Why I Started The Queer Love Project

Let’s talk about the ways we find, accept and explore love and commitment among gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans people in queer relationships.

Once upon a time, LGBTQ+ people fought for the right to be different, but then something changed. And we fought — and won — for the right to be the same.

Same-sex marriage had always seemed like a mirage. Suddenly, when it became legal in the United States in the summer of 2015 because of a Supreme Court decision, it became an expectation. As a Gen-Xer who came of age during the height of the AIDS epidemic, when gay people were battling for survival, we didn’t have time to fantasize about wedding rings and perfect honeymoons.

Then, when I became a top editor at Out magazine, the largest, most influential gay publication in the country, I became a “professional queer,” investigating the ways in which men and women put themselves together, profiling newlyweds and celebrating high-profile gay weddings. Over that span of years, I persisted in looking for love: sometimes in all the wrong places. When I finally found a partner who completed me, we settled into a comfortable domestic equilibrium until we found ourselves forced to ask a question that we never imagined possible: Do we get married?

Most of what I understood about “love” had been filtered through the lens of pop culture — which meant boys and girls, men and women, flirting and coupling and feeling heartbreak on TV and movies and Top 40 hits. Most of those relationships involved a courtship that was exhibited publicly, ended up with procreation and some stable version of the nuclear family. My working-class parents dated in high school, married immediately upon graduation, and expressed their undying commitment to one another. They’ve now been married over 40 years, a love story that held such power over my imagination that it didn’t prepare me for what a mature, happy relationship could be for me.

My internal struggle was also tied to the time period when I came out, when being gay seemed to be a death warrant. You were going to get AIDS and die — or just live a sad, solitary life. That’s what my parents told me when I decided to come out to them when I was 15 and we were living on an Air Force base in Okinawa, Japan. I’d been raised Southern Baptist, but I’d already rejected those perverse, hypocritical teachings. Being the only out gay kid on a military base on a tiny island in the South Pacific in 1992 was peculiar, to say the least. I assumed there must be other people like me, but no one had the quixotic confidence to blurt it out. My refuge was the library on the military base and my drama teacher’s collection of scripts:  My gay references were Oscar Wilde, Gore Vidal and Larry Kramer. I thought being gay meant you were smart, cultured, literary and a rebel. When we were relocated to Valdosta, a small Southern town in Georgia my junior year of high school —where racial tensions were high, and gay kids got their asses beat — I refused to go back in the closet despite my mom’s pleas. I realized most gay men were still frightened, meeting up surreptitiously in parks at night or hidden in chat rooms, afraid for their lives. Some even married women, knowing that they couldn’t give them a satisfying relationship and kept their secret yearnings on the down low. The first happy, long term gay couple I ever met were the lesbian parents of a kid at my school. Marsha and Alice were an epiphany—and it was two women making it work in the Deep South that first showed me that same-sex love could thrive despite the odds. (I recently wrote about how lesbians taught me that queer love could thrive.)

I felt driven to find someone who I could share my passions and curiosity with. Although I knew I was attracted to men, as a teen I told myself I would find anyone who could see and appreciate me for being me. Before I learned the terms, I even fantasized about a big pansexual commune where we could raise a family with other queer people — oblivious to gender norms. Gender and sexuality didn’t matter: just love. I refused to live in the shadows or believe my existence had to be more difficult, that I couldn’t find happiness. So, I continued to search, and to fail.

After college, I spent the greater part of my twenties attending the weddings of friends from high school and college as a single man. I read poetry and passages to the crowd from my friend's favorite books; I was a groomsman and attended rehearsal dinners and was often expected to be the life of the festivities, dancing with grandparents and siblings at post-nuptial shindigs. I bought gifts, fussing over details and other people’s dreams. But I never dreamed of doing that myself. Rather than pine for the rom-com fantasy, I rejected it. I was too good for marriage.

Of course, I supported the fact that no one should be denied equal rights. But that didn’t mean that I wanted to participate in binding myself legally to another man. Comedians like Chris Rock might joke, “Gay people got a right to be as miserable as everybody else,” but I knew that glib response was not enough. I’d seen people denied rights; heard how cruel the bureaucracy could be when a partner was hospitalized or died and family and government agencies intervened. It became very unpopular to criticize the marriage equality movement, and LGBTQ+ people didn’t want to fuel the religious conservatives who opposed it, despite the fact that same-sex marriage was in fact a conservative concept. As Kate Bornstein, a self-described “gender outlaw,” writer and queer activist explained in 2009, years before same-sex marriage seemed inevitable: “Marriage equality … is wasting resources that would be better deployed to save some lives.”

I joined the editorial staff at Out magazine on July 25, 2011, the day after marriage equality became legal in New York City and hundreds of gay women and men tied the knot. It felt like a new era, and I was responsible for writing about and assigning stories during this pivotal time. We were at the forefront of a movement that felt inevitable, advocating and documenting something that was monumental. But I was also conflicted, since marriage — even between two men — seemed to be granted under the presumption that it also meant strict adherence to traditional rules and values, which frustrated me.

In my new role, I became obsessed with interviewing couples about how they made it work: old, young, transgender, interracial, celebrities, full-time military, families with children. I was thrilled to meet Edie Windsor, Jim Obergefell and other notable people who had been fighting legal battles for human rights for us all. I wanted to hear all the reasons they decided to tie the knot — or not. I also wanted to find out how people’s attitudes toward gay men had changed so rapidly, even interviewing Robert De Niro about his late gay father, and making him cry in the process. 

The vast majority of straight people operate in a way that is different than how most queer people have survived for over a century. Straight people date a little then typically marry. Until very recently, that wasn’t an option for us: We dated and even remained in long term relationships, but there was never the thought that we’d be expected (or allowed) to settle down. Now we are, yet we don’t really know how to do it. Or what it means. Or how it affects us.

Me with Greg Louganis in 2013 | Photo Courtesy of the Author

While interviewing Olympic legend Greg Louganis about why he got married at 53 to Johnny Chaillot, 52, he said something that seemed relatable to a great many gay men I know. “The more I fall in love with Johnny, the more I fall in love with myself.” It made me wonder: Is that why marriage seems implausible? Because we often start with such a deficit of self-love? 

I seek for this newsletter to be a platform for us to share personal stories of struggles and happy endings, of poor romantic decisions and how we try to make better and better ones. It will include interviews and advice, and seek to provide insights to those just starting out in their lives as well as highlight the queer elders who have figured out how to thrive. It will span queer couplings, pansexual polycules, asexual romantic relationships and the multiplicity of ways we put ourselves together.

At one point, I was angry that gay men and women were being treated as second-class citizens. It was a struggle for what it means to be American: If one citizen has the right to do it, then all citizens have the right to do it. If you have the right to get married, then I want the right to get married. It doesn't mean I have to get married. But then, once we do, what’s next? Anyone who has been in a LTR will tell you that love is just the start: making it work takes completely different skills. And the ending of a relationship can feel like an even bigger failure since it can seem like you let down a community as well as grieving your own loss. Plus, being in a queer relationship can often mean coming out over and over in multiple ways: to doctors, to your neighbors, to coworkers, to people at hotels when you travel on vacation. Same-sex relationships are not the same as heterosexual ones — and shouldn’t pretend to be — and we must never forget that. In fact, it’s time to come out and celebrate it.

Here’s how to submit your story!

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