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S TA RR IN G

MEGAN RAPINOE AND SUE BIRD PLUS

Ciara and Russell Wilson Naomi Osaka and Cordae

S TARR IN G

NAOMI OSAKA AND CORDAE

PLUS

Ciara and Russell Wilson Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird

S TA R R I N G

CIARA AND RUSSELL WILSON P LUS

Naomi Osaka and Cordae Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird

dior boutiques 800.929.dior (3467) dior.com

TOMFORD.COM

CONTENTS

On the Covers

The Fix 25 Reasons Why You Should Share a Wardrobe. .. .. .. . . . . . . . .. .. . .. .. . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 5 Very Stylish Couples. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 The Relationship Watch by BENJAM IN CLY MER . . 42 MARY H. K. C HO I

on Family, Grief, and Love. . . . . . . 44

Photograph by Sam Taylor‑Johnson. Styled

by George Cortina.

On RAPINOE: Pants, $990,

by Givenchy. Boots, $150, by Dr. Martens.

On BIRD: Vintage pants

by Helmut Lang from David Casavant Archive.

Features Cover Stories and MEG A N R APINOE . . .. . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . 50 NAOMI OSAK A and C ORDAE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 CIAR A and RUS SE L L WIL SON . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . .. 68 S UE BIRD

Lessons in Modern Love Craigslist Romance... 78 Psychedelic Couples Therapy. .. . . . .. .. . . . . . . . .. 79 Adult Performer JANICE G RIFFI TH on Dating. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 NAOMI KL EIN Discusses Family and Climate Change. . .. .. . . . . . .. .. .. . .. .. . ... . .. .. 82 Pandemic-Era Elvis Weddings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 HAR I N EF’ S Deliverance Outside the Club. . . 84 ERIK MA DIG AN HECK’ S New Family Vision. . 86 Poet DA NEZ SMITH on Sex After HIV. . . . . . . . . . 88 Raising Children as a Throuple. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 S T E VE WAY on Dating With a Disability....... 92 CAT C OHE N on Orgasms and Anxiety. . . . . . . . . 94 Love and Ink That Last Forever. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 C O L MA N D OM INGO ’S

How AN DREW GI L LUM’ S Marriage Survived a Scandal. .. . .. .. . . . . .. . . . .. . .. ... . . .. ... .. . .. . 96 The Future Is OnlyFans. .. . .. .. . .. . . .. . . .. .. .. . .. .. .. . .. 100 2 0

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Photograph by Renell Medrano. Styled by Mackenzie and Alexandra Grandquist with Mobolaji Dawodu. On CORDAE: Sweater, $595, by Paul Smith. On OSAKA: Sweater, $518, by Hope Macaulay.

Earring, $105 for pair,

by Jennifer Fisher.

Photograph by Micaiah Carter. Styled

by Madeline Weeks. On WILSON: Blazer, $4,995,

by Brunello Cucinelli.

Turtleneck, $995, by Ralph Lauren. On CIARA: Dress, $2,180, by Bottega Veneta at Nordstrom.

M A K E U P, TO BY F L E I S C H M A N .

CONTENTS

For our story on the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea and designer Melody Ehsani, see page 32.

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ADVOCACY HAS ONE DIRECTION, FORWARD. Visit NAACP.ORG/FORWARD

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

and I started planning a special edition called the Modern Lovers issue, the mission was clear: We wanted to tell a bunch of love stories that we’d never heard before. ¶ No disrespect to Romeo and Juliet or Sid and Nancy, but what about marriage in the time of COVID? What about taking some MDMA before doing couples therapy? What about the dating life of a notable sex worker? Does anyone know what’s going on with that Colorado Springs throuple from HGTV?! ¶ So much of the work we’ve been doing at GQ over the past two years or so has been about redefining the point of view of a so-called “men’s magazine.”

Jettisoning old tropes. Pushing the conversation forward. ¶ In a way, we used the pages of this issue to answer the big question implied by the words on the cover: What exactly makes love or lovers modern now?

WHEN THE GQ TEAM

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story boldly and publicly as a gift to others—that’s modern. Call it storytelling as activism.

For a fiery example, check out our interview with Ramy actor Steve Way (page 92), who is unafraid to share blunt truths about his body and his sex life and his financial realities not just to make us laugh uncontrollably but also, hopefully, to improve the lives of other people with disabilities who face similar indignities. Like all great comedians, Steve is willing to say things nobody else will—and so others don’t have to. Modern as hell.

Or check out Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird locking bodies for photographer Sam Taylor-Johnson.

In the story by writer Emma Carmichael (page 50), Billie Jean King celebrates Megan and Sue’s freedom to be both global superstars and very out—a freedom that Billie Jean herself never had.

And then Sue imagines some burgeoning young WNBA baller who will one day coast frictionlessly into the same opportunities for which Sue had to fight like crazy.

Being part of a triumphant lineage of sports heroes that are building equality through sweat equity— that’s modern.

As you read on, I think you’ll also find modernity in 1,000 intimate little details in this issue. Our lovers share clothes, love languages, and

sex, and romance to be inextricably intertwined with technology: Twitter, Instagram, OnlyFans, Jack’d, Grindr galore. (I gotta wonder: Do modern lovers like us even have fantasies that Big Tech doesn’t already know about?)

I hope these stories open your heart, stir your loins, and expand your mind.

Special thanks to our awesome subjects for sharing so generously.

GQ loves you.

Will Welch EDITOR IN CHIEF

BEST

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STUFF

The GQ Best Stuff Box is filled with our favorite things from upstart brands and labels we’ve always loved. Inside each box is more than $200 worth of menswear, style accessories, grooming products, and exclusives. The best part: Each Best Stuff Box costs only $50.

Richer Poorer Sweatpants MVRK Skin + Beard Lotion Nalgene Water Bottle (Exclusive) Aaptiv Fitness Subscription and more

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Want to look and smell your very best? Be the first to try new grooming products for your hair, skin, and beard by signing up for GQ’s new Try It Program. We’ll send you samples that match up with your own grooming routine.

Just fill out a grooming profile to qualify.*

Sign up now > GQ.com/tryit *Spaces and samples are limited. Products are targeted to skin and hair types and preferences where applicable.

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a Wardrobe

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25 Reasons W

T H I S PAG E : ST Y L I ST, J O N T I E T Z ; H A I R, G RO O M I N G , A N D M A K E U P, R AC H E L L E I D I G AT A RT D E PA RT M E N T. ST I L L- L I F E PHOTOGRAPHS THROUGHOUT: PROP ST YLIST, CL AIRE TEDALDI AT HALLEY RESOURCES.

D R O P S

a yY h ou Should S

By SAMUEL HINE Take it from modeldesigner Sasha Melnychuk and skaterartist Adam Zhu, who met at a BLM protest in June (“He was my first hug of quarantine,” says Sasha): It ain’t no thing to swap fits, especially when you’re rocking a louche and drapey Emporio Armani set.

Shirts, $495 each, and pants, $645 each, by Emporio Armani.

Watch, $725,

by Seiko.

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NYC-KNIT RUGBY If you don’t know the name Connor McKnight, you will soon. The young designer’s new unisex made-to-order collection is pure heat, starting with this perfectly chunky merino tile knit rugby ($725).

THE CHAIN WATCH The only thing sweeter than rocking a Chanel Première Chain Watch is sharing one with your partner ($3,700; see page 42 for more on the Relationship Watch).

SUMPTUOUS SET For his second COVID-era collection, Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli made his vision for the future clear by borrowing embroidered lacy fabrics from the women’s collection for a series of couture-level shirt sets (shirt, $4,950, and shorts, $2,250).

THE NEW MAN BAG Leave your crossbody sling pack in 2020 and invest in a Celine Homme Triomphe canvas purse—the shoulder bag is the new wave ($1,250).

STAR YOUR FACE If you are prone to breaking out and aren’t above a beauty flex on IG, Starface’s hydrocolloid pimple protectors are your new best friends ($11 for pack of 32).

LEISURE SUIT Why is Christophe Lemaire heir to the French minimalistfashion throne? Because he’s created an entirely new look, typified by this radically voluminous, luxuriously chill suit (jacket, $1,100, shirt, $605, and pants, $680).

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SMALL-BATCH BODY WASH We swear by F. Miller’s plant-based grooming oils and hand-and-body wash.

Crucially, the design and packaging look great in the crib ($39).

RUFFLED TUX SHIRT Your tuxedo shirt shouldn’t sit in the closet for 362 days of the year.

Try subbing it in for a casual shirt every once in a while and you’ll feel as groovy as black-tie boss Tom Ford ($1,190).

SUNSET SHADES Ahlem’s artisanally made shades look like they escaped from the French New Wave for a bungalow vacation in Santa Barbara ($455).

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ARTISANAL SOCKS Think beyond white or navy to Comme Si’s luxurious quarter-length hosiery, which comes in a series of delightfully strange shades ($42 for pair).

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70-AND-SUNNY SANDALS The most crucial sandals of the season are handcrafted by Hermès and wouldn’t look out of place on Picasso’s feet in the South of France ($1,025).

MEDUSA HAIRPIN When your unenlightened menswear bros ask you, “Is that a hairpin?” the proper response is “No—it’s a Versace hairpin” ($200).

DANGLY PEARLS Walter Raleigh’s favorite accessory took a detour through “ladies who lunch” culture and emerged (thanks to Mejuri) as the boldest jewelry flex of 2021 ($75).

BLAZER AS OUTERWEAR Raf Simons has always attracted brainy fashion rebels of all kinds, but this season the Belgian legend formally introduced womenswear pieces, like this riotous oversized blazer ($1,504).

DANCING SHOES It’s about time to load a pair of Saint Laurent braided loafers in the barrel for the postpandemic reopening of dance floors ($895).

PSYCHIC HEADWEAR A turban from the allseeing eye of Gucci’s Alessandro Michele that says: I am the future of fashion ($630).

A COMB YOU’LL KEEP In the brave new world of raging WFH hair, it pays to invest in a gentle cellulose comb by upstart dome-focused brand Crown Affair ($36). in Prada’s gloriously preppy mesh Linea Rossa set (shirt, $1,060, and shorts, $780).

OFF-PITCH SOCCER KIT It’s no contest: Wales Bonner x Adidas was the smash-hit collab of 2020, and for spring the British phenom’s unisex Jamaica-inflected soccer gear is even better (price upon request).

HEIRLOOM VARSITY Rhude’s cropped varsity jacket has the buttery-soft feeling of a once-in-a-lifetime vintage find ($1,980).

HERBACEOUS NAIL POLISH With its limited-edition drops of coolly masculine nail lacquers, Faculty is at the forefront of the boundaryless grooming movement ($15).

HOOF-PICK BELTS The debut menswear collection by It girl outfitter Maryam Nassir Zadeh includes slinky shirting and these sensual napa leather belts ($239 each).

NAMASTE PANTS Nanushka proves that even the softest, swishiest, floral-iest pants can still go very hard ($425).

CHOOSE-YOUROWN-ADVENTURE MAKEUP Fashion’s favorite perfumer, Byredo, is expanding into makeup with “color sticks” you can swipe onto your eyes, lips, cheeks, whatever.

The point is to freak it your own way ($30).

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The F i x Great Personal St yle

Big Love and Huge Fits F L E A A N D E H S A N I : M A K E U P, TO BY F L E I S C H M A N .

Five stylish and creative couples on how they found each other, what inspires them, and the romance of sharing clothes.

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The F i x

Great Personal St yle

Flea & Melody Ehsani UNDERSTAND THE cosmic bond between streetwear designer Melody Ehsani and her husband, Flea, gaze upon photographs of their 2019 wedding. In them you will see the Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist in a lilac doublebreasted Undercover tuxedo with a mint green bow tie and Ehsani in a nude fishtail gown appliquéd with a garden of white sequined lilies. It wasn’t, from a style standpoint, a “day for her” or a “day for him,” but instead a day for two major matrimonial fits, freaking it in glorious tandem.

“What I was looking for in a partner was mutuality,” says Ehsani, who launched her eponymous streetwear label in 2008 and was recently announced as the women’s creative director of Foot Locker. “Somebody that wasn’t in competition with me.”

“One of the things that drew me to Melody intensely,” adds Flea, “was her strength, and her passion, and her unwavering commitment and belief that manifests in every part of her life.”

The couple—who call each other Mook—acknowledge that their big personalities lead to frequent disagreements. In matters sartorial, they find more traditional marital bliss.

Flea has a flamboyant bizarro-dream sense of style. But he’s expanded his horizons since Ehsani came along.

“I’m anti-brand,” he says—or he used to be. “I’m going to pay for something and then advertise for you? That’s a rip-o≠. But Mel has a di≠erent approach to that.”

“You have to think about the di≠erent times we grew up in,” says Ehsani, who is almost 20 years Flea’s junior. “I grew up with hip-hop, so it was all about logos and branding. You wanted ‘FUBU’ on your chest. Flea grew up with punk rock, where you didn’t subscribe to that at all.” But now he proudly appears on her Instagram decked out in her logo’d goods.

“I don’t really know anything about fashion,” he says. “But I love beauty and expression.” — R A C H E L TA S H J I A N

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Jesse Williams & Taylour Paige Logic versus faith. Jesse Williams and Taylour Paige are, in Williams’s words, “on opposite sides of the spectrum,” even in their approach to their craft. Both are actors—he as a longtime star of Grey’s Anatomy, she in the upcoming Jeremy O. Harris and Janicza Bravo film Zola—and their di≠erences are congruous, a true embodiment of opposites attracting. “We get satisfaction from being fed,” he explains of their dynamic. “If you like to feel full in new ways, it’s a fun learning process.”

The unflinching honesty and willingness to adapt also extends to their respective closets. They’re not afraid to challenge each other. “I don’t really respond to trends,” Williams admits, while Paige says she pushes him to simplify his closet. “He has things from literally like 2002, like, ‘Well, CONTROL VERSUS FATE.

All clothes, jewelry, and accessories, subjects’ own. o p e n i n g pa g e on ehsani

Hoodie and sweatpants by Melody Ehsani. t h i s pa g e o n w il l i a m s

Sweater by Kapital. o n pa i g e

Shirt and skirt by Brock Collection.

Earring by Jennifer Meyer. Ring from Belle Epoque Jewelers.

P H O T O G R A P H

I loved this…,’ and I’m like, ‘No.’ ” Williams is most focused on a vintage watch or his signature gold chains.

“He definitely dresses like a 1986 drug dealer,” Paige says, laughing.

“Jesse will be like, ‘You’re wearing that?’ or I’ll say, ‘That’s wack. Take it o≠.’ ” Williams adds, “It’s not a meek interaction,” but Paige says that ultimately they know it’s coming from a place of support.

As it did for most couples, quarantine put their union to the test.

But instead of buckling, they say, they found it was a “hyper boost” in deepening their bond. And it’s still going. They’re discovering new ways in which they complement each other while also learning how they can adapt to be better together. “We make up where the other lacks,” Paige says. “So where Jesse is structured and organized—he still can be more organized.…” Williams follows her playful chide with a perfectly timed “See what I’m dealing with here?” and it feels like talking to a couple who’ve been together much longer than two years. “I think being in a relationship is almost impossible,” Paige admits. Together they almost make it look easy. — F R A Z I E R T H A R P E

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W I L L I A M S A N D PA I G E : H A I R, CY N T H I A A LV E R A Z ; M A K E U P, C H E R I S H B RO O K E H I L L F O R D I O R.

TO

The F i x

Great Personal St yle

King Princess & Quinn Wilson the 22-year-old musician better known as King Princess, is pretty sure that her relationship with 27-year-old director Quinn Wilson owes to a single crucial moment—one “iconic move,” as Straus describes it. The two were on their second date, at a bar tucked away on Santa Monica Boulevard, when Straus felt Wilson reach out and grab her yellow Adidas rain jacket. Wilson remembers her own assertiveness that night too. “I just wanted my ass to be in her lap!” she says with a laugh.

That was two years ago. Wilson had been living in Los Angeles for a couple of years and was beginning to garner respect in Hollywood for her artistic sensibilities, working alongside Lizzo, for whom she’d eventually become creative director. The couple are recalling their beginnings over Zoom, sprawled out on their bed with their dog, Raz, between them. Behind them, along an entire wall, is their shared closet—the contents of which also factored into the courtship. “[Quinn’s] style is the reason I fell in love with her,” Straus admits, gesturing toward the clothes. From my vantage point, I can spot a green Gucci suit and a neon orange pu≠er. Straus, who describes her aesthetic as “basketball player o≠ duty,” says that Wilson’s influence has been transformative: “My style is much better now, and everyone in my life has noticed it.”

The same union of taste is evident in the music video for Straus’s single “Pain,” which Wilson directed. The project draws visual inspiration from the videos for Weezer’s “The Sweater Song” and Madonna’s “Human Nature,” featuring King Princess being put in a headlock, shot with an arrow, tattooed, and licked by a series of women between clips of her performing in a loose-cut suit. It centers queerness in a way that is momentous for mainstream pop and reminiscent of the couple’s love. “I think that the way we work together is symbiotic,” Straus says. “It’s a true partnership.”

