spoils the mood, I'm a realist. I'll live. I mean, they yanked the cancer and my balls right out of my body, and I survived. One gay guy rejecting me isn't going to kill me.
Read the full essay here.
Bicycle Repair for Ladies and Revolutionaries
by Amelia Possanza
I moved through partners as quickly as I moved through bicycles, too isolated to get much assistance with the repair. An entry from the register on the latest accident: After a year-and-a-half-long courtship filled with longing voice notes, the digital descendants of Daisy’s unanswered letters, I dated my best friend. They wanted two nights a week, preferably at a bar, and I wanted someone to cook dinner with, to slot into my routine and make my junior one bedroom apartment feel a little less cavernous. Heart, a bit bruised. Hands, itching to pick up my phone and call.
Read the full essay here.
I'm in Bed With a Man and a Cat Named Hussy and I Miss My Wife
by Asya Graf
And yet: like all stories about desire, that I do not desire my wife is an untrue story. That I do not desire her body is an untrue story. But to tell you this other, possibly truer, story, I have to contort language. Maybe we don’t have the language to describe this desire I’m trying to describe, because our language of desire is not a queer enough language, or a lesbian enough language. If I were writing a dissertation about it, I’d call it, Home for Desire: The Lesbian Erotics of Everyday Life.
Read the full essay here.
No 'Happy Endings'
by Lester Fabian Brathwaite
Love feels and has always felt impossible to attain for me, so I tend to resent queer love stories because they don’t, or can’t, portray the reality and the complexity of my love life, or of queer love in general. So I felt the need to preserve this one beautiful, perfect New York August night-turned-morning, so that I can always reference it and remember it. And maybe to remind myself that if I took a chance every now and then, maybe love wouldn’t feel so impossible.
Read the full essay here.
The Greatest Love Story of My Life Isn't Real
by Guillem Clua
Yes, you could say that Alex and Bruno's love story has been the most important of my life and that this strange threesome I have with them will continue to work in the future. Right now, I don’t know if there will be room for a fourth character, someone to call a partner with whom to share my life. The door is still open, without the hormonal urgencies of my thirties or the toxic, unattainable ideals of my forties, so maybe my fifties will bring something new.
Read the full essay here.
Cut by the Chase
by Bob Merrick
With our ever-changing circumstances, I would learn the hard way the true meaning of codependency. I found myself performing for him, hoping he would chase me over that high, choose me over that drink, that expensive purchase, or sex with strangers. I collected every red flag and displayed them proudly in a vase on the kitchen table. Someone once said the red flags were like a fire alarm going off on the whole block and, instead of getting out of the house, I was just finding ways to disconnect the power and talk over it like nothing was happening. That resonated.
Read the full essay here.
Mountain Removed: On Queer Grief
by Jardana Peacock
If you climb the mountain, you may feel a subtle stirring. This happens in grief, a flutter of joy, a moment of relief. Something will tremor through you. The vibration could be the possibility of love again. It is a strange feeling to feel pain and pleasure in the same step.
Read the full essay here.
Recovery at the End of the World
by Mark Jason Williams
Maybe I’d always feel a bit insecure about someone taking care of me, but I saw then, calmly sipping flat whites in a cafe, how much I loved Michael and how grateful I was to share a life and suitcase. I began to understand the difference between being a sick kid dependent on doctors to save my life and having a husband who just wants to help me wipe coffee from my sleeve (because, of course, I spilled mine).
Read the full essay here.
Gray Hanky, Left Pocket
by Wayne Hoffman
The most important thing Allan Bérubé gave me was the sense of pride that I noticed when I first saw him speak at Harvard: fearless without (always) being strident. Sometimes, when I’m speaking in public now, I like to pay tribute to him by wearing a (light blue) hanky in my right back pocket, knowing that there might be one person in the room who’ll notice, and understand.
Read the full essay here.
Chasing the Ghost of the One I Wanted
by Sara M Hajri
I wish I could rewrite a few moments, the ones where my story could have changed. The unspoken rule for a repressed queer person at 17 is to always mask, to keep escaping instead of staying. I didn’t create this rule; it was made for me, and I followed it because the introvert in me didn’t want to ruffle any feathers. Living on the margins feels safer than being exposed, safer than being seen for who I truly am—someone different. And normally, I’m alright with that; I’ve grown into it. But not in this situation. Because, at that moment, I wanted to be seen. But I let her hop out of the cab at her hotel, and said nothing.
Read the full essay here.
Our Connection Was in the Cloud
by Molly Thornton
While I would never be immune to a crush, I vowed to never try to make love in a corner of the internet again. Instead, I would use my avatar to turn interest into a date and nothing more. I knew I could not live up to the ideal my digital footprint planted in someone else’s mind any more than they could, and that all the intimacy a phone can hold couldn’t replace the necessity of learning to agree on a place to eat and navigating the dailiness of life as a pair.
Read the full essay here.
Dating a Throuple Is Like a Martini Glass…
by Aidan Wharton
Whereas before, I would go over to their place for entire weekends, now I'd just come over for a night or an afternoon. When I did spend the night, my guy and I would sleep in one bedroom and his boyfriend alone in the other. I always made sure that what was happening was OK, but I couldn't ignore that things felt off. As my guy and I became more intimate and involved, space grew elsewhere. I hated feeling imbalanced, yet I couldn't bring myself to pull away. Looking back, I think that's when the reality started to sink in for all of us.
Read the full essay here.
Hugs: My Japanese Husband's Love Language
by Brian Watson
Hiro was, and still is, an excellent hugger. Never content for touch-and-go affection, he locked his arms around me and held on. Although that behavior surprised me when we first intertwined in my apartment’s tiny entranceway, I realized I had been waiting for it. Waiting for the person for whom physical embraces were not a duty to be dispatched.
Read the full essay here.
If It May Please You
by Jonathan Hurwitz
Lots of folks love to share about a hot hookup they just had, but I wish we felt equally comfortable sharing the messy, hurtful moments, too—the ones that play out silently in the shadows. As an assault survivor, it’s brought me such peace to be able to talk to other survivors, so I hope we can all continue the conversation, out in the world, out in the light.