The Question I Ask Everyone About Love
What I've learned about queer love after a year of the QLP Questionnaire.
I want to share what a year of working on the QLP Questionnaire has taught me. To be honest, I’ve struggled to write this. Maybe because I want to have something profound to report. Maybe because I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to be profound. It’s all still a work in progress. Nothing definitive. Nothing certain.
In my recent interview with Kate Bornstein, I incorporated some of these questions from the template. When I asked if she had an “ideal relationship status,” she pointed out:
“Take the word status out of the picture because status implies 'static' and that's the end of any relationship. The ideal relationship for me nowadays, looking back, is one that never stops growing. One where you're having to let go of your precious and see the precious that someone else is offering you.”
So, true. This is the reason I’ve enjoyed receiving the answers and working with the people who have responded. It’s expanded my own ideas and ideals. But it hasn’t been easy. Sometimes I have to cajole. A lot of people say yes until they see the scope and then they recant. A few have started couple’s therapy after discussing with their partner. Luckily, we have gathered a year’s worth of wisdom, and it’s available for anyone to access here. So, here it goes…
How it all began
First, let me explain the origin. When I was devising the questions in the QLP Questionnaire, I happened to watch a documentary, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, and was blown away by her impact. I knew a lot about Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Reports published in 1948 and 1953, but for some reason, despite Shere Hite’s ubiquity in the late 1970s through the ‘80s, this feminist sex researcher had been virtually forgotten and erased from the discourse.
In particular, I was curious about her survey (you can check out the original questions here), her methodology, and her followup questionnaire that asked about relationships. It inspired me to include a couple of questions that I had left out of the original, in particulare: “Does the relationship fill your deepest needs for closeness with a person? Or do you prefer not to share every part of yourself?”
The biggest difference for me: I didn’t want it to be anonymous. In fact, I felt like the value in the QLP Questionnaire would be to have a wide range of people publicly and proudly sharing their thoughts on relationships, sexuality, and love.
I also tried to keep it short, since I knew it was a lot to ask for people to volunteer so much intimate information. The final template includes 27 questions, and I tell people to skip anything that feels redundant or irrelevant. There is just one question that I ask everyone to attempt to answer.
How do you define love?
It’s perhaps the most difficult question and many people have told me that they struggle with it: “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 understand why. We don’t often interrogate this question deeply. We rely on received knowledge from family, friends, and popular culture. People have answered it in a variety of ways, some deflecting or dodging, others going deep.
Ty Beaver:
“Love is wanting what is best for the other person—even if it’s not what you want—while doing what also is best for you. It’s rare that what’s best for you is best for the person you love. But if you love each other, you navigate it. And if that means ending the relationship, then that’s what you do. This is what makes love painful.”
Gina Femia:
Defining love is as futile an act as trying to definitively define queerness or gender. It’s too large and complicated and simple and true and real a thing to try to narrow down into a definition, and it’s specific based on the person and person/people involved in that love.
Troy Ford:
Everyone is different; every love is different. For me right now, love is the deep and abiding affection I have for my husband of 25 years; it’s never been perfect but always respectful, and built on a shared desire to support and care for each other no matter the direction it seems to evolve. And it has evolved in that time, believe me—love isn’t static.
You never forget your first… TV show
A majority of people didn’t feel like they had proper role models and had to search for ways to discover sustainable ways to find a partner. Most of my hypotheses have been confirmed. Some gay men said that rom-coms do, in fact, distort their ideas about what they should expect when dating or pursuing a longterm commitment. A lot of lesbians really, really love The L Word—or at least it was the most-watched TV show by a great many women of a certain age—since it was the first time they saw their versions of queer love depicted on televisin. And Ryan Murphy’s TV shows have had a big impact for quite a few.
Edgar Gomez:
I was definitely brainwashed by every rom-com I watched into believing that I needed to find a rich dude to “rescue me.” Maid in Manhattan. Closer. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But at the same time, I also really loved movies where women learned karate and beat their shitty ex-husbands up—Enough, Double Jeopardy—so I think it all balanced out.
Xandra McMahon:
I binged all six seasons of The L Word the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college after side-eyeing the listing in my Netflix queue for months. I didn’t want to linger on it for too long with my remote or admit to myself how curious I was to watch it. Finally, one day, I ripped the Band-Aid off, and I spent 71 hours of my summer glued to the TV. Despite its flaws, I’ll always be grateful to that show because by the end of it, the idea of being gay felt a lot less scary.
Stacy Lambe:
Strangely enough—especially considering how much pop culture has impacted my life growing up and is very much part of who I am today—I don't have any specific memories of anything that taught me about love or relationships. But in the time I came out to myself and started coming out in general, I definitely sought out those stories. One that jumped out to me at the time was Kurt and Blaine's relationship on Glee—and then anything Ryan Murphy wrote or produced after that.
Was the first time with someone you liked?
Most everyone has had awkward first intimate encounters with people they were not necessarily attracted to (some explained that it was sexual assault or rape and colored their experiences). While we idealize a first kiss, holding hands, or some sort of innocent canoodling, that’s not always the case for LGBTQ+ folks. Often attraction is coupled with danger or risk, and that can inhibit possibility.
Mark W. Kane:
I was sexualized at a fairly young age, so I missed out on all that sweetness. There wasn’t much kissing, let alone, holding hands. My partner was a young man two years older than me, the older brother of a school friend. At the time, I didn’t feel pressured, just very curious. Did I like him? Very much. I’ve questioned whether this might be considered abuse, but I don’t think it was. It was something we mutually pursued on more than one occasion.
Ben Greene:
I didn’t kiss her for the first month. On our one-month anniversary, she was about to leave my house and I was so mad I couldn’t work up the courage to kiss her, I chased her car down to stop her from leaving and kissed her through the window. It was a very chaste peck, but it was still very romantic.
Lawrence Everett Forbes:
My first "intimate" moment occurred at 14, when I was raped by an older cousin on my father’s side. It took a lot of therapy to turn such a violent introduction to sex into an ultimately pleasurable act, but I have finally reclaimed my own concupiscence and advise anyone with a similar history to do the same.
My first consensual intimate moment involved holding hands with my first boyfriend in San Francisco and kissing him on every street corner from the bar to his place. It made me feel both free and proud.
Kate Walter:
I have kinda blocked out my fumbling attempts of having sex with men (I thought that was what I was supposed to do). I remember my college classmates talking about their boyfriends and thinking what is wrong with me? I don’t feel that way. I got depressed. It never occurred to me I was gay. But the first time I made love with a beautiful woman (post college), it was fantastic, and I knew I was gay.
The most common advice may be the most difficult
The final question asks respondents to provide advice to “someone younger than you who thinks it’s impossible to find love.” The range of answers has been inspiring, and I wish I could include them all, but it would be quite a lot to pack into one post. Many people advised that you should “wait for love to find you”—and several said they expected the jaded, cynical eye-rolls that advice would provoke.
Nearly everyone recommended seeking out some form of therapy to “practice mending, understanding, forgiving and trusting, celebrating, being celebrated.” And Dale Corvino reminded us that “every relationship is a little transactional.”
But there is one answer that recurred over and over again, and it is in fact the advice I can easily co-sign: LOVE YOURSELF FIRST.
It may sound trite and like easy drivel, but it is a hard-earned lesson that resounds. But beyond that, here are a few more that might strike a chord.
Aidan Wharton:
Explore what you think you’re looking for. A lot of times, we feel hopeless about love because the expectations we’ve been taught are not only too high but actually impossible. There is no one out there who will check every single box for you, but there are so many people out there who will love you, make you happy, care for you, and grow with you.
The sooner you accept your own flaws and that your partners will have flaws, the sooner you can actually move through that and create your own happy, healthy, thriving relationships.
Nicole Zelniker:
Your people are out there, whether they’re romantic or platonic. Platonic relationships are just as important as romantic ones, so make sure to invest time and energy into friendships and worthwhile family connections. That’s where so much of love comes from, no matter what attraction looks like for you."
So yeah, there’s a lot to keep unpacking and analyzing and synthesizing here. I’m lucky to have the privilege to engage with so many generous people willing to share their stories and trust me with their words.
I repeat: It hasn’t always been easy. I’ve noticed more male-identified people have responded to the questionnaire than women. I’m happy we’ve had so many trans men, but I wish I could convince some trans women to participate. Although I understand that not everyone feels safe sharing so much identifying information and that could be part of the reason they shy away from doing it. We’ve had a few who identify as nonbinary, bisexual, aromantic, and demi-gender—but I hope we’ll have more!
I’ll leave you with this quote from Roger Q. Mason:
This is such a dangerous world for young queer people, so the only advice I’d give them is to stand proud and tall in their desires because this world wants so desperately to make LGBTQIA+ people feel small and disappear. Our love is revolutionary.
Jerry,
Nice overview of your first year with Queer Love Project. Wonderful that we can continue to take as we give, and learn from others as they learn from us. Fondly, Michael