Queer Love in Color by Jamal Jordan

Queer Love in Color by Jamal Jordan

Author:Jamal Jordan [Jordan, Jamal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Published: 2021-05-04T00:00:00+00:00


The couple rarely gets to spend time together during the workweek.

Amar and Thomas

Detroit, Michigan

Together since 2014

Amar was going through a ritual familiar to many gay men in the twenty-first century—preparing to delete the dating app Grindr for the who-knows-how-manyth time—when he received a message from Thomas. After chatting briefly, they exchanged numbers and began to text. (The progression of Grindr message to text message is a large milestone for some members of the community.) For better or worse, Grindr was Thomas’s only option for dating. He’s narcoleptic and can’t drive; this makes navigating Detroit—and having a social life—nearly impossible.

After a few years of trial and error, it wasn’t working out for him. At his wit’s end, he decided to consult his “spiritual guides.” I laugh at this, but he quickly lets me know he isn’t joking: “I really said, ‘You know what? I’m just gonna give this dating thing over to a higher power, and I’m going to work on me to make sure I’m ready for this amazing person that’s going to show up in my life,’ and sure enough, he did.” He gestured toward Thomas, with a satisfied smile, as if to emphasize how well his spiritual guides had worked.

Thomas, for his part, found Amar to be a ray of light in his otherwise gloomy love life. “I’d gotten to a place where I told myself I would be okay without love. I was putting myself out there, I was dating people. I fell for people, but I never knew what it was like to have those feelings reciprocated. But with Amar, they were,” Thomas says. “It was fast. It was like…falling off a mountain.”

Their digital courtship progressed from Grindr to text messages to phone calls to FaceTime video chats. They would often end their conversations with a question: “What’s this thing we’re feeling?” After a few weeks of chatting, they were eager to meet in person; this presented the next hurdle. They lived about 65 miles apart: Thomas in Detroit’s suburbs and Amar in Flint, Michigan.

“When I told him I have narcolepsy and can’t drive,” Thomas began, “he said it was—”

“No sweat,” Amar finished. “What was an hour of driving versus what I would lose not being with him?” Amar eventually moved closer to Detroit for work, and their relationship has settled into something that feels like “normal.”

The pair spent a lot of time reflecting on their younger selves and contextualizing their relationship in terms of personal growth. As a child, Thomas had struggled to conceptualize whether love would even be a possibility for him: “I just didn’t have anything to look up to, to aspire to, to even see,” he says. “Even today, there are so few gay Black couples that I can look up to. I think it would’ve been important for me, as a child, to see things that told me: You exist in this world. You don’t have to hide yourself. You can be authentically 100 percent yourself and aspire to do what you want and find love and live your life unapologetically and unashamed.



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