When asked about their future, Straus plays with Raz—whose name is inked on her forearm—and exclaims, “Fifteen dogs,” then adds, “I think that our closet is going to grow a lot too.” — W I L L A B E N N E T T

o n w il s o n ( l ef t )

T-shirt, vintage.

Jeans by Levi’s.

Necklace and link bracelet by Tiffany & Co.

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on straus

Sweater, pants, and briefs

by Gucci.

Ring by David Yurman.

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ST R AU S A N D W I L S O N : H A I R A N D M A K E U P, D E ST I N Y V E N I C E AT A RT D E PA RT M E N T U S I N G R+ C O & M AC C O S M E T I C S .

MIKAELA STRAUS,

TRY IT

Want to look and smell your very best? Be the first to try new grooming products for your hair, skin, and beard by signing up for GQ’s new Try It Program. We’ll send you samples that match up with your own grooming routine.

Just fill out a grooming profile to qualify.*

Sign up now > GQ.com/tryit *Spaces and samples are limited. Products are targeted to skin and hair types and preferences where applicable.

The F i x

Great Personal St yle

Zack Fox & Kat Matutina and Kat Matutina fell in love as only a wellness influencer and a viral comedian can: orbiting each other on Instagram. “My first words to him were probably ‘LOL,’ ” says Matutina, trying to recall who slid into whose DMs first. “Or ‘Where’s that sandwich from?’ ” The duo ran in overlapping circles in the music industry but spent months swapping comments on each other’s Stories before Fox invited her to one of his shows in 2018. Both are multi-hyphenate creatives with several plates in the air: Matutina DJs, runs a fitness program, and hosts a sexual-health podcast, while Fox is a comedian with a verging-on-serious rap career. The middle of that Venn diagram is music, where their relationship took shape. “One of the first things that drew me to Kat was her extensive music knowledge,” Fox says.

He cites Matutina posting a screenshot of Lil B’s “Finna Hit a Lick,” which he took as a sign that she didn’t take herself too seriously. “That’s why we’re compatible,” she adds.

The same ethos applies to their sartorial preferences, whether it’s Matutina’s passion for monochromatic neon or the gold-cat-embroidered corduroy loafers Fox has been practically living in. He’s always been drawn to Matutina’s sporty, futuristic swagger, while she clocked his “hot dad” look—an energy that’s only gotten more potent during the two years they’ve been together—as instantly ZACK FOX

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attractive. The biggest sticking point? A pair of chunky purple and neon green Pumas that look like they walked o≠ the set of Nickelodeon’s Slime Time. “I love these shoes so much,” Fox says emphatically.

Meanwhile, Matutina likens them to Barney. Although stylistically they sometimes clash, there is one thing they can both agree on: the matching flannel pajamas they wear to bed.

on fox

Pullover and sweatpants by Total Luxury.

Sneakers by Atmos x Li-Ning.

Sunglasses by Saint Laurent

by Anthony Vaccarello.

—DANIELLE COHEN

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Dress by Charlotte Knowles. on kiwi the dog

Sweater and sunglasses

by Pawxee.

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The F i x

Richie Shazam & Ben Draghi week of summer 2018 when Richie Shazam spotted Ben Draghi gyrating on the dance floor at Brooklyn’s Spectrum. Neither of them had been in a serious relationship: Draghi had just graduated from college and was acclimating himself to New York’s queer scene, and Shazam, a downtown nightlife fixture, described themself as “the eternal single lady.” But Draghi was feeling himself as he danced alone, and Shazam was mesmerized: “I was like, ‘Damn, this white boy has moves!’ ” Shazam is a model, photographer, and activist whose work subverts the fashion world’s obsession with whiteness and the gender binary.

IT WAS THE FIRST

Draghi is an emerging electronic musician and videographer. A long conversation that night led to an exchange of Instagram messages, which led to a summer-long courtship, which led to an outcome neither of them expected: an enduring partnership that has electrified their mutual artistic practices.

As their relationship deepened, they became each other’s muses and sounding boards. “Part of our process is learning from each other,” says Shazam, who shows Draghi every photo they take for the likes of GQ , Vogue, and Interview. But the couple’s most powerful works have been accomplished together: a harrowing,

psychedelic “sex tape” created for a one-night-only art rave in 2019, a downright smoldering ad campaign for Michael Kors, and a Nadia Lee Cohen photo book in which they both star, each piece a totem to a gender-fluid, multiracial queer intimacy that has yet to become acceptable in the mainstream.

“When I was single, my husband was my work,” Shazam says. “That was my survival, my sustenance.”

Now, Draghi says, work is “what’s kept us together. You get to know people in a very di≠erent light when you work with them, and that can be a very harrowing experience. Or it can be really beautiful.” — S A M U E L H I N E

Great Personal St yle

on shazam

Swimsuit and earrings

by Area. on dr aghi

Turtleneck by Helmut Lang.

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THE RE AC OFF FIELD.

AL TION IS THE WAT C H AT

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The F i x

BY OUR MONTHLY WATCH COLUMNIST, BENJAMIN CLYMER

Watches

The Case for the Relationship Watch Before you adopt a dog or have a child, try parenting a timepiece with your significant other, says Hodinkee founder Benjamin Clymer.

L L O W M E T O repeat a semicontroversial opinion that I’ve been shouting for years: There is no such thing as a men’s watch. Similarly, there is no such thing as a women’s watch. There are just watches. They may come in different sizes, and some might have diamonds or jewels on them, but there is no timepiece in the world that comes with an anatomical requirement. There are, however, some that simply look good on everyone, no matter who they are. Which brings us to my next semi-controversial opinion: There is nothing, and I do mean nothing, more wonderful than sharing a watch with your partner. The watch is the only piece of jewelry that has its own heartbeat; there are few objects as personal. Worn every day, it becomes an intimate part of your life, and when shared with your significant other, it becomes something closer to a metaphor: It might suffer a few dings and scratches over the years, but if taken good care of, it’ll tick along till death do you part.

Some designs are a no-brainer for this parenting experiment, like the Cartier Tank (bottom right), which, in its quiet elegance, has looked killer on literally any wrist for more than 100 years. For a sportier feel, there’s the Rolex Datejust (top left), which I consider the most versatile timepiece in the world. Rolex has made it for more than seven decades, in a variety of metals and styles, and while it’s worth playing with different sizes depending on your preference, to me the ultimate Datejust for

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sharing is a 36-mm steel-and-yellow-gold model on a Jubilee bracelet. It’s no surprise this is among the brand’s best-selling models—the contrasting materials, the instantly recognizable fluted bezel, and the silky bracelet lend it an undeniably universal appeal.

Vacheron Constantin’s Overseas line—in some ways the anti–Royal Oak—has quietly produced hit after hit since its relaunch in 2016. And the 37-mm model makes a compelling argument to even the snobbiest horology snobs that the Overseas (top right) is truly where it’s at—for men, women, anyone. It’s got a perfectly slim stainlesssteel case, an elegant bracelet, and one of the finest movements in the world. Not to mention it comes with detachable, adjustable leather and rubber straps, so you and your partner can wear it your own way.

If you and your significant other are, like so many of us, in the midst of a ’90s obsession, or you simply prefer a timepiece that doesn’t take itself too seriously, Bulgari’s relaunched Bulgari Aluminium (bottom left) is an undeniable option. Introduced in 1998 as a radically luxurious sport watch, the Aluminium features a super-lightweight pure aluminum case and an athletic rubber strap. And, of course, it boasts the iconic BVLGARI logo bezel. It’s a different type of classic for anyone who’s allergic to the stuffiness of traditional watchmaking— and a relatively affordable option for the commitment-averse.

Deciding what relationship watch works for you? That’s easy. Who gets to wear it which days of the week? That’s on you two to figure out.

P H O T O G R A P H S

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GENTLEMEN’S QUARTERLY

EST. 1957

These Are the Faces of the #BOSSteam Three-time NBA champ Draymond Green is the star of a new team this spring: the BOSS x NBA #BOSSteam. The Golden State Warriors’ forward appears alongside NBA G League forward Isaiah “Zay” Todd, Grammy-nominated rap artist Aminé, and jewelry designer Greg Yuna ,among others, in the spring campaign for the first BOSS x NBA limited-edition capsule collection.

The co-branded casual wear collection— featuring the New York Knicks, Brooklyn Nets, Los Angeles Lakers, LA Clippers, Miami Heat, Chicago Bulls, Golden State Warriors, Houston Rockets, Toronto Raptors and the NBA logo—will be available in February exclusively at BOSS Stores, online, and across select wholesale partners, including Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom.

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My parents got sick.

My husband withdrew.

My quarantine became unbearable.

But all the pain of the past year taught me something: the true nature of intimacy.

The F i x

Essay

Naked Grief

The author’s parents on their wedding day in Seoul, 1977.

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COURTESY OF MARY H.K. CHOI.

B y MARY H.K . CHOI

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in april of the pandemic , my mother was diagnosed

with lung cancer. It was not an optimal moment to need a pulmonary specialist. In September we learned that my father had ALS. That was it for me—it was time to go home. That I’d now taken to calling it home hadn’t escaped my husband’s notice. I moved to New York when I was 22 and hadn’t been in Texas longer than a week since. He made it clear that he did not want to go, but would. ¶ We planned for three weeks in October, with the tacit agreement that we’d stay on indefinitely if the need arose. It had been a sobering summer for everyone.

For months, I’d vacillated between descending, possibly riddled with pathogens, upon my immunocompromised parents and remaining in Brooklyn, startling each time a siren sailed by. In my apartment, I felt useless and prone, on hold, awash in confoundingly circuitous lines of advocacy for my parents’ care—the specialists, the insurance accreditations, the referrals, the labs, the farcical wait times, all during a pandemic when even a cancer surgery was considered elective. And my husband, a socially anxious, monastic workaholic, seemed to withdraw.

I remember most that he was going to the beach a lot. He threw himself into music school, watched the ocean, and wrote spare, stunning compositions.

A week before our scheduled departure, we took a walk along the pier at Bush Terminal in the industrial section of Sunset Park, Brooklyn. It was breezy by the water, and we kept our eyes trained on the ships beyond Bay Ridge Channel. We’d learned it was best to relegate any discussions of our trip outside. Optimally while walking. It’s handy for avoiding combative gestures, standing shoulder to shoulder, the lockstep of forward momentum tricking parties into a sense of accord.

“You know what I can’t stop thinking about?” he said. It was still warm, but the light was taking on the burnished quality of fall and I remember thinking his hair was getting long.

“What?”

“That you’re weak for needing to go,” he said. “That your lack of restraint is going to get us killed.”

I have never loved him more than in that moment. ours is an infant.

Soft-skulled and milk-breathed.

We’ve been married for two years, together for five. We also don’t have AS MARRIAGES GO,

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kids, whatever that signifies for pain thresholds. When we met, my husband had ended a 17-year relationship and only just moved to New York from Switzerland. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, a rite of passage for New Yorkers who tire of seasons as a concept, only to then keenly remember that they can’t cope without bodegas. I was still involved with someone else and living with this someone else. The convenient thing about marriage is that it does wonders to mollify the tawdriness of the a≠air that preceded it.

Long-distance entanglements in your late 30s are as ill-advised as they are hot, and there was no one more captivating to me than my husband as a stranger. He was horrendously inappropriate. An arriviste from a famously inscrutable patch of Europe, he had no one who could vouch for him. He lived clear across the country, smoked two packs a day, drank far too much, and when soused, had a quarrelsome habit of doing hard drugs of completely unknown provenance.

I knew I loved him when he asked me if I’d ever had sex sober. I was visiting him in New York and we were waiting for the subway on our way to a house party out in Canarsie, bottles clinking in red plastic bags. It was the thick of July, when the sweat pools at the small of your back and then sluices down your bare legs no matter how still you are. I couldn’t believe the temerity of his question, the absolute gall. I was appalled in the way you can be only when completely

exposed, indignant to be accused yet humiliated to be found out. My entire sexual history began with coercion at age 13 and continued in anesthetized, obliging politeness like one of those cats bred to go slack at any hint of agitation. In so many other instances I would have laughed, acidly switched subjects, and later blocked his calls.

But in that moment, waiting for the L, he was the hot priest breaking Fleabag’s already broken fourth wall, piercing through to this other, jarringly transparent dimension. It was an observation, not an indictment.

An entreaty to draw closer. I was back in New York within five months. And joined a few 12-step groups.

When we married at City Hall in downtown Brooklyn, me clutching a fistful of deli flowers, him grinning helplessly because there was a housefly that kept landing in my hair, I was happy. I was nearing 40 and had no designs on children; my only requirements for a wedding were that it be in the city and that I wouldn’t have to see my mother. I reasoned that with zero guests, save a photographer to serve as witness, everyone would be o≠ended equally.

Truthfully, I was a coward. I couldn’t bear the crushing disappointment of a torrent of concessions—the Catholic priest, groom in a somber black suit, my father and me inching along the hollow church nave—only to leave my mother wanting. I pictured her, wren-like and severe in her St. John double knit, under a hundred pounds, marshaling guests and sizing up envelopes at the door, tallying by touch. Her shrewd gaze wouldn’t miss a trick—visible tattoos, wrinkled hems, glazed attentions—assiduously and accurately gauging which of our friends were underemployed and likely wasted.

I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams, and those dreams happened to be sharply prescriptive. My mother worried when my definitions of success didn’t mirror hers. And I was unwilling to test my decisions against her scrutiny, her verdicts. So I chose.

This would be my family now. Him and New York. I didn’t even go home for holidays.

“I think that you’re weak for needing to go,” he said. “That your lack of restraint is going to get us killed.”

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grew and the days shortened, I thought not just about my parents but about us, the crucible that quarantine made of our lives. In a pandemic there is too much you cannot unknow, too much you cannot unsee.

If there’s summer-camp intimacy, or even the intimacy of doing ecstasy together, being mutually trapped in a New York apartment in sustained hypervigilance is an altogether di≠erent paradigm. It’s alarming how far you can peer into the void when you’re still. How you can see that the dull, protracted bits of life are o≠set only by the arrival of generally terrible news. I was meant to work on a novel but didn’t. I stopped setting an alarm.

I would hazily brown out for whole swaths of afternoon, evening, weeks.

It’s like what Hemingway said in The Sun Also Rises about bankruptcy. How it happens gradually, then suddenly. A pervasive, subtle deadening. An ambient loss of interest. The arrival of a kind of tumbling o≠ the edge, somatic evaporation, full-body tinnitus.

AS OUR HAIR

was crushing. When death is keenly felt, the fact that you’re not pulling the trigger on life makes you feel impotent as a human.

I would stare at myself in the mirror, my graying roots, my dry, chapped lips, recalling the Megan “WAP” lyric: switch my wig, make him feel like he’s cheating. It recalled that old masturbation technique, The Stranger, whereby you sit on your hand until it’s numb before diddling yourself, just to be in the remotest neighborhood of having someone new do it for you. Without friends, without flirting, without the enlivening of human touch administered by someone else, the months were relentless.

Stultifying. I never considered an a≠air but did contemplate divorce for the clerical diversion in the same way that I romanticized the prospect of a roommate. I couldn’t locate sensation, let alone pleasure or desire.

I speak vindictively, accurately, of the ways in which my husband withdrew, but I’d withdrawn first.

In these moments, I’d look to my husband with wonder, seized by a thunderbolt of alacrity, and think, Who the fuck even are you?

I can’t accurately ascribe how much of it was related to the pandemic, depression, my parents, or that I no longer drank wine. I idly fantasized about babies. Smelling them. Holding them. Germinating them to entice my mother to endure.

To ride this out at least for a human gestation period, so that she could stick around and tell me everything I was doing wrong.

In these moments, I’d look to my husband with wonder, seized by a thunderbolt of alacrity, and think, Who the fuck even are you? The dissonance was swift, delivered with a frisson of closely followed relief. As soon as I became convinced that my parents were dying, I couldn’t shake the fixation that no matter how close, how snarled and felted together I became with my partner, he and I would never be tied by blood. This schism, this genetic Zeno’s paradox, would and could never be closed.

The decision not to have kids, a careful choice arrived at mutually, only contributed to this untethered mootness. Yet I stayed. And the dispassion

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I am good at leaving. I come from a long line of people who are. When my parents moved from Korea to Hong Kong, I was 11 months old and my brother was two. When we were infants, they ran a restaurant in Happy Valley, around the corner from the racing track, to bankroll more auspicious schemes. They ferried shipping containers between Hong Kong and Seoul filled with various manufacturing materials—glass, green-tea extracts that would become the precursors to FitTea, collagen supplements that predated the Korean skin-care market by two decades.

Each load was a gamble. A dazzling test of wits between factories, customs o∞cials, cargo inspectors. Most seasons they went bust. As latchkey kids, we rarely saw them. I often fantasized about them dying so at least I’d know where they’d be.

I was a teen by the time we moved to America. We’d left, uncertain of Hong Kong’s fate as it returned to Chinese rule. San Antonio was a harder landing. The sparseness was stifling. The heaviness of the sky. We

had family in L.A., but—because of or in spite of that fact—my father chose Texas. Coming from intrepid stock, I’ve always felt I had license to return to a real city. It would be adult to leave my parents behind. And I thought it capitulation to ever want to return.

But when my parents got sick, I thrust myself back into their lives.

My helplessness was diabolical, truculent, lacerating. I called them daily, as if to make up for lost time, raging when they went to the store.

I raged when they saw their friends.

I raged when I couldn’t force them into a single-story apartment.

I raged that even in sickness they held sovereignty over themselves.

The wrath elsewhere in my life was astonishing, extravagant: As our friends from the city moved away to start families or be closer to theirs, I despaired but also cast them o≠ as shameless, fickle, weak. More so as the reasons for my moving here—career ambitions, parties, museums, relevance—felt increasingly arcane. As ludicrously nostalgic as hors d’oeuvres. Vulgar as status handbags.

Seemingly overnight I loathed my life. I’d chosen wrong. I wanted to tear it all down, but I couldn’t leave now. This dimension that my husband had lured me into with his honesty, his guileless charm—it was a sham. For a while, this outrage presented as a days-long campaign to force him into getting a vasectomy the moment I started menopause.

I wanted it in writing. I wanted him trapped in this protracted satellite existence with me. I followed him around the house about it. He refused. I made him promise not to tell his friends what I’d asked. He refused that too. I pleaded that we at least get a puppy. He told me to consider meditation. In better moments I can laugh at how diabolically snide he can be. Snide, not wrong. and final season of Seinfeld, there’s an episode called “The Apology.” It’s the one where Jerry dates a nudist named Melissa and distinctions are made between good naked (brushing hair) and bad naked (opening jars; crouching).

The crux is that there’s something decidedly o≠-putting about the dispensation of e≠ort. Good naked presumes an unguardedness, the rousing tenderness of a perceived vulnerability. It’s happening upon my partner asleep, his hair curling IN THE NINTH

COURTESY OF MARY H.K. CHOI.

riotously against his brow. The quiet and warmth of small hours, bodies pressed upon each other as an eyelid flutters open.

Sheltering in place is bad naked. It is deeply and intensely unsexy watching your romantic interest cope.

The constant exposure to less-thantelegenic micro-expressions. An intolerable aspect of yourself clocked in your spouse. The sweatpants. A cozy but misshapen “housecoat.” What a novel and alarmingly survivalist pathogen does to human aging when you’ve both just turned 40, that moment when everything slackens with an almost audible sigh of defeat. Whatever it is, after a while, you just don’t want to fuck it.

But confronted by my husband’s unalloyed contempt that day in the park, when he told me I was weak for wanting to see my dying parents, I felt true intimacy for the first time in months.

The admission was a tonic.

It wasn’t just truthful. It was an advanced truth.

It was not just bad naked.

It was beyond naked. He’d called me weak because he hated me. And he hated me because he was scared.

Everything he’d done in support of me and my family was noble. Selfless.

Bodies are a constant fucking be trayal, and that he’d strapped himself to another one that was in turn attached to a whole human centipede of decrepitude was deeply a≠ecting. But then he’d admitted not only his reservation but his scorn. How it ran counter to his most primal instincts of self-preservation. Were he alone, with his discipline, his self-su∞ciency, his precious solitary walks on Far fucking Rockaway, he’d survive this. Meanwhile, I’d demanded we head to the airport.

I dared him to say no, because I knew he couldn’t. This was marriage.

Because good naked is a lie. The truth of my own hideousness is disgusting even to me. As unassailably repellent as the smell of an earring back. The ugliest parts of me revel in the craven parts of him.

Because so far there are no conditions by which he doesn’t love me, no matter his reluctance.

S O W E went to San Antonio.

It was not the homecoming I’d anticipated. The thing about being home is that the people who live there are home already. Mostly my father bristled at my long, searching glances at his extremities while he tried to watch TV. My mother, who in FaceTime appeared drawn, her face sunken, looked—as my husband put it as we drove up—diesel.

Standing on an incline at the top of the driveway, with her arms crossed, she was tiny but sinewy. Condensed, somehow. We looked up as she planted a sizable, insulated bag of home cooking for our Airbnb quarantine halfway between the garage AND

The author and her brother with their mother in Hong Kong in the early 1980s.

and our car and then retreated to her side as though it were ransom.

She accused me of not feeding my husband properly. Tears slid hotly beneath my mask as the plastic face shield fogged up. We each thought the other utterly helpless.

Weeks later, after multiple tests, I finally held my mother and wept.

Love is never what I think it will be. It’s small but spreads wide, surprising me with its contours, its unfamiliarity, its unhurried rhythms. I don’t know how I arrived at the conclusion that families are zero-sum. I never interrogated the apocryphal notion that my two families would repel each other like

magnets or else collide and decimate me. I just couldn’t face the questions, the mixing. The muddiness. But this is what love is.

I’ve learned, too, that for me love is always struck through with terror. As a solemn kid in Hong Kong, searching for my parents through the window of our high-rise at night, it was the uncertainty I couldn’t tolerate. The anticipation of loss. Now, as I care for them, I’ve entered that fog again. I don’t know how it will feel when my father’s limbs go, when his smooth-muscle functions abandon him. I don’t know whether it will coincide with my mother’s tumors resurfacing. All I know is that I don’t get to know. That there is no way to prepare for those moments. And that for now, my parents are here and I can talk to them.

In the winter, on the afternoon of my mother’s good news at her follow-up oncology appointment, my father took a fall. I was back in New York by then. Back home. It was a confusing day. I sent one thousand emails before the feelings erupted in crying jags and naps. I didn’t call my parents as a gift to all of us. My partner made lunch.

Then dinner. Afterward, we went for a walk.

Shoulder to shoulder with my husband, in lockstep, I realized something. That day by the water, at the end of the summer, he said he resented that I had to see my parents—when it might be years before we could safely travel overseas to see his. And that he would endure. Yet his sacrifice, his prudence, could be wiped out by our seeing mine.

I understood that miserly calculus well. The pettiness, the scarcity, the fear. I love him all the more for it. It’s how I can reach for him in a blind, frenzied hunger in the pitch black of our bedroom, stone-cold sober, on our mid-priced mattress, tearing o≠ last year’s Uniqlo Heat Tech because I know for a fact he isn’t better than me. He is other than me but not better than me, and that’s the best thing about family.

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mary h.k. choi is a ‘New York Times’ best-selling author. Her third novel, ‘Yolk,’ is out March 2.

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Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe both had Hall of Fame–worthy careers before they met. But to reach new, boundary-obliterating levels of achievement on and off the field, they needed each other. And, as they tell Emma Carmichael, their work is just getting started.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY SAM TAYLOR‑JOHNSON STYLED BY GEORGE CORTINA

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not plan to propose to Sue Bird by the pool on a lazy afternoon in Antigua last fall, but Megan Rapinoe is not a big planner. She tends to do things in the moment, when they feel right. One of the defining plays of her decade-long international soccer career—her last-second, game-tying cross to Abby Wambach in the 2011 World Cup quarterfinals—was famously pure instinct. “I don’t even think I looked up,” before smacking the ball with her left foot, she told ESPN: “I took a touch and thought, ‘She better frickin’ be in there.’ ” In 2019, she made an o≠hand comment in an interview leading up to the World Cup (“I’m not going to the fucking White House”); when it was published that summer, President Trump wrote on Twitter, “Megan should WIN first before she TALKS!” She made the winning part look easy: In the following game, she scored both goals in a 2-1 victory over France. It was the most watched women’s quarterfinal of all time.

While there was not a proposal plan for Antigua, where the couple of four years had gone with friends to celebrate Bird’s 40th birthday and fourth WNBA title, there was a growing sense that it might be the right time.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg had just passed away, shifting the balance of the Supreme Court to the right. Bird and Rapinoe had been wondering—like anyone whose basic civil rights are essentially wet paint—if they needed to get married while they still could. Less pressingly, Bird’s nieces began asking the couple when they would tie the knot. “Whenever Megan asks,” Bird would reply.

It was midday, and they’d been drinking, so most of the group was sleeping o≠ their buzzes in the sun.

Rapinoe was lying on the ledge of the infinity pool, just where it dropped o≠ into the horizon, and Bird was in the water next to her. “There was a look in her eye,” Bird remembers. Rapinoe got on one knee. Bird caught on: “I could just sense it. I knew what was happening.”

We’re speaking over Zoom in December, and there’s a sweet pause as the couple—titans of their respective games, internationally celebrated activists, preeminent LGBTQ+ icons of the 21st century, the most beloved power couple in sports—gaze at each other, basking in the memory and the delight of sharing it. And then Bird snaps out of the reverie, turning back to the screen as she remembers a crucial detail: “She had this bucket hat on,” she says, still disbelieving.

Bird quietly asked her to take o≠ the bucket hat.

Rapinoe obliged. The photo that was eventually posted to their Instagrams—liked by a combined 750,000 people, covered by celebrity-news outlets, and shared by no less than Joe Biden in a viral tweet—does not feature MEGAN RAPINOE DID

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than most couples have steak knives: At 35, Rapinoe is one of the most decorated American soccer players of all time, with two World Cup titles and an Olympic gold medal to her name. Bird, 40, is considered one of the greatest basketball players of all time, having won multiple championships at every stage of her career—from her two championships during her fabled UConn days to her quartet of rings with the Seattle Storm and four Olympic golds with the national team.

They have set the agenda o≠ the field too: Both have been active in the Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name movements as well as the ongoing fights for equal pay and treatment that have revolutionized their sports. In January, after months of campaigning that started at the WNBA’s pandemic site in Florida, Bird celebrated Rev. Raphael Warnock’s victory over Atlanta Dream co-owner Kelly Loe±er in one of Georgia’s crucial runo≠ Senate races. They are pushing things forward, as none other than Billie Jean King tells me. “We were always afraid of the unknown,” she says. King lost all of her sponsorships in 24 hours when she was involuntarily outed in 1981. Things are di≠erent now. “This is why having Megan and Sue out in front like this, being comfortable in their own skin, is so huge. It allows other people to be more comfortable.”

“What they’ve been able to do as a couple, individually, I don’t think they could have done that alone,” Diana Taurasi, the WNBA legend—and Bird’s close friend dating back to UConn—says. “When two people are on the same page, and they love each other, and they’re working towards something better, you can do a lot of good things.”

Bird and Rapinoe first met in the run-up to the 2016 Rio Olympics. It wasn’t exactly romantic: Every four years, Olympians are asked to get dressed up and take patriotically hot photos for media circulation.

They crossed paths as Rapinoe was heading out of one shoot and Bird was preparing for another, wearing her uniform—and full makeup.

Rapinoe had a fleeting chance to make an impression.

Instead, she made a cringey joke: “Are you getting ready for a game?” There may have been two-handed “this guy” pointing, Bird says.

“It didn’t go like I planned at all,” Rapinoe says, shaking her head. “I walked away like, ‘You’re an idiot.’ ” Rapinoe’s summer in Rio did not go as planned, either.

The U.S. Women’s National Team failed to medal for the first time in team history. She was engaged at the time, but things were rocky with her then fiancée. After Bird’s team won the gold medal, Rapinoe attended the victory party, where Taurasi noticed something.

←← OPENING PAGES ON BIRD

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vintage tank top Helmut Lang from David Casavant Archive pants (price upon request) Dior boots $150 Dr. Martens her own watch (throughout) Rolex jewelry (throughout), her own

“It was on a ship, a big ballroom; there were a lot of people, and Sue would just gravitate right back to [Megan’s] table,” Taurasi says. “I’ve seen Sue in a lot of bars, and I can tell when she’s on the prowl. I was just like, ‘Yep, there it is.’ ” Bird and Rapinoe made plans to get together after the Olympics in Seattle, where they lived and played for their respective pro teams but had never crossed paths. They had dinner with friends and then, in early September, both in Chicago for road games, met for drinks. Each sensed a spark.

Bird and Taurasi joke that you can always tell when a teammate is newly interested in someone, because it’s easy to notice when professionally regimented people miss a pregame nap or choose to travel on a day o≠.

Right after she and Rapinoe parted ways in Chicago, Bird says, she was up most of the night, giddily chatting with Rapinoe, and then finally crashing—“only to wake up as soon as possible to get back on the phone. We were breaking all the athlete rules of schedule. If I got four hours of sleep, I would consider myself lucky.”

Rapinoe broke things o≠ with her fiancée, and when she felt ready, she and Bird went on their first date. (In her 2020 memoir, One Life, Rapinoe writes that there was no “physical overlap” with Bird while she was with her ex but acknowledges an “emotional one.”) After dinner, they walked back to Bird’s apartment, where Bird put on the Maroon 5 Pandora station. Rapinoe asked her to change it and then made the first move. “The second my butt touched the couch, [she was] all over it,” Bird says, laughing.

They’d known from that first texting session that they were falling for each other. Dating confirmed it. “I was like, ‘Okay, don’t be a cliché lesbian, where you love this person when you first meet them,’ ” Rapinoe says with a laugh. “But it just was immediately like, ‘Oh, this is home.’”

Ashlyn Harris, Rapinoe’s best friend and USWNT teammate, a≠ectionately compares her to one of those “tall noodle-looking things’’ outside a car dealership, “living life loose.” Bird, she says, “is always the same.

She’s never too high. She’s never too low. She’s an alien.”

In conversation, Bird, who has done game commentary over the years, is a patient storyteller; Rapinoe is her devoted and excitable hype-woman. They are each other’s foil, “like yin and yang,” Harris’s wife and teammate, Ali Krieger, says. “They fit perfectly together.” the relationship entered her life precisely when she needed stability. It wasn’t just that she had ended her engagement; she was also at a professional crossroads, struggling to balance her career with her outspoken nature and a newfound commitment to racial justice.

A few days after that early meeting in Chicago, Rapinoe decided to kneel for the national anthem before a game with her club team, in solidarity with then 49er Colin Kaepernick. She was the first white professional athlete to join Kaepernick’s historic, and thus far NFL career–ending, protest against police brutality and racial injustice. “Being a gay American,” she said afterward, “I know what it means to look at the flag and not have it protect all of your liberties.” After she kneeled again, this time with the USWNT, the United States Soccer Federation, the governing body for soccer in the U.S., admonished Rapinoe in an o∞cial statement. Soon she FOR RAPINOE,

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“I was in a pretty precarious situation, soccer-wise.… From a career standpoint, I owe so much to Sue.” —megan

rapinoe

was removed from the starting rotation. O≠ the field, she received hate mail and members of her family questioned her actions. By February, after being left o≠ the roster for yet another tournament, she could feel the position she’d worked so hard to secure slipping away.

“I was in a pretty precarious situation, soccer-wise,” Rapinoe says. “I think everyone was like, ‘Okay, if you fade out, that’s sort of fine.’ ” She didn’t play in a national-team game from mid-September to April, the longest stretch of her life (not counting injuries). During that time, she folded herself into her new relationship with Bird, whom she credits with building her up—emotionally, but also physically, as she began to follow Bird’s strict diet and training regimen.

“I really did transform. From a career standpoint, I owe so much to her,” Rapinoe says. It was what her game needed: “In order for me to really get back, I had to be way better than I was before, because [U.S. Soccer o∞cials] were just kind of happy to let this bitch go.”

Bird was an anchor, Rapinoe says. “I’m going through this crazy situation with my coach, my career’s on the line, I’m feeling wild things and saying wild things at times. I’ve never felt insecure in my career in that way.

[The relationship] felt safe in this very unsafe world that I was living in.”

By spring 2017, having made it through a singularly heady first six months of dating, they had resumed their routines. Rapinoe had fought her way back onto the USWNT roster, and Bird was gearing up for another season with the Storm. Bird, who’d been out to her friends and family for many years, came out publicly as a lesbian that July, announcing her relationship with Rapinoe. Out to the world and finally on solid ground together, they returned to their usual business of kicking ass. In 2018, Bird won her third WNBA title. Rapinoe won her second World Cup a year later.

doom any overbooked celebrity couple, particularly if they’re star athletes who play di≠erent sports all around the globe. For Bird and Rapinoe, the pandemic o≠ered a small silver lining: Like the NBA, the WNBA had decided to play its season on a “bubble” campus in Florida. Bird relocated there in early July; Rapinoe joined her soon after. “We were ships in the night for most of the end of 2019,” Bird says. In 2020, they spent only a few days apart.

The Wubble, as the site came to be known, often felt like a parallel universe where the pandemic was on hold.

For nearly three months, they shared what was essentially SCHEDULING ISSUES CAN

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“The bubble made organizing very easy. And I think the reason it worked is because we’re women, and this is what women do. We collaborate, right? It took the entire league to execute.”— s u e b i r d a hotel room, operating on di≠erent schedules. Rapinoe would work out before the Florida heat became unbearable, while Bird would sleep as late as she could so she was rested for games. “It was either that or not be around you for three months,” Rapinoe says, gazing at Bird. “And that was not happening.”

During the day, Rapinoe spent time recording the audiobook for her memoir, working on other personal projects, and hanging out at the pool (and nearby bar).

She and Bird saw old friends and made new ones: support sta≠ for other teams; the ESPN reporter Holly Rowe; Marta Xargay, a Spanish professional basketball player who dates Storm star Breanna Stewart. Xargay and Rapinoe would grab drinks together before riding a shuttle to the arena for games.

“I went to a few of the games real drunk,” Rapinoe says. “Definitely the last game. Me and Marta, we were like, ‘This shit’s going to be a sweep!’ ” This is not to say that the Wubble was MTV Spring Break: Pandemic Beach. Players arrived on campus not long after protests against the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other innocent Black Americans had spread across the nation. The league—whose teams have been openly protesting police violence since July 2016, when some WNBA players were fined for wearing “Black Lives Matter” shirts during warm-ups—dedicated the season to Taylor’s memory.

At the same time, Loe±er, co-owner of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream and a Georgia senator, had written a letter to league commissioner Cathy Engelbert, in which she said she “adamantly oppose[d] the Black Lives Matter political movement” and asked the WNBA to “remove politics from sports.” Bird says the letter felt like “a gut punch.… When you’re in a room talking to Black players who say to you, ‘When I take my jersey o≠ and go home, I could be Breonna Taylor’—it just hits in a di≠erent way.”

The WNBA’s Players Association organized behind the scenes. Bird and other players on the union’s executive council vetted Warnock’s record, then designed and ordered “VOTE WARNOCK” T-shirts—Bird’s idea. Images of league stars wearing the T-shirts began to go viral, and after a few days Warnock had passed Loe±er in the polls.

(They never mentioned Loe±er’s name in interviews, to avoid giving her extra press.) Mobilizing was helped by the fact that everyone was more or less within reach: “The bubble made organizing very easy,” Bird says. “And I think the reason it worked is because we’re women, and this is what women do. We collaborate, right? It took the entire league to execute.”

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She also says it was a lesson in showing up for her Black colleagues.

Compared with Kaepernick and other Black athletes, Rapinoe says, “I have benefited from kneeling. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.” About 70 percent of WNBA players, meanwhile, are Black, and both Bird and Rapinoe have spoken about the relative privilege that comes with being white activists. When players were considering backing Warnock, Bird says, “people were exhausted. I was able to take some of the burden o≠ of my executive-committee counterparts who were Black.”

Bird and the Storm swept the Las Vegas Aces in the finals. Her relationship with Rapinoe moved forward too. In the Wubble, they had learned something a lot of couples discovered during the pandemic, if under slightly di≠erent circumstances and with occasionally higher stakes: that they didn’t mind each other’s company, even in the same room, even for hours a day.

A little more than a week after they left the Wubble, they were engaged. playing soccer and basketball in the ’90s, a couple of decades removed from Title IX and during a relative boom time for women’s sports. Women’s soccer debuted at the Olympics in 1996, and the WNBA’s inaugural season came a year later. I remember exactly where I was, and how limitless the world felt, when Brandi Chastain scored the 1999 World Cup–winning penalty kick and ripped o≠ her jersey in celebration.

I watched every UConn basketball championship Bird, Taurasi, and their fellow Huskies won in the early aughts, and Rapinoe’s national teams were benchmarks of my 20s. It was nice to see, but it was also just sports, a series of meaningful moments for a cub reporter and former athlete.

And then a few years ago, I met a woman and fell in love, and slowly acknowledged a part of my identity I hadn’t allowed myself to face for a long time. I did not have a single “aha” moment; I didn’t post anything to Instagram on #NationalComingOutDay. It was more like a series of puzzle pieces gradually clicking into place, a settling into I GREW UP

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myself. And as I started to come out to people close to me, I looked around and realized I had some familiar company. Since the legalization of gay marriage in 2015, WNBA stars have publicly come out simply by getting married to their partners. Rapinoe’s teammates Harris and Kreiger threw a classically decadent Miami wedding that was featured in Vogue. At some point, Xargay nonchalantly started to post photos of her girlfriend, Stewart, on Instagram; in late 2020, New York Liberty guard Layshia Clarendon said that she identified as nonbinary and trans. After winning the World Cup in 2019, star U.S. defender Kelley O’Hara, who wasn’t previously out, walked o≠ the pitch, casually kissed her girlfriend in the stands, and never mentioned it again. Many other pros in both sports are out; many more are surely not out but happily living their lives.

I followed along from the sidelines, sharing posts and couples’ portraits with LGBTQ+ friends, texting harmless gossip about who might be dating. It felt like watching my life—my new queer life—get mainstreamed and a∞rmed in real time, and all by the same people who had helped shape my adolescence.

Bird and Rapinoe have been on the front lines of that shift, helping to build a world where, in Rapinoe’s words,

the “boundlessness” and acceptance of LGBTQ+ people becomes as normal as another U.S. women’s World Cup title, remarkable only for its casualness. It’s work, but it’s work they’re happy to do. “Not everyone wants to be saying ‘I’m gay’ and doing the interviews,” Rapinoe says.

“That’s not everybody’s lane.”

“This is exactly what my generation was fighting for,” says Billie Jean King. “Everything they get to do, if we did, we would’ve been toast.”

Rapinoe came out to her family at age 19 (her twin sister, Rachael, is also gay) and then publicly in 2012 as she geared up for the London Olympics—becoming the first active member of the USWNT to do so.

Bird’s path was a bit more circuitous. She was drafted first overall in 2002, when the WNBA was less comfortable embracing its LGBTQ+ fan base and fewer lesbian athletes were out in general. She was young and white, with girlnext-door good looks, marketed as the face of the franchise. She attended the ESPYs that year with Backstreet Boy Nick Carter, a wholesome publicity stunt set up by the agent they shared.

“You can tell when someone’s hiding something, and I feel like that’s how the WNBA was with our marketing,” Bird says now. “I don’t really (continued on page 110)

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Naomi Osaka is a tennis prodigy who’s on her way to being the greatest athlete of her generation.

Cordae is an electric young rapper with a Grammy nod.

And with their powers combined, they are the most dynamic and outspoken young couple in the culture right now.

BY MARK ANTHONY GREEN

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY RENELL MEDRANO

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corner for a point. The shot was mesmerizing—the kind of momentum shifter that eventually helped Osaka cruise to victory—but it was her non-reaction afterward that was most revealing. While someone like a Rafael Nadal might have celebrated by leaping into the air and screaming until their neck veins exploded, Osaka was…relaxed.

Unbothered. She just sort of casually glanced down at her racket as if to check on its well-being, like, Hey, little guy, that wasn’t too hard on you, was it?

No matter what kind of pressure she’s under or the caliber of opponent she’s facing, Osaka’s default state is one of unflappable chill. It’s almost eerie. Like she has the resting heart rate of a Galápagos tortoise. She was even unflappable as she fielded tone-deaf questions from Open reporters about the face masks she had been wearing all tournament long, which were printed with names including Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Elijah McClain (“What was the message you wanted to send, Naomi?”—as if the answer wasn’t obvious).

Meanwhile, when Osaka’s boyfriend of two years— the Grammy-nominated rapper Cordae—attends her matches, he is decidedly unchill. He’s a complete 180, hollering in the stands every time she wins a point. And thank God for that. Because Cordae on the sidelines showcased a level of unbridled joy that was one of the few glimmers of goodness many of us had all year.

And what better pair to fawn over? Despite being such a new face and name, Osaka is already the highest-paid female athlete in the world—with sponsorship deals from Nike, Beats by Dre, and Louis Vuitton. (“I did buy my mom her first Louis Vuitton a couple of years back, which was a nice memory for me,” Osaka said in an email. “Now being the new face of the brand is just so surreal.”) She’s an instant cultural juggernaut. Cordae, on the other hand, is a radical thinker and an exciting new voice in music with cosigns from legends including Eminem and Dave Chappelle. The L.A. Times called him “hip-hop’s next great MC.” So it is notable that Naomi Osaka is indeed fearless and coolheaded, able to calmly handle the media’s unfair obsession with her and her idol Serena Williams, whom she was pitted against after going toe to toe in a Grand Slam final. (More on that in a bit.) That is, unless you start talking to Naomi about her relationship, in which case she gets noticeably flustered. Meanwhile, Cordae is eager to explain the nuances of Je≠ Bezos’s Regret Minimization Framework, but he too gets a little discombobulated when you ask him simple questions about how he and Naomi first met. This isn’t Hollywood coy,

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who seems to float above the fray, as if she’s on her own high frequency. For someone young enough to still be on her parents’ health insurance, she’s forcing us to re-examine what a young, modern athlete can stand for.

Especially when it comes to winning.

You started tennis at age three and have been a competitor your entire life, basically. Has the importance of winning changed at all for you?

NAOMI OSAK A: That’s a funny question. When I was younger, winning was everything. You train your entire life for the match, and you feel like your worth is validated whether you win or lose. It used to be really heavy when I lost, because I felt like that just meant that I was kind of worth nothing. I feel like as I grew up, I learned more and I realized that life isn’t based on just the tennis game I play. It’s sort of based on little things, like your actions as a person. Like saying hello to everyone you meet and stuff like that. I feel like that is more validating than whether I win a tennis match or not.

GQ:

To someone on the outside looking in, starting a profession super young seems really toxic.

I can only speak for myself, but I feel like it’s taught me a lot of lessons. Most of them I had to learn the hard way. So I’m not sure if that’s called toxic or not. It’s the only life that I know, if that makes sense. I can’t imagine myself doing anything else or going through any other trial- or tribulationtype thing. I would say that when I was younger and going through the process, I wished things were different. But I also feel like surviving it made me a stronger person.

One of those moments that I’m sure made you stronger was beating Serena at the 2018 U.S. Open. Now, after two years, what was that really like?

Well, I always think of all my matches as a tennis match, no matter who I play. And it’s weird, but as a kid, I always dreamed of playing Serena in the finals. So for me it felt like just a huge accomplishment to even be there in the first place. I was just going into it thinking it was a tennis match. And then I feel like everything after was something that I could have never prepared for. And I just felt super overwhelmed. Even during the trophy ceremony, I was overwhelmed.

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But I feel like the me now sort of understands everything that took place. And at the same time, I wish I could have articulated myself better and expressed to everyone my emotions—say what I really thought.

Because I feel like the media sort of [dictates] the narrative of how they want to sell things. And for me, I never saw it that way when I was playing.

Specifically you never saw what?

I never saw Serena as angry or anything like that. It was a tennis match. She was expressing her emotions, but we were playing tennis. You know what I mean?

What did you not say then that you can say now?

Probably just for everyone to stop pushing the narrative that Serena was being mean or stuff like that. For me it was weird because, at the time, I didn’t even know they were saying that. After the match, I didn’t have my phone or anything on me. I was just eating dinner with my parents. And then when I woke up the next morning, it was on the news. So for me, I was very shocked because, first of all, that was the first time I was ever on the news.

Second of all, I felt like it was for all the wrong reasons.

So I feel like this is something that I’ve learned over the years. But I wish I could have said something back then.

Does it change the way you feel about the victory?

For me it doesn’t taint anything. I would say it definitely made it very controversial. But I feel like anybody that watches tennis would have appreciated the match. And I also feel like it sort of shows how big of a figure that Serena is. Everyone in tennis says it, but anyone that beats her sort of gets thrown into the spotlight. But I wouldn’t say that that tainted it. I would just say that it gave me a lot of experiences in one single day that maybe would have taken a lot of other people a couple of years to experience.

To me it feels like whenever two Black women play against each another there’s added media attention that’s often negative. Does it feel that way to you?

I would definitely say it feels different. Just hearing you say that makes me think: There are so many tennis players in the world. And yet, for some reason, whenever I play Serena, they broadcast it in a way that’s a rivalry.

But it’s not. She’s won so much more than me. So many people can try their entire lifetime and not catch up to what she’s done. And that’s something that, you know, I’m trying to set as a goal. I’m not even sure it’s possible to do everything that she’s done. But it’s also weird how they set it up like that.

“My elementary school, middle school, high school was 99.9 percent Black.

Kids who look like me.

It just felt really weird for me being in that space [at the 2019 U.S.Open] That was my first tennis match ever.” — c o r d a e toward Black people] on Twitter, before I was wearing the masks. I pulled out of a tournament earlier that day, and I was getting so many notifications—my Twitter has never blown up like that before. So just getting all those notifications and then getting texts from, you know, my mom telling me she’s proud of me and she hopes that I’m all right. Stuff like that.

Realizing the scale of reach that I have that I don’t really exercise day to day.

And then just accepting and realizing that tennis is a majority white sport, which is something that I knew growing up. Everyone sort of knows that. I feel like when people think about tennis, they think of Wimbledon and wearing white clothes and wooden rackets. So I’m hoping that, you know, as the years go on, that viewpoint changes.

How would you describe your relationship with Kobe before he passed?

I would say he was like the older brother/uncle that I wish I always had. He was someone that, no matter how busy he was, for some reason he always picked up the phone when I called him. And I remember once, after the [2019] U.S. Open, I called him after one of my matches and he was just hanging out with his youngest daughter. He’s someone that gave me advice.

Are you ever worried when you speak out about things like race?

When I started thinking about it, yes. Because I feel like all you ever really need is, like, the first push.

There’s a point where you just think to yourself, “Well, there’s no turning back now.” So I’d say it definitely did scare me a lot.

What’s the best advice he gave you?

I was asking him questions about how to handle the media and press when I was getting news articles written about me whenever I lost. And that was really stressful. I remember he told me, “Imagine that you’re a lion and you’re hunting your prey. So you see a deer off in the distance. And if you watch Animal Planet, you always see the lions looking at their prey, and they have gnats around their eyes. Think of the media and the press as gnats, and you’re the lion, so never get distracted. And you never see the lion trying to swat away the flies or anything like that.”

Do you remember the first time you vocalized something and realized that it could be considered controversial?

When I first posted a statement [about police brutality

Kobe! Do you ever think about life after tennis?

Of course I’d like to have a family. I’m really grateful for it, but I’ve… I’ve never had to experience being famous. You know what I mean? Like, not being able

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to go anywhere or having to have a security person.

So I’m really grateful to be in the position that I’m in, because I don’t think I would be able to handle it.

So yeah, just chill somewhere with my family.

You don’t think you’re famous? Like…currently?

Yeah. I honestly don’t think I’m famous.

Naomi Osaka, you’re very famous.

di≠erent when I talk to Naomi and Cordae together. Getting them to answer a very basic question about how they met takes almost 10 minutes. They’re giggling. They’re blushing. They’re constantly contradicting each other in a way that feels endless.

It’s adorable. But trying to put together a coherent timeline of their romantic backstory is tough. Historians will have to THE ENERGY IS COMPLETELY

chart their relationship as if it were the Big Bang. The only thing we’re fairly certain about is that it happened.

The basic story, as I understand it, is Cordae and Naomi linked up two years ago and exchanged phone numbers. After some back-and-forth, they agreed to meet for a first date at, of all places, Staples Center, for a Clippers game.

We were on FaceTime trying to find each other because the arena was so big. And I just remember seeing that there were so many people who wanted to take a picture with him. And I just thought it was really cool how friendly and welcoming he was with everyone.

NAOMI:

Cordae, is it true you didn’t know she was a tennis player at the time?

CORDAE: Yeah, at the time. It’s not my sport. If you asked me about tennis, before being immersed in it because of Naomi, I could only give you Venus and Serena Williams, you know? Because they’re just a part of the culture.

Naomi, does Cordae play unfinished and new music for you first?

NAOMI: Yeah. But he had to warm up to me. And I had to do a lot of pleases.

“Please, sir, can I just please listen to your song?” Eventually he let me listen to his music, which I feel really grateful and honored about, to be honest. He’s a perfectionist, and I think that’s sort of what I am too. So maybe that’s why we get along.

CORDAE: She’s musically inclined, though. She has a good ear. I don’t really trust too many people’s ear like that. You get what I’m saying? She has a widespread ear. And that’s the way she thinks as well: worldwide.

Has she ever listened to something and been like, “Change this” or “Change that”?

CORDAE: No. I don’t tell her how to swing. It’s a mutual respect.

NAOMI: He also introduces me to a lot of older music. Songs I remember my parents listening to. I’m not sure if he’s going to kill me for saying that.

Like what, Cordae?

CORDAE: It just depends. Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye. Gil ScottHeron. Michael Jackson is my favorite artist of all time. Oh, Chuck—a lot of Chuck Berry as well. Jimi Hendrix and stuff.

NAOMI: Growing up, I feel like I just heard the hits, you know what I mean? It’s a really interesting thing about him. He knows the whole catalog of everyone. I feel like

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the knowledge that he has about his craft and his passion is so much more vast than mine.

CORDAE: You’re making it work, though! She making it look good.

I think most people found out you guys were dating at the 2019 U.S. Open. What was that like for you, Cordae?

CORDAE: I don’t know if I ever told Naomi this or not, but I felt really out of place. Like, that was my first time being in an environment like that in my entire life.

My elementary school, middle school, high school was 99.9 percent Black. Kids who look like me. It just felt really weird for me being in that space. That was my first tennis match ever.

That’s basically like your first rap concert being Jay-Z at Madison Square Garden…and you’re dating Jay-Z. Cordae: I was just about to say that. [Laughs.]

Naomi, most musicians’ lives are pretty chaotic and formless. Late nights. Tons of travel. Was there an adjustment period for you when you guys first started dating?

NAOMI: In the beginning. Just because he has such a completely different work style than me. I start super early in the morning, and then I end late afternoon. But I feel like for him everything starts at night. So it was kind of hard to adjust to that in the beginning. But when I did, I felt pretty comfortable. I wouldn’t say there was a moment where I felt like he did when he went to the Open or anything like that.

Dating an artist is traditionally difficult. Is any of it surprising to you?

NAOMI: I would say it definitely feels very different. But I never… I don’t know. I never really thought too much about it. I was about to say something really cheesy. I’m glad I didn’t. Yeah, it’s just… [Even through a pixelated Zoom, I could make out Naomi blushing.]

What would happen if you said something “cheesy”?

NAOMI: I just don’t… I don’t want to say something cheesy. I would feel kind of… [Laughs.]

CORDAE: She’s just a boss, man. She do that boss talk, bro! That’s how she moves.

On top of normal relationship pressure, there’s static that comes with being two famous people in a relationship. How do you guys navigate that?

CORDAE: We were dating for almost a year before people knew about us. So we kind of move very reclusively. We don’t really post intimate moments, because I feel as though they’re sacred. A relationship is really a sacred thing. Once you let outside influences get into it, it becomes less sacred.

But sometimes there is celeb static that is unavoidable. For example, the times when Naomi went on the Ellen show. Ellen spent entirely too much time pushing for you and Michael B. Jordan to date. She said she texted him. Ellen even displayed a photoshopped

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“Honestly, he’s quite a romantic dude.”

—naomi

osaka

billboard of Naomi and MBJ outside her studio.

Granted, she didn’t know you two were dating at the time. But non-famous people don’t have to worry about billboards of their girlfriend with Michael B. Jordan.

NAOMI: I mean, for me it was awkward. But at the same time, I sort of understood why she did it. The previous time I was on the show, that’s sort of what she was talking about. So in my mind, I just thought it was a segment, but I also didn’t want to just say, like, “I have a boyfriend.” I sort of felt like maybe she would blow that up too. And I wouldn’t know how I would handle that.

Cordae, how did watching that make you feel?

CORDAE: It’s funny. I didn’t even notice it. But Michael B. Jordan is like my big brother in real life. And he sent it to me and commented on it. He said, “Ellen, you funny as hell.” I’m a pretty secure dude and don’t like tripping off any of that. And I know how both of us think. [Naomi] reacted in a way that she should have—versus blowing the whole situation up. Because we both know what it is.

What’s the most romantic thing Cordae has ever done for you, Naomi?

NAOMI: Honestly, he’s quite a romantic dude. This is going to take a little bit of backstory, but you know how in the U.S. Open we had to quarantine and we couldn’t really have a lot of people there with us? So for me I’ll always have my dad with me, because he’s sort of like the guy that keeps me calm and he tells one-liners to keep me happy and stuff like that. He was unable to travel with me there. During the whole New York thing and with everything that was going on, I started to feel really depressed. Sometimes I would call Cordae, and maybe in some of the calls I would cry. I don’t remember.

[Laughs.] And he flew out, even though he was really busy. I really appreciated that.

I’m not sure if I’ve told him that. I feel like he actually really helped me win just, like, keeping up the motivation.

Cordae, same question.

CORDAE: I don’t know. She always comes on tour with me. I don’t know if that counts as sweet or romantic.

But that’s pretty tight. It’s like she’s the only girl in the crew. You know how a tour bus goes: It’s me, the band, security, the homies, tour management, lights, sound engineer. You know what I’m saying? She’ll just take time out of, you know, whatever she got going on training and things of that nature to just come with us on tour for, like, two weeks at a time.

Naomi, does tour-bus life mess with your routine?

NAOMI: Honestly, it did in the beginning. But I sort of got used to it. And for me, I’ve been training for my whole life. It’s just like a fun adventure anytime I go on tour with him. (continued on page 109)

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With a pair of megawatt careers and a brood of cherubic children, Russell Wilson and Ciara are the ultimate overachieving celebrity couple. Which doesn’t mean that their lives are without struggle and disappointment. True perfection may not be totally possible—but that will never stop these two from trying.

he first thing Russell Wilson and Ciara do together in the —right around 6 a.m., after one kid or another has —is pray. The prayer is always the same: They ask that the day be great. In football season, they do this in Seattle, where Wilson plays quarterback for the Seahawks and they have a house overlooking Lake Washington. In the off-season, it might be at their house in Los Angeles—if they have business there, which Ciara, now going on her second decade of pop stardom, often does—or at their house in San Diego (“our home away from home”), or if they’re looking for a little more fun, their house in Mexico. And you know what? Usually it’s a great day.

“It’s always a blast that we get to do love together,” Wilson says. He’s in his hyperbaric chamber, laid back on a pillow, the white tent around him gently wheezing and sighing. Yesterday the Seahawks narrowly beat the San Francisco 49ers, and so today is a recovery day.

“I’m getting hit by 350-pound dudes,” Wilson says. The body can take only so much. The chamber helps. How does the chamber help? “It brings good oxygen to my cells and helps me recover faster. Science shows that it helps with recovery and healing, and so that’s why it’s such a big thing for me.” It’s weirdly intimate, seeing him occasionally lift an oxygen tube to his mouth and nose, the phone screen just inches away from his face.

He has a couple of these chambers; this one is in Ciara’s o∞ce. She’s on the other side of the room, feeding their youngest son, Win, who was born in July of last year, and in this way they get to be near each other, even while separate.

Being near one another is always a priority. “We have some fun rules that we created,” Ciara says—rules about how long they are willing to be apart. “What is it, like 10 days that we don’t wanna push past, babe? Ten days when we travel?”

“When we first met,” Wilson answers, “it was 14 days.”

That was in 2015. They got married in 2016. “Then it was 10 days. And now it’s no more than seven or five. I don’t know, it may be really five days at this point.”

“We laugh about it,” Ciara says, “because I’m like, ‘Babe, how many days?’ ” During the season, Wilson is often on the road with the team, but at least his schedule is predictable. As for Ciara, well: “I could be called tomorrow to go and do a private for somebody’s wedding, and I’ve got to be able to rock and roll.”

Ciara, 35, has sold more than 20 million records since she began making music as a teenager; Wilson, 32, has won a Super Bowl, appeared in two, and has been selected for the Pro Bowl nine times. On one level, they have a marriage like anyone else’s, a blended family— Wilson helps raise Future, Ciara’s child from a previous relationship with the rapper of the same name—and together they nurture, as Wilson likes to put it, “an oldschool love.” But there are di≠erences. They have a sta≠ of eight to ten: two full-time chefs, a physical therapist, a full-time massage guy, a trainer, childcare, assistants, security. They have, collectively, around 32 million Instagram followers (most of those followers are Ciara’s).

They have lived, at times, in the tabloids, most notably during Ciara’s contentious split with the elder Future—a

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split so public and well documented that it ended up in a Jay-Z lyric. Wilson and Ciara have businesses together, fashion brands, fragrances, a charitable foundation, LLCs. People speculate about how they got what they got.

They go on Twitter and give relationship advice based on Wilson and Ciara’s relationship: I don’t know who needs to hear this, but Ciara didn’t pray for a man, she prayed for herself. Wilson and Ciara are aware of the speculation, of the advice, and of what sometimes even seems to be envy; they are honored by it.

“It lets you know the feeling that people feel from you,” Ciara says. “It speaks for the power of love.”

They take the challenge of the perfection projected onto them by others and say: Okay. Sometimes they speak like the victorious teammates they are, giving postgame press conferences at the lectern of life. “We’re just grateful that we get to spend time together every day,” Wilson says. “Every morning we wake up together it’s a blessing, and we get to smile from ear to ear and know that ‘You know what? Let’s go. Let’s go do this.’ ” “I feel like, if I could look back in a crystal ball when I was a little girl,” Ciara says, shaking her head in agreement, “and I looked at the idea of my family and what it would be for me, it’s exactly this.”

At weddings, someone inevitably gets up, holds out a Champagne glass, o≠ers a toast, and says: Marriage takes work. Everyone nods sagely. But the reality is, most of us just muddle along. We are distracted by our jobs or our golf games or our Twitter accounts; we put in work like high school athletes, reaping modest glory when it happens to come our way, otherwise passing the time.

Few of us turn pro, literally or metaphorically. Whatever it takes—to become a starting quarterback in the NFL, to become a multiplatinum artist, to bring that same manic drive and energy to building and maintaining a relationship—is beyond us. “People want to do it,” Wilson says, “but it takes a lot of responsibility to do it. Winning is a habit, you know? And nothing happens by accident.”

But Wilson and Ciara are dedicated to the habit of winning. They are willing to start over every day, to try and fail and try again, to make the thing between them work. “I think it was Thomas Edison, maybe, who talked about 10,000 light bulbs,” Wilson says. “That’s how many light bulbs it took to get to the right light bulb, you know? When you think about all that, how many times does it take to get to the right special moment, to get to that perfect place? If it was so easy to get to perfection, everybody would do it. That’s why you aspire to make the (text continued on page 74) perfect light bulb.”

←← OPENING PAGES ON CIARA

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the relationship work, though? Exactly, I mean. “On an average day, we’re around each other pretty much the whole day,” Ciara says. When they aren’t, they generally FaceTime. Friday is date night. And if they have a big decision to make? “I really love letting him lead, as the man of the house.” Wilson drives. He plans the vacations to St. Barts.

“I’m a quarterback, so I like talking,” Wilson says.

“I like talking about plays. I like, ‘Hey, what do you think about this idea? This strategy?’ ‘Hey, what do you think about this for the kids?’ Ciara, she’s an entertainer. She runs the show. She is the show. So for both of us, we have our beautiful flow of dialogue, constantly. And that could be all the way from our kids to, you know, the next business decision that we’re doing, to where we want to take our next trip to, you know, ‘Hey, what do you think about making a donation here or there?’ ” Wilson says he thinks a lot about the “discipline of marriage”—“this idea of the discipline of communication. If I don’t communicate to my receiver, he doesn’t know what the play is. It’s like, ‘Uh, hey, what are we doing here?’ It’s probably more significant than that, even, but for us, for me and Ciara, communicating, it’s the same: ‘This week’s going to be a challenging week, babe, because I’ve got this responsibility. What about you? What do you have?’ And at the end of every week, we always go through a checklist of 50 questions of, you know, ‘How’d I love you this week?’ ” They are, Ciara says, “equally” ambitious. They go to parties and talk to everyone in the room. “I think the thing that we both do very similarly is we love networking,” Wilson says. “We love getting to know people.”

They are embedded not just in each other’s lives but in each other’s careers. He is her first listener. “One thing Russ has the ability to do is that he has a great perspective that would reflect most people—almost like a fan’s perspective, or an everyday person’s perspective,” Ciara says. Wilson is as dedicated to the project of Ciara’s greatness as he is his own. When Ciara decided to give up her major-label recording contract and launch her own company, Beauty Marks Entertainment, Wilson stayed up half the night with her, researching the history of people who have owned record labels. “I think Frank Sinatra was one of them,” Wilson remembers now. “Some amazing lists of people, you know?”

In so many ways, the two of them are tasked with finding domesticity in lives that are not particularly domestic: Are they able to find it? “I’m such a homebody,” Ciara says. “But I also was very blessed to travel the world.” She was a military brat, growing up, lived all over: Fort Hood; Germany; Monterey, California. Then she was a multiplatinum artist. Seattle is a long way, weather- and energy-wise, from Atlanta, where she first became famous. “There’s not near as much sunshine and a lot more rain,” Ciara says. But, she says, “just the raw, beautiful nature here is really beautiful. I’ve had way more lake experiences.” Paddleboarding, for instance. Also, “there’s a really cool boat culture here.”

Ciara stops, tries to remember the name of the annual boat festival in Seattle.

“Babe, what is it called in the summer? Um, Seafair?”

And from deep in his oxygen chamber, Wilson responds, in the way husbands respond to their wives the world over, with a kind of weary, leave-me-out-of-it a≠ection.

“Seafair,” he says. “Yeah.”

BUT HOW DOES

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“At the end of every week, we always go through a checklist of 50 questions of, you know, ‘How’d I love you this week?’ ” —russell

wilson

Wilson sets alerts on his phone when he’s not at home, reminders to send his children video messages.

He says this project became even more urgent in the past year, as the summer brought reckoning after reckoning about the way Black folks are treated in this country. “It weighs heavy,” he says, “because you have these two beautiful kids at the time, and then another one in Ciara’s stomach here, about to pop out. And knowing that your three beautiful brown-skinned kids: It could be them.” He spoke about this at the ESPYs in June; he spent the football season warming up in a shirt that read “We Want Justice” and a helmet that said “Breonna Taylor.”

And “at least once a week, or every day sometimes,” he says, “and especially when I’m in the grind of being busy, I’ll send an inspirational video just to the kids. For example: ‘Hey,’ you know, ‘Future, be a leader. Be who you are.’ And Sienna: ‘Don’t forget you’re a queen.’ ” the two of them is to get a sense, perhaps absent from other lives or partnerships, that love and marriage always move forward and that the present is always an improvement on the past. Wilson was married before; Ciara was engaged. Why get married again?

Because everything is better now, is in their answer. The two of them are, as Ciara says, equally yoked. “Spiritually, first and foremost,” she says.

Wilson nods. “God is the center of it all for us,” he says. “And that’s a foundation for us. I think as we get to do everything together, business, life, kids, you know, parenthood, all that stu≠, in every one of those categories the center of it is God and our faith.”

Their daughter, Sienna, was born in 2017; now they have Win too. “They’re all so close,” Wilson says. “They all like taking care of each other, so every day I come home from work and it’s late at night, it’s after film and practice and all that, and me and Ciara are together, and we just smile from ear to ear in the kitchen because we realize that our family is a beautiful blended family but it’s also, you know, our family. It’s us.”

When Ciara and Wilson first met, in 2015, Ciara was in the middle of what was reportedly an ugly custody battle with her former partner. The attention had grown so unrelenting that on Wilson and Ciara’s first date, the two were forced to drive around Los Angeles until they finally found a place, in the Georgian Hotel, uncrowded enough that they could sit and talk without being photographed. (Wilson went in ahead of Ciara and had them dim the lights.) This would be their first, and more or less last, moment of (continued on page 108) TO TALK TO

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jacket $650 Lorod sweater $920 Brioni sunglasses $154 Ray-Ban chain necklace $3,050 David Yurman pendant, his own ON CIARA

blazer $4,995 Dolce & Gabbana hair by césar deleon ramrez for crowdmgmt. grooming by mark jacob baysinger. makeup by yolonda frederick-thompson for crowdmgmt. manicure by yoko at y’s nail. tailoring by natalia goebel. set design by annabella kirby. produced by house creative group.

GQ

The idea of love—and all of its beautiful and (at times) tricky trappings—is constantly morphing.

Here, GQ enlists the voices of artists, comedians, psychologists, sex workers, and other thinkers on the front lines of the culture to share how humankind’s most profound emotion continues to evolve.

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Colman Domingo found his husband, Raúl, thanks to Craigslist.

BY CAM WOLF “ T H I S I S A good story,” Colman Domingo says. It’s a story about love, luck, and stars aligning on the internet.

In 2005, Colman had just walked into his local Walgreens in Berkeley, California, in search of a Queen Helene mud mask. Then a struggling actor— Colman has since gone on to appear on Fear the Walking Dead and lit up Twitter with his star turn on Euphoria—he’d taken on a brutal role in a macabre play about the Jonestown Massacre and needed a moment to expel the toxins and treat himself.

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and “these eyes,” Colman recalls over Zoom, like he’s lost in them all over again, while Raúl looks down and grins.

At the store, Colman was on a call with a friend on his Motorola Razr when he suddenly realized he needed to hang up. Colman and Raúl locked gazes. Raúl was arm in arm with an irritated woman who was dragging him out of the Walgreens. Colman tried to wave him back but was unsuccessful.

Dazed by the man he’d just seen, Colman wandered o≠ and somehow ended up aimlessly puttering around the aisles of a nearby Blockbuster. He ambled back onto the street, brimming with the sort of hope you feel when destiny’s just knocked on your door. “I just felt something,” Colman says.

Cupid’s arrow was slightly o≠ target that day. See, Raúl

horribly lost. So they stopped

by Walgreens to get an “I’m sorry I’m late” chocolate bar.

At the party, Raúl downed Chardonnay to try to forget the face he’d just seen.

The day after their drugstore encounter, Raúl fired up Craigslist and drafted a post in the Missed Connections section that began “I saw you outside of Walgreens in Berkeley…” A couple of days later, on the other side of the bay, Colman was browsing Craigslist in search of a used iPod Touch and, ever the hopeless romantic, clicked over to Missed Connections.

“I literally jumped out of my chair when I saw the post,” Colman says.

Raúl returned home from work that day, opened his clunky laptop, and dialed in to the internet to check his Yahoo

a dating app, he says, he likely would have swiped right past him. “It is magical,” Colman says, “the imperfections or the o≠-roading and things like that.

It’s supposed to be like this.

You never know what you’re supposed to get.”

Nine years after they first met outside that California Walgreens, Colman and Raúl were married in a small, casual ceremony disguised as a house party. They invited 25 people over and greeted each one by saying, “Welcome to our wedding.” Colman wore a Hawaiian shirt; they danced until four in the morning. They are still living happily ever after when I talk to them in December. Behind them, just as it’s been since the beginning, is a bouquet of white roses. cam wolf is a gq sta≠ writer.

I L L U S T R A T I O N S

B Y

K E I R

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COLMAN AND RAÚL DOMINGO: COURTESY OF COLMAN DOMINGO.

and then they spent the night together after Raúl insisted.

Colman leaned over when he thought Raúl was sleeping and whispered, “I think I love you.”

Just as quickly, they became inextricably part of each other’s lives. Raúl showed up to nearly every one of Colman’s performances in the Jonestown play with a bouquet of white roses. In a way, watching

THE CASE FOR PSYCHEDELIC COUPLES COUNSELING Therapist Jayne Gumpel on the transformative healing power of tripping together.

BY GABRIELLA PAIELLA

Jayne Gumpel was a 20-something living in South America, “riding bareback in the mountains and eating mushrooms.” When she’d trip, she’d think, Oh, my God, this would be so good for the world.

Decades later, science seems to agree: Psychedelic integration, when an individual takes a drug and explores their experience in follow-up therapy sessions, is becoming increasingly mainstream. Oregon voted to legalize psilocybin in the fall after studies showed the drug’s e∞cacy in treating depression, anxiety, addiction, and PTSD. Meanwhile, researchers in Canada have seen promising results when administering MDMA to couples.

Today, Gumpel is a licensed clinical social worker with over 25 years of experience as a couples therapist. She doesn’t (and can’t legally) recommend or administer MDMA or psilocybin to her clients, but if they approach her saying that they’re planning on trying it, she’ll help them prepare for the journey. After they’ve tripped, they’ll come back and incorporate their findings—which, she says, are “very profound very often”—into their ongoing work.

BACK IN THE ’70S,

Can you share some insights that have come out of a successful psychedelic integration session?

JAYNE GUMPEL: I can honestly say I’ve never had any unsuccessful ones. Because even if it’s a difficult session, there’s always an opportunity to learn something. This one couple that I’m thinking about, they experienced themselves in their past lives and they were brothers.

GQ:

Whoa.

I know. When you talk about it on this level in this reality, it sounds really far-out. But they were brothers and they got separated.

There was some catastrophe, a fire or an earthquake. They didn’t come back together again in that lifetime. They lost each other, so they felt the pain of that situation. They were both crying because they were lost and they were looking for each other. Then they found each other and were so happy.

They came back to the present moment as husband and wife with this experience of being brothers together. When they came into my office for the integration session, they used it as a metaphor, feeling like they had really lost each other.

How did they incorporate what they learned on their trip into their marriage?

We did a lot of Gestalt therapy, a lot of “become the brother, sit together faceto-face, chair to chair. Talk to each other as if you’re back in the trip.” That was very powerful. There were a lot of tears, as they were integrating what it was like to lose each other and then to find each other again.

“MDMA is very useful for people who are struggling with intimacy.”

Do you ever get couples who come in and each person had a wildly different reaction to the drug?

I’ve had it where one person cried the entire trip because she realized the devastation of the planet. She’s a nature photographer. She cried for six hours. It was all about “Oh, my God, we’re fucked.

We’re polluting the waters.” The trees, she experienced them as people crying in the forest. So it was really difficult for her.

And her partner had a completely different experience. He was in outer space visiting his people.

Instead of being upset that they weren’t attached at the hip, which he would love, he

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had all this space where he could be okay to be alone and not feel lonely. He saw into her soul that she was connected to nature in a way that he was not. Instead of resenting her, it completely changed his relationship to her.

Are there any specific relationship problems that you come across that are best suited by psychedelic integration?

MDMA is very useful for people who are struggling with intimacy. What happens when couples come into therapy, they’re out of alignment. Usually it’s around deep misunderstandings and hurt feelings, and they get very stuck in and attached to their narrative: “You did this, and that’s why I feel that.” When you do the psilocybin, it engenders a feeling of oneness and

each other very differently.

hold and it releases the attachment to the pain. You realize that we’re all nodes of consciousness on the tapestry of being. And for some people it can be very profound. They’re married 15, 20 years, and they go off and they do a psilocybin session, and it’s like, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe we’ve been fighting about this thing for years.” It just goes away, because it doesn’t have any significance anymore.

What has doing psychedelic integration work with couples taught you about love in general?

I’ve learned how to be a much kinder, more patient person and to let go. I care much less about a lot more. And I care much more about a lot less. Working with couples, they open their lives to you in this very intimate way, and that’s very humbling.

gabriella paiella is a gq sta≠ writer.

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VERY REGULAR DATING LIFE What’s it like to date online as a famous adult performer like Janice Griffith? No one believes you’re you, for starters. BY SABLE YONG tricky enough when you’re not famous and often naked on the internet. But having potential suitors mistake your real dating profile for a catfish is just one of the many occupational hazards that the adult performer, activist, and— coincidentally—my new Brooklyn neighbor Janice Gri∞th is forced to navigate on the daily. “When I was on Bumble, my account got reported for being fake,” she tells me.

“And I was like, ‘You deleted me!’ ”

ONLINE DATING IS

Gri∞th, 25, is one of the most outspoken and in-demand porn actors on the planet— someone who cares deeply about normalizing sex work.

She and I have been online acquaintances for a few years now, and when she said she was down to talk all about her dating life as someone who works in the industry, it seemed like a perfect reason to finally connect IRL. Her challenges, I’d learn, aren’t so di≠erent from any other millennial’s, though she does have some wisdom we can glean. “Porn years,” she explains, expedite maturity very swiftly.

When I arrive at her door on a cold afternoon in December, I can hear her pleading with her

50-pound pit bull mix, Opal, from the other side to refrain from accosting me. (One of the reasons she settled on this new multi-bedroom duplex is it has a backyard for Opal to run around in.) Gri∞th is wearing an elegantly flowy satin pajama set befitting a wealthy eccentric auntie, and she immediately apologizes for the state of things: There are pantry deliveries that need to be put away, as well as a few boxes still awaiting unpacking. A DVD sleeve of Lesbian Anal Virgins, starring

possessiveness is a non-starter.

“I’m friends with tons of people I’ve had sex with,” she says.

At another point during our conversation, she scrolls through the text messages of one of her more well-known exes, the political Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. This was maybe the only one of Gri∞th’s relationships visible online, and although they don’t talk anymore, she says he’s partly responsible for why she got Opal—she loved spending time with his dog so much that she wanted a canine companion

JANICE GRIFFITH: COURTESY OF SUBJECT.

“It’s fun to want to be the best version of yourself after a breakup. When you get revenge hot.” my host, rests on top of one. As we settle onto her sofa, she fixes us tea using one of her vintage tea sets and rolls a joint. Opal hops up and melts into my lap.

Originally from New York, Gri∞th flew to Los Angeles when she was 18 to shoot “just one scene” and then subsequently continued to work for nearly every adult production company under the sun. She tells me she fell in love for the first time not too long before that, at 15, and it was a “perfect intense puppy love and it taught me I can be absolutely bananas in love,” she says. The guy was “kind of stupid” and showed her how to drive (even though she still doesn’t have a license), but things ended abruptly and she wound up with a broken heart.

At one point Gri∞th pulls out her phone to look for the guy on Instagram, but nothing comes up and she shrugs it o≠.

“Heartbreak is fun, though,” she says. “It’s fun to want to be the best version of yourself after.

When you get revenge hot.”

Her visibility means she gets a ton of DMs from fans—which range from extremely bad to just very bad—but they don’t seem to faze her much. (“Do not use a weird, dirty joke in the first few messages,” she advises.) For Gri∞th, any potential partner has to be sex positive and openminded about what she does for a living; even the faintest whi≠ of

of her own. For the most part she believes exes can still be in each other’s lives, although it takes hard work and care. The friendship has to feel intentional.

“It’d be such a shame to not have someone in your life after they were so important to you, just because you aren’t romantic anymore,” she says.

Hollywood seems to love portraying sex work as some sort of cautionary tale, even when it’s well intentioned. (See: The Netflix docuseries Hot Girls Wanted, which Gri∞th and her peers have criticized as exploitative.) Reality, however, is tamer—at least for Gri∞th.

She’s picky about her partners.

And even though she can be fiery online, in person she strikes me as a romantic optimist—the kind of person who chooses to see the latent good in others.

The pandemic has made dating tricky, and she’s not eager to jump into a new relationship anytime soon. But she has thought a lot about what she wants in a partner. “If I fall asleep on the couch, I need you to carry me to bed and tuck me in—I think that’s my love language,” she explains, laughing. “But I’ve taken a couple of love-language tests, and I’m almost equally split between the five of them.”

MODERN LOVE

BY THE NUMBERS WE SURVEYED 889 PEOPLE OF ALL AGES AND BACKGROUNDS ABOUT WHAT LOVE TODAY MEANS TO THEM—AND THEN SOME. HERE’S WHAT WE LEARNED. People in a relationship: 62% People not in a relationship: 38% People in relationships are happier than those who aren’t (65% of people in a relationship say they are extremely happy vs. 32% of single people).

The 3 most important elements of a loving relationship are:

1

Open communication

2

Emotional connection

3

Spending time together

71% 24% 56% of people say sex is important in a relationship.

of people say sex is crucial in a relationship.

of straight women said they wouldn’t date a man who isn’t financially secure.

1/3 Most people have had sex with 1 to 5 partners.

40% of people are “very satisfied” with their sex life.

of people say they aren’t currently having sex.

34% of Asian people, 35% of white people, 53% of Hispanic people, and 63% of Black people say they are very satisfied with their sex life.

sable yong is a writer based in Brooklyn.

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flash in the midst of crisis? When a society says, “You know what, the basics are going to be taken care of,” you have a really powerful intersection between policy and love. Nobody is locked out.

But when you live in a society that tells people they can take nothing for granted, whether it is housing or food or water or health care, that lights up the parts of ourselves that are very fearful. That makes us take a scarcity approach to love, and scarcity love justifies barbarism. It can play out at a familial level or a neighborhood level, a national level or a race level, but the governing ethos is out of my love for my own, however “my own” is defined. I justify whatever it takes to protect my own.

HOW TO

Few people have thought as deeply about climate change as author and activist Naomi Klein.

Here she shares her ideas on big questions like whether to have children and how we might begin the monumental work of saving the planet—and maybe even one another.

BY COLIN GROUNDWATER 8 2

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expressions of love. People risk their lives to save others. I’m describing a sort of abundance love, a love without scarcity.

I’ve covered enough disasters to know that this is a profoundly human impulse. When disaster strikes, people are not asking, “Are you Christian? Are you Muslim? Are you related to me?” People are just faced with taking extraordinary risks to save each other, whether it is a home-care worker saving the life of the elderly person who they’re taking care of or whether it is somebody risking their life to save somebody else’s kids.

Outside of a crisis, are there ways we can make that kind of abundant love a reality?

Yeah, I think so. The question is, what are the structures that would enable us to have this sort of abundant love being more than a

What does that scarcity love look like today?

Look, we saw it during COVID, right?

There’s a huge flight to the suburbs and bigger cars. There’s no policy of love in this country, so the message people take is “If

soul child, nephew. So that’s just the way we do it, and it’s worked for us.

There’s so much attention paid to this question of “Should people have kids or not?” It sounds like that focus might not be productive, and it’s more important to expand our notion of what family is.

I just think we should have open discussion.

I don’t think anybody should be making the decision for anyone else. That’s a huge start.

Then I think we should have more interesting discussions around how you can have kids without creating massive carbon footprints. But there’s a way that discussion can become an extension of the individual consumer conversation around climate change, where people try to be the perfect low-carbon human and that’s how they deal

with climate fear and grief and responsibility.

Just making individual low-carbon decisions when it comes to your consumption won’t be enough to deal with the climate crisis, and just making individual low-carbon decisions about your procreation won’t add up to what needs to happen, either. There are going to be more children. They need a future whether they’re yours or not.

To me it’s also adjacent to the idea that we care about the climate because we have kids.

I had my son when I was 42. I cared about the planet before that, I assure you. The idea that somehow people fight harder because they have kids or grandkids is a really flawed and incredibly cruel projection on people who don’t. That you don’t care about the future because you don’t have blood in the game?

I think it’s monstrous. When I didn’t have kids and I heard people talk about it, I just thought, “Wow, are you saying that I don’t care about the future because I don’t have a toddler? That’s just weird.”

Whether or not a person wants to have kids, are there climate conversations that people in any kind of relationship should be having?

I don’t really give relationship advice or procreation advice, but if kids are in the picture, whether they’re yours or not, be careful when you talk about the depth of the climate crisis.

“There are going to be more children. They need a future whether they’re yours or not.”

What I know from being part of the climate-justice movement is that when water, and planet protection, they do so

STE VE CONNOLLY: COURTESY OF SUBJECT.

metal things. It’s because they love their

of fear, because love will sustain them much better in the long run.

colin groundwater is assistant to the editor in chief.

A Hunk of Burning Pandemic Love

The pandemic upended nearly everything, but it couldn’t shake the traditions that truly matter: like getting married by an Elvis impersonator in Vegas. Steve Connolly, who’s donned the King’s jumpsuit for 25 years, tells us about the scene in the marriage capital of the world.

essentially. I do the later weddings: 11 p.m., midnight.

The Elvis who works at A Little White Wedding Chapel during the day, he doesn’t like doing anything late.

My standard wedding is usually one song, the written ceremony, and then another song.

You can’t come into the chapel without a mask. I have to be performing while you’re six feet away. We’re conforming to that, and thankfully we haven’t had anybody come down with COVID. Most of the weddings we’re doing tend to be Southern states or states that are right next to us. And I just married a

I’M A VAMPIRE,

Every day we see people who don’t want to tell their parents. We just had a couple, they were two different cultures. They had a dog with them, and the dog had to be part of the wedding. I held the dog. It was a bulldog and very well behaved. They weren’t sure if their parents wanted them to get married, so there was sort of that Romeo and Juliet thing going on.

During the fires in California, there was a gay couple; their house burnt down. They lost everything and they weren’t married legally.

They decided, “Well, our whole life is upside down and in fucking shambles. We’re going to go to Vegas and get married. At this point, all we have is each other.”

Doing weddings takes me from whatever doldrum I’m in. If I’m sitting here feeling sorry for myself, it’s like a shot in the arm. I try to stay positive. I’m destroyed.

I’m burning through my savings.

Whenever I’m at the Little White, the mood is pretty good. Numbers may be down compared with where we were, but I think we’re still the wedding capital of the world.

People cry at my weddings. I cry.

I know it’s a business, but for the most part, ministers and people I deal with are in it because of this love connection.

— A S TO L D TO G A B R I E L L A PA I E L L A

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THE AGONY

Modern Love by the Numbers ⅓ of people say COVID has had a negative impact on their relationship.

¼ say COVID has strengthened their bond with their partner.

⅓ said COVID has had no impact on their relationship.

23%

of all people feel a prenup is important.

16–24

38%

25–34

49%

35–44

56%

45–64

65%

64+

73%

LGBTQ+ couples are more likely than others to meet through social media and dating websites.

The older you are, the more likely you are to view marriage as an “important institution.”

Hari Nef on the time she unexpectedly confronted her gender dysphoria outside the gay club. said the door girl.

“No chance. Zero.”

Dan* and I shivered at the threshold of a queer warehouse party somewhere in Berlin.

It was 5 a.m. on the ninth September morning I’d spent with Dan since our first date, across the ocean nine nights prior, which was about three years since we’d matched on Raya and begun texting. Seven hours ago, we’d decided to be monogamous; in about two hours, he’d tell me he loved me.

We were high on 2C-B, a designer drug that united the e≠ects of MDMA and LSD. We were summoned here, to a party we couldn’t get into, by KG, a young art student I’d met in a gay bar.

Prior to acting, I’d worked as a door girl. I’d brandished a clipboard and curated parties with qualified bodies. I imagined what the German door girl saw: me, a tallish young woman in a wool trench, a Gucci bag on her arm. Beside her, a

“IT’S A NO,”

INFIDELITY Were Forgiven:

44%

Never Found Out:

33%

Of those who have been unfaithful, nearly half were forgiven by their partner and a third say their partner never found out.

47%

With Kids: 59% Without Kids: 37% Unfaithful people with kids in the household are more likely to have been forgiven than those without.

of women did not forgive a partner who cheated on them.

1/4 of people say they have cheated.

1/3 of people say they have been cheated on. *Names have been changed.

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P H O T O G R A P H

man, ostensibly her boyfriend: brusquely handsome with a Roman-coin profile, wearing white jeans, Common Projects sneakers, a Rolex, and an APC leather jacket. Dan and I could really keep it together on drugs— it was something we admired in each other—so we couldn’t have looked too inebriated. For Berlin, we weren’t.

KG sprinted out of the warehouse, waving his phone in the air. He wore an iridescent blue vest with no shirt underneath and a structured skirt printed with shimmering butterflies.

“I invited them,” he cried, pupils like saucers. “They’re my friends.”

The door girl raised an eyebrow.

A couple in head-to-toe fetish gear materialized behind us and were beckoned in with a wave.

She scanned me again, then Dan. “No,” she spat. “Sorry.”

I stared at her with everything I could but refused to say out loud: “I’m a trans woman and I belong inside your queer party! I grew up at parties like this. I used to shave my eyebrows o≠ and paint my face blue and wear nothing but ribbons and vinyl to go dancing. My brow bone, in fact, used to jut out rather far, and my jaw was square—I was quite androgynous and fascinating-looking before my facial feminization surgeries!

And sure, my boyfriend is cis and straight, but he enjoys the

B Y

J A C O B

B I X E N M A N

company of queers as much—if not more!—than I do. Hell, he’s dating one. Let us in, you superficial bitch.” The message wasn’t received. (I’m not a telepath, and neither, I suppose, was the door girl.) She jabbed her finger in the direction of the street.

I wove my arm around Dan’s as we glided away, KG flanking

I carried, and continue to carry, in my heart had ceased, in that moment, to be inscribed upon my body. “I’m an ugly girl trapped in a hot girl’s body” was a joke I’d begun to crack over the years I’d spent getting stared at on the New York subway, chased down city blocks with slurs and, one time, a knife; years behind the wheel of a lemon with no license.

And now…what? Deliverance— from my gender dysphoria, and the gay club too? An eligible bachelor on my right arm, a Gucci bag dangling o≠ my left?

Designer pieces are, if nothing more, indicators of social class, and because of a stigma too vast and nuanced to cover here, one doesn’t necessarily expect to see them on a transsexual woman in the wild. Some gonzo alchemy of sex and class had submitted any lingering impression of my transness to an image of yuppie heterosexuality. The thought made me giggle, then sneer.

What a shame, I thought, and what a joy.

Dan and I hugged KG goodbye, hailed a cab, and sped away from the warehouse to our Airbnb, where we would make love. As we got out of the car, I received a text from KG: “My friend Tendril told her who you were and she’s like ‘please apologize to her I’m humiliated!’ ” I wondered what, exactly, Tendril had said to the door girl.

I wondered who—or what— exactly, they thought I was.

what a joy.

hari nef is a writer, actress, and model.

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When a Photographer’s Family Is His Masterpiece Erik Madigan Heck’s painting-inspired pictures take family photos to new heights.

BY COLIN GROUNDWATER

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Making art about your family is uncomfortable. “You don’t want to do your partner injustice,” photographer Erik Madigan Heck says. “You’re almost like, ‘How could I ever capture what we have?’ ” But his latest book, The Garden, does just that. Part of a larger project that includes an album of experimental music and two floral fragrances, it offers a fresh take on the family theme in photography. ¶ Heck is best known as a fashion photographer—he’s shot for Fendi, Thom Browne, Gucci, GQ… The list goes on.

He often references French masters like Monet and Vuillard in his work—and he brought those vibrant, stylized colors to The Garden, which he compares to a fairy tale. “It’s about the hopeful, idealized quality of the images,” Heck says. ¶ An essay in The Garden reads, “Before you love someone—really love them— you can’t take a great picture of them.” That lesson extended from the project into Heck’s practice. He’s found that working with the people he loves the most liberates him to be the most creative version of himself.

HECK FAMILY: COURTESY OF ERIK MADIGAN HECK.

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HIV RUINED MY SEX LIFE. THEN I

Poet Danez Smith on the relationship that reignited their fire. on Jack’d, the Blacker, less functional Grindr.

Mutually horny and down for the wham, we talked and sexted his whole way back to the Twin Cities from Milwaukee. I didn’t ask for a face pic. I wasn’t picky then, happy to eat and be eaten. And he had good game, so rare in the age of sup and wyd. Even as a faceless square, he stirred something in me I’d presumed

HE HIT ME

was dead. Somewhere in the body, near love, lives horniness, and for the first time in too long, he had me there again, under the spell.

This was the summer of 2016, two years after I had tested positive for HIV at the Magic Johnson center, in Oakland.

That day had felt like a wake— I remember my mother openly mourning in front of my face— and since then sex had been haunted for me, drained of romance, a negotiation at a death-marked market where pleasure felt accidental and undeserved. HIV was no longer a death sentence, they said, but what of the social loss, the sexual death?

untouchable, banished from desire, that I should be glad for what I could get. “No poz,” it became clear, was an unspoken corollary to “no fats, no femmes.” I learned what it was like to be “not someone’s thing.” What it was like to be a thing. I felt starved for even “hey.” And I started to understand why some positive folks keep their status a secret.

Being positive can feel like someone looked into your life

dick from bad men and was too grateful for it. Full of meds and drained of intimacy, I resigned myself from the dream of love.

I took my scraps in weary peace. I was going to live—but live alone.

And then I found him. He wanted to meet for dinner when he got o≠ the road, said he needed to eat before eating.

A hungry bottom in wait, fasting all day for the promise of strokes, I arrived hunger-

dazed and hopeful for touch. He pulled up at the same time as I did, his Black skin bruised purple in the early moonlight.

I took in his Negro nose, his Hov lips, eyes like stones buried in black sand. I don’t want to limit him to the Black of his face, but I loved every curve from the jump. Them teeth looked holy, a smile that summoned my rain. Not to be all Zane about it, but like 40 days and nights of it in seconds.

Over Henny and fries, we fell into a velvety groove, talking about the things we talk about.

Does your mama know? How she feel about you? Where are you with God? We had more in common than just desire. We’d both come up in the church, both spent some years in Wisconsin figuring out our lives. I told him

here he was—cool, calm, positive, and fine as hell.

We fucked good and long that night, not a bloody worry marking the sheets, the plague of loneliness passed over for once. I pulled the Lovers card from my Tarot deck and dated that man to the other side of summer. I loved him briefly but deeply; he healed me up and got on my last good nerve. I got on his. A summer with him— sweating in the night while Greenleaf played on with no audience—returned something to me. A normalcy. A sense of worth. The good dick and decency I deserved. Someone to love until I didn’t. My right to feel desire.

Now, in the middle of another plague, I’ve left a di≠erent lover.

Returned into another season starved of touch, I find myself

HIV was no longer a death sentence, they said, but what of the social loss, the sexual death?

about poetry and the places it was taking me. He told me about his preaching days. I heard my mama fall for him then.

“You read my whole profile, right?” I asked as we were about to leave. “Did you see that I’m…”

“Me too,” he said.

This was the year the CDC released a study estimating that one in two Black men who has sex with other men will contract HIV in their lifetime. We sat there, two men on the same unlucky side of that dark equation, horny out of our minds, settled down by the facts of our blood. As the candlelight flickered across our faces, we compared notes on meds and side e≠ects, the things stigma does to the mind, the soul. Why hadn’t I asked his status before?

How did he seem so easy around this disease whose constant threat loomed in my stomach like a stone? In an instant, my fear had almost kicked me out of the date and into a depressive spiral. And

thinking back, a few summers and a few lovers ago, to the night I sat across from a man I’d just met, readying for a one-night stand that would last until autumn. It was the first time I ever talked about HIV without gesturing toward dark conclusions, a reminder to my then stigma-riddled mind that even within danger, there is room for pleasure. A year into COVID-19, 40 years from the beginning of AIDS, 400 years since the pandemic of American anti-Blackness began, I’m thinking about that man, not wanting him but holding on to what he taught me: In a world, a nation, and even a body that are each plotting to kill you, don’t forget to fuck. Freely, wildly fuck, unburdened and unbridled, as is your right. danez smith is the author of four collections of poetry, including ‘Homie’ and ‘Don’t Call Us Dead,’ a 2017 National Book Award finalist.

Modern Love by the Numbers

1 in 4 people feels unrequited love.

72% of people say “I love you” to their partner at least once a day.

Regardless of demographics, 1 in 2 people believes in soul mates.

47%

71%

47% of people are familiar with the concept of love languages.

76% of people who watch porn don’t pay for it.

71% of Black people are familiar with the concept.

<35

40%

>35

17%

People under 35 who watch porn are much more likely to pay for it.

26%

40%

40% 71% More men watch porn alone than women.

<35 >35

More women use sex toys alone than men.

3x

23% 8%

Younger people are more likely to have posted video of themselves having sex on the internet. It’s also a more common practice for LGBTQ+ men (30%) and trans men and women (30%).

People under 35 are three times as likely to have nudes of themselves on their phone.

50% Half of people share their passwords with their partners.

9% Only 9% of people are in a relationship where one person shares and the other doesn’t.

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THE COLORADO

CHILDREN TOGETHER The sweet—and slightly complicated—domestic life of one man and two women. BY GABRIELLA PAIELLA that Lori, Brian, and Geli are in a relationship, the assumption is that their house is a 24/7 sex-fest. “Not the case,” deadpans 28-year-old Geli. Men, in particular, go out of their way to tell Brian that he’s one lucky guy. “Oh, he’s not,” Lori, 42, says with a laugh. “We’re a pain in the ass.”

The three of them are speaking to me from their Colorado Springs home, which I’ve already seen every square foot of, on account of my chronic House Hunters habit. In July of 2019, they moved here from San Antonio and became the first throuple to appear on the mega-popular HGTV series about the highstakes, emotionally fraught sport of buying real estate. (For anyone else who caught their episode and is wondering: They have not built the third vanity in their en suite bathroom yet.) The December evening we speak, they’re squeezed together on their living room couch, talking over one another a≠ectionately. Lori and Geli periodically run out of the Zoom frame to refill their wineglasses. Their kids, 12 and 14, bound through the background, while the dog, a scru≠y white mutt, snoozes peacefully nearby. In short, they resemble millions of other families who have spent nearly every waking moment of the past year together because of the pandemic.

If anything, in a time of extreme and unprecedented isolation, having an extra partner around puts the family at an advantage. “We divide the duties three ways,” Brian, 47, starts, before Lori cuts him o≠: “I don’t know how single parents do it. Props to them.” Geli continues, “Having another WHEN STRANGERS LEARN

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Lori, Geli, and Brian at their 2019 commitment ceremony.

person to cook or take the kids to soccer. Go to the grocery store, because I hate that shit.

Laundry. Things like that.”

Three began with two more than 20 years ago, when Lori and Brian first met in Gainesville, Florida. Brian knew from the start that Lori was bisexual, so they started going to Fantasy Fest, a raunchy 10-day street fair that’s popular with the swinger set, in Key West every fall. This allowed them not only to explore together but to get those uncomfortable conversations about desire and boundaries and rules out of the way by the time they got married. Six years ago, the pair were out at a gay bar in San Antonio when they met Geli. Or more accurately, Geli was out with a drunk friend who really wanted to get with Lori. The friend struck out, and Geli left to go drive her home, but not before surreptitiously exchanging numbers with Brian. In a tale as old as time, Lori and Brian texted Geli their address in the wee hours of the morning and she showed up at their door. “They could have been serial killers,” Geli says. “Now here we are, six years later.”

COLORADO THROUPLE, COMMITMENT CEREMONY: RONEY LOPEZ/ARUBA PHOTO AND FILMS; OTHER PHOTOGRAPHS: ANGELICA LABUGUEN (2).

“I don’t know how single parents do it.

Props to them.”

a two-page letter about how awesome her family is and how she loves having three parents.”

Next up were their parents. Brian’s family was easy. “They were like, ‘Yeah, whatever.

Great,’ ” he says. Lori, though, was raised in a strict Catholic home, and it took her folks a bit more time to get used to it. Her dad, especially. But after Lori and Brian proposed to Geli, he gave them a call. “My dad is a man of few words: ‘I heard congratulations are in order. If you guys are happy, I’m happy. I love you,’ ” Lori recalls. As for Geli, who grew up in a Filipino Catholic military family, things were even harder. “We grew up not talking about things. And if you don’t talk about it, then it doesn’t exist,” she explains. She eventually slipped a note into a book about polyamory that she gave to her mom, although her dad proved more intimidating. “I went to my parents’ house, and I was just crying because…hello, I’m Asian! I don’t want to disappoint my parents,” she says. But her dad soon agreed to walk her down the aisle and even told their extended family in the Philippines about her relationship setup.

Introducing themselves to the public was another story. On the one hand, they thought that appearing on House Hunters was a chance to control the narrative about what life in a throuple is like. “We wanted to

mous relationship out there,” Lori says. On the other hand, the lead-up to the episode’s airing was stressful. What if it was edited in an unflattering way? Plus it would be exposing them to their new neighbors—Colorado, Brian says, was already shaping up to be more conservative than they expected—to acquaintances, to colleagues. They’d been burned before: Brian, who works in sports marketing, says he once had a job o≠er rescinded when the company learned about his family.

After the episode aired and went viral, Geli couldn’t stop scrolling through negative social media posts—the garden-variety trolls, the inaccurate assumptions about their relationship dynamic. “People were saying shit that a≠ects me,” she says. In dayto-day life, the reactions were mostly positive: Brian says a coworker contacted him to share that she had a brother in a similar setup, and other soccer parents came up to them after their kids’ games to introduce themselves and say they loved the episode.

Brian adds that there was one kid who told their son that they couldn’t hang out anymore because his parents had watched House Hunters and freaked out. “You’re going to find out who your real friends are and who’s understanding and who’s not,” Brian says.

Lori, Brian, and Geli get asked most often is which one of them sleeps in the middle.

(It’s Lori.) As for whether they fight, they say it’s a rarity. Sure, Brian and Geli tend to be a more united front in disciplining the kids, since they grew up in military families. And Lori and Geli team up to keep the thermostat at a much lower temperature than Brian would prefer. (To which Lori points out that perhaps Brian should be sleeping in the middle instead.) Oh, and then there’s the matter of TV preferences. “These two like to watch murder shows, and it makes me really nervous,” Brian explains.

What about jealousy, the one emotion that’s di∞cult enough to manage in a monogamous relationship? At first they struggled with it, especially Lori, when she would travel for work for weeks on end and Geli and Brian would be alone together.

But then Lori learned about compersion, a term in the polyamorous community that refers to the joy of seeing your partner happy and in love with someone else. The process of discovering that underscored one of the biggest advantages of being in a throuple for her. “You are forced to figure out yourself and evolve and grow,” she says. “Because you got two people calling you out on your shit.”

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Modern Love by the Numbers 18%

28%

59%

A quarter of people under the age of 35 have participated in a threesome, almost twice as many as their older counterparts. More than half of LGBTQ+ men have participated in a threesome (and 48% have participated in an orgy).

25–34

35–44

45–64

64+

Open

Monogamous

Polyamorous

Open Relationships: Bigger in theory than in practice—29% consider it, but only 15% practice it.

LGBTQ+ Men

42%

Straight Men

20%

LGBTQ+ Women

13%

Straight Women

7%

Those currently in open relationships differ significantly by gender and sexuality.

(Additionally, newer relationships are more likely to be open/poly, and couples with kids are twice as likely to be in an open relationship as those without kids.)

Couples Therapy

Was Couples Therapy Helpful?

17% tried

61% very helpful

83% didn’t

26% somewhat helpful 13% not helpful

G Q’ S S U RV E Y O N M O D E R N LOV E WAS A D M I N I ST E R E D I N D EC E M B E R 20 20 A N D P O S E D A S E R I ES O F M U LT I P L E- C H O I C E A N D W R I T E- I N Q U EST I O N S TO 8 8 9 I N D I V I D UA LS.

16–24

THE MADDENING INJUSTICES OF DATING WHILE DISABLED Ramy star Steve Way wants to change how we think about the love lives of disabled Americans like him—and upend the barriers that make it impossible to get married. BY YANG-YI GOH never forget the first time he and his girlfriend, Victoria, hooked up. “The first time we had sex was right before Sting debuted in WWE,” he says, smiling wistfully over Zoom from his New Jersey apartment. “So, easily the greatest night of my life.”

Before Steve met Victoria on OkCupid almost seven years ago, his dating life was “basically nonexistent.” The 30-year-old actor and comedian was born with muscular dystrophy, which meant his search for love was complicated in both a practical sense—needing someone to drive and accompany him on dates; ensuring venues were wheelchair accessible; coming home early so that his parents, his caregivers, could “get their sleep too”—and a psychological one.

“I had to overcome my own fears,” he says. “Trusting that when they say they love you, they mean it. That they want to be with you for who you are, not because they feel obligated.” And then there are the systemic obstacles that Steve and Victoria continue to face as a couple: the discriminatory government policies that made it di∞cult for them to move in together last year and make it virtually impossible for them to get married now.

Steve has shone a light on these issues through his role on Hulu’s Ramy, where he stars as himself alongside his real-life best friend, Ramy Youssef, and he’ll be turning up the brightness in the new A24produced show he’s working on for Apple TV+ about navigating the world with a disability. “You know how Jon Stewart was the guy for 9/11 first responders?” he says. “I want to be the guy for disability policy. If AOC reads this, I would love to have a meeting with her.”

STEVE WAY WILL

What are the biggest issues that folks with disabilities face when it comes to dating?

STEVE WAY: Well, people have to understand that disabled people are just people.

We have feelings. We might not necessarily have the same experiences as everybody else, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not capable of having a relationship.

I mean, people think that my girlfriend is either my sister or my nurse. Somebody even thought she was my mom once.

I know her coworkers have asked her weird questions, and her friends didn’t think that it would last. Stuff that would not have come up if I wasn’t disabled.

GQ:

STEVE WAY: Z ACK BIRTHDAY (2).

Do people often assume people with disabilities only date other people like themselves?

Yep. Once, my friends saw another girl in a wheelchair, and they were like, “Steve, you should go out with her!” And I was like, “How would that work? Are you going to hold me up in bed to fuck her?” Like, come on, think about that. Like, really, really break that down.

That reminds me a little of an episode of Ramy where, after a night at the strip club, Ramy helps your character masturbate.

That’s something that a lot of disabled people go through— it’s just not really that talked about. My hands don’t work.

You don’t [get off], and after a while, it hurts. When you sit all day long, it hurts even more. So a lot of times, people try to get help from their personal-care assistants or nurses. A lot of times it can be a sex worker.

After that episode came out, I had a lot of discussions with disabled people facing the same issue. It’s more of a medical concern than it is just sexual release. For me there have been nights where the pain would literally wake me up. I know so many guys that go through that and just didn’t know what to do about it.

forced. I wanted to move in together after I got more at-home-care hours from my Medicaid provider, because if I didn’t get that, I would be alone for a couple of hours a day while my girlfriend is at work. But my sister got COVID, and I had to bounce out of my parents’ house because the situation got to the point where they weren’t able to take care of me anymore.

What exactly does the care you require entail?

It’s a pretty big range. It starts with the basics: feeding me, dressing me, helping me go to the bathroom, giving me my medications. But then you have stuff like I’d get something in my throat and I can’t cough it out, so I need help getting that up.

And you weren’t able to secure that extra care before moving out?

No, I lost my court case, on the grounds that based on New Jersey rulings of how disabled someone is, I’m not disabled enough. My ultimate goal is to change that rubric to make sure that everybody in my situation gets the amount of hours that they need. There’s no reason for it. Capitalism, that’s it. It’s greed. They just don’t want to spend the money. The extra hours that I asked for would cost my health insurance

“She’s helped me learn how to share my space. I’ve never had that before.”

provider about $1,300 extra a month. In 2017, the then CEO made about $1,100 every hour.

Given all those challenges, what has living together been like?

Given the time and the circumstances, I think we’ve adjusted and adapted very well.

She’s helped me learn how to share my space. I’ve never had that before.

I’ve learned how to really budget my time and how to really appreciate time with someone.

She works so much, so I try to really cherish every minute that I have with her. There have been times, obviously, where things have been tense. But I don’t know anyone in the world who hasn’t [had those feelings].

Now that you’re living together, is marriage on the table? Is that something you’ve talked about or are considering?

Definitely. But I’d have to make enough money to where I don’t have to rely on government

assistance and health care.

Once I get married, it becomes joint income, and I’ll lose all that.

Private insurance does not cover personal-care assistance at all.

You can only get the at-home care I need on Medicaid, which means I can’t have more than $2,000 in my bank account at any given time.

Wow. That’s not only a barrier to marriage but a barrier to success.

It’s a barrier to life. But it’s all by design. It’s just to keep us living in poverty. I have zero credit. The money I make goes into an LLC that’s basically not attached to me. I just don’t touch the money.

To get out of this, I’d have to basically make enough money to where I could just pay my personal-care assistant out of pocket—and that’s a lot of money.

It’s just another thing I’m trying to use my platform to change.

We still don’t have true marriage equality in this country.

yang-yi goh is a gq commerce writer.

You and your girlfriend recently moved in together.

How’s that going so far?

It happened, but it was really

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Comedian Cat Cohen reflects on what’s more important during a pandemic: good mental health or sexual fulfillment.

Do you hear that? That’s the sound of the ground breaking. Yes, I love fucking and even, say it with me, cumming.

(It’s only spelled “coming” if you’re seducing a virgin near a moor with your quill.) The rumors are true—I like sex and I like to cum because it feels good instead of bad. Life can be so bad. Things fall from the sky. Everyone you know and love will one day pass away.

People younger than you can say they’re proud of you. And sex—much like the famous drug alcohol or that popular festival where people wear sequins near sand—is an escape.

As someone who su≠ers from anxiety and once had a therapist who was bad at their job call her “gently bipolar,” I’m always looking for an escape. So when the world-renowned Pandemic hit, sex was there for me.

At the beginning of quarantine, my boyfriend (brag) and I went upstate (brag²) to watch the interminable yet exquisite reality program Love Island and have what critics and fans alike are calling near constant sex.

My “lover” and I have deemed ourselves the horniest people in America. We are base and vile creatures whose main interests include slamming our soft, hairy bodies together and eating gas station cuisine. When my boyf turned 29 in isolation, I split an Oreo in two and wore both halves as pasties on my nipples while singing “Happy Birthday”—a performance for which I deserve to EGOT. Our first few weeks upstate were bizarrely idyllic. I had spent most of 2019 traveling and was eager to get home and cozy up to my lover so he wouldn’t leave me for someone who could ostensibly pull o≠ low-rise jeans. Plus we had just stopped using condoms, so sex felt like a new video game we were dying to get home and play. Video game??? Okay…I’m a guy’s girl. If you don’t hate me yet, I also need to share that I’ve always prided myself on cumming quite easily, something I learned while wearing too-tight Abercrombie jeans on a bicycle in 2004.

I LOVE FUCKING.

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I’ve also been blessed with perfect eyebrows and a penchant for worrying about the same four things on repeat until the sweet release of death: that my body is bad according to society, that I won’t become successful enough to have a perfume, that my boyfriend will fall out of romantic love with me, and that I, or a family member, have a rare, fatal, and oft-misdiagnosed disease. While I normally shift from one fear to the next every few months, during quarantine the endless unscheduled time gave my anxieties free rein to rapidly cycle at an unmanageable rate.

It soon became clear that #quar was not a cute three-week vacation, and as the fabric of society furiously unraveled, a return to normalcy felt unfathomable. I drove home to Texas to spend some time with my family and fell into my first true depressive episode. I couldn’t eat, which obviously had never happened to me before. Have you tried food? It’s so good. I couldn’t get out of bed, but wasn’t sleeping—more like Manic Pixie Awake Girl! I started having the urge to hurt myself, which I thought was just for teens.

Trix-are-not-just-for-kids vibes! I started drinking to numb the pain, and worst of all, I started painting abstract portraits of “a tree I had seen.”

My parents kept saying I was acting like a child. I was like…yeah, that’s my role here…

I’m your child. I didn’t recognize myself, either, but I was too lazy to reach out to my psychiatrist, who, like so many doctors, insists on speaking to me only through a portal. But one night, when I found myself staying up till 4 a.m. listening to Fevers and Mirrors–era Bright Eyes and asking my boyfriend if we should have a baby just to have “something to do,” I decided it was time to send my psychiatrist a message.

When I told my doctor what I had been going through, she, in full-blown The Simple Life vocal fry, replied, “Yaaa everyone kind of feels like that right now.” She also wrote me a Prozac prescription.

As the pills took their sweet time kicking in, I spent the summer “getting into natural wine”—a.k.a. “diving headfirst into

I was pissed.

I wanted to feel normal, not nothing.

POLITO PORTRAIT AND TAT TOOS: COURTESY OF BRUNI POLITO.

reboot The Graduate but make it girl” while wrestling a pool noodle

“hourly meltdowns” in a few days.

On our road trip back to NYC, we stayed at an Airbnb that my boyfriend recognized from “a porn he likes,” so obviously we were psyched to express our love physically in the tradition of the pioneers who came before us. (I love porn if my boyfriend says the girl looks like me—otherwise it’s bad for women.)

But when we made love in that sacred space, I couldn’t cum at all. I was pissed. I wanted to feel normal, not nothing. It felt silly to be so preoccupied with my own little death when the whole word was grappling with real death on an alarming scale, and I am mortified to be complaining about something so trivial, but I think we all deserve a bit of familiar pleasure when our new lives are unrecognizable.

I would love for this essay to have a romantic ending. I wish I could take a drag of a cigarette, bashfully look down at my chestnut Ugg minis, and tell you that my venture into medication made sex even better, that the slow burn of delayed pleasure brought me and my partner closer together. That we take our time, inhaling every inch of each other, making eye contact for hours until I finally arch my back up toward the heavens. And while that’s true sometimes (though I’ve never arched my back while orgasming—if anything, I curl inward like a salted snail with tits), it’s not my truth.

We still have good sex, but in general, the situation is, for lack of a better term, very annoying.

I’ve always liked extremes. Moderation?

Who is she? But in the wake of 2020’s endless chaos, I longed for something to cling to. I found myself, for the first time, choosing some semblance of stability over the rush of getting thrown o≠ my axis by a hearty, grassfed, organic orgasm. What’s preferable: feeling okay all the time or really good for a little bit of time? I (drumroll, please) don’t know! I guess for now I’ll keep tinkering with my pharmaceutical cocktail and hope that doctors will soon make an antidepressant without the wretched side e≠ects. After they give us all the vaccine, of course. I want to complain about this to a friend in a crowded bar!!!

In the meantime, I’ve found solace in things I previously considered facets of a boring life: regular therapy, medication, waking up early, experimenting with not drinking every night, doing fucking yoga.

Confronting the things I had been avoiding isn’t fun, but it’s the only way to stay afloat.

Ugh, it’s so inconvenient when something is character-building. cat cohen is a comedian, actress, and writer whose debut poetry collection, ‘God I Feel Modern Tonight: Poems From a Gal About Town,’ was published in February.

Good Morning in Heaven My King

For decades, Tony Polito was the king of the Brooklyn tattoo scene, accommodating some 40 customers a day out of his shop, Old Calcutta.

When he died in 2017, his wife, Bruni, took over his Instagram account and began to post daily messages to him, beginning every note with an iconic missive: “GOOD MORNING IN HEAVEN MY KING.” Here she explains what the process means to her.

A N T H O N Y W O U L D S E N D me nice little cards, but those were only between us. With the Instagram after he passed, I wanted everybody to know how I felt about him. I get up in the morning, and there are times when I’m very sad. And that’s when I really start writing, when I wish he was here, and I talk to him. I feel like, hey, I have to honor my king.

That was my nickname for him.

My king. He never called me by my name. Everybody else calls me Bruni or they’ll call me Sugar. He always called me Mira, which means “look” in Italian.

I met him on August 21, 1983.

I worked in a bank, and one of my customers came in and I saw a tattoo that he had gotten from Anthony. I said, “Oh, gee, where did you get that at?” He said, “From this guy named Tony on Lefferts Avenue.”

He gave me the address, and I went to see Anthony that day with two of my friends. When he did my first tattoo, a rose, of course I was nervous, and he was like, “It’s okay. Just relax.”

And he went and got me a little, tiny bottle of Coke. He says, “Drink this.

You’ll feel better.” And he just gave me the soda and he held my hand.

Oh, it was so nice. Afterward I told my friends, “You know something, girls?

I’m going to marry him.” They said, “What? You don’t even know him.” We got married in 1986.

Now the tattoo says our names too. Tony and Sugar. I loved his rose tattoos. The roses were the prettiest.

And the pinup girls! He loved doing pinup girls. He made them so sexy.

And he was very, very romantic. Oh, my God. Always giving me flowers, a little rose here or there. When he got sick, I said, “It’s time for me to take care of him now.”

You’re going to think this is crazy, but before he passed, I had never seen a dead person before. Whenever somebody died, we would go to the wake to pay our respects. Well, he would go in, but I couldn’t do it. And I used to say to him, “Please don’t die before me, because I won’t see you.”

He said, “Yes, you will.” So needless to say, when he passed, he was the first person I saw in a casket. And it was beautiful. I wasn’t afraid. I held his hands. I touched his face. And I’m telling him, “Why did you go?”

Now I talk to him every day. I pray for him. I feel his presence all the time. Oh, it’s incredible.

— A S TO L D TO C H R I S G AY O M A L I

Rising Democratic star Andrew Gillum was found in a Miami Beach hotel with a male

BY WESLEY LOWERY

To keep their marriage together, he and his wife, R. Jai, had to embrace a new dynamic of “radical honesty” in their relationship.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MALCOLM JACKSON

in a stately subdivision 20 minutes from the airport was built to be inhabited by a governor: two stories of regal brick canopied by a front yard full of tall trees, the worn basketball hoop at the edge of the long L-shaped driveway, the big white “G” hanging from the front door.

Of course, this isn’t the governor’s mansion. As I hopped out of my rental on the last Tuesday of November, a smiling R. Jai Gillum emerged from the garage to escort me, past halls covered in children’s drawings and glossy black-and-white family photos, to the living room. “Gillum!” R. Jai shouted as I took a seat, prompting her husband, the man who in 2018 came 32,000 votes shy of running the state of Florida, out of an adjacent o∞ce.

Looking equal parts casual and cerebral, wearing a tightly cropped beard, glasses, sweatpants, and socks, Andrew Gillum greeted me with a friendly elbow bump. A good-looking, well-liked Black Southerner, the 41-year-old Gillum had risen steadily from city commissioner to statewide candidate and celebrated resistance darling with a seemingly unlimited future. Even after he lost the governor’s race, his name was among the handful frequently floated as a potential vice presidential pick. Then it all came crashing down.

On the morning of March 13, 2020, conservative activist Candace Owens was sent—she won’t say by who or how—a copy of a police report from an incident the night before.

According to the document, an incapacitated Gillum had been found by police in a Miami Beach hotel room with a male sex worker, baggies that the cops suspected contained crystal meth and other narcotics, and a third man, who had called 911. Given the frivolity with which she believed President Trump and his wife had been covered by the press, Owens later explained to me, “surely, someone highlighted as the future of the Democrat Party at a drug-fueled sex party with a male escort must rank somewhere near important.”

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So Owens, who has more than 2.5 million Twitter followers, tweeted the police report.

(The department vowed to investigate the leak of the document but closed its probe after interviewing three o∞cers and without identifying a source.) Not long after that, the Daily Mail published photos taken by police at the scene; another photo, published by a rightwing blog, showed a naked Gillum seemingly passed out in his own vomit. On the same day the coronavirus was first declared a national emergency, the country’s top headline for several hours was Andrew Gillum.

“My brother is just like, ‘What’s going on? You’re trending? You’re the number one trending thing in the country right now,’ ” Andrew recalled. “I don’t know if you’ve seen the news,” R. Jai told her mother and brother.

“Don’t watch it.”

The story presented a salacious cocktail— drugs, possible solicitation, and presumed infidelity. It was a scandal not only about substances and sex but also about sexuality.

Gillum withdrew from public life, releasing a statement and checking himself into alcoholism rehab. And six months later, in a September TV interview with Tamron Hall, Andrew revealed he is attracted to both men and women—instantly making him the most prominent openly bisexual man in American political history, even as it’s unclear what his future in government might hold.

Beyond the professional implications came the more personal, and even more di∞cult, familial fallout. The circumstances provoked

questions about what, precisely, R. Jai had known of her husband’s sex life. Left politely unsaid in public, but ever present in gossipy whispers, was the idea that perhaps the entire marriage had been a convenient cover. The truth was more complicated: For at least a year prior to that night in Miami, their partnership, filled with galas and campaigns and events with the Obamas, had been crumbling.

Life as a public figure, much less a political couple, requires image management, and both they and I knew that their participation in a profile provided them an avenue to at least partially re-seize the narrative around their relationship. “I sometimes feel, being married to an elected o∞cial or a public person, that the stories about him—he may be able to control the narrative a little bit, but typically my story is always told for me,” R. Jai explained at one point.

The Gillums said they were willing to discuss the incident in Miami—although they stopped participating when I later attempted to confirm the details—but were also eager to talk about the tumult that preceded it and the rebuilding that followed. As we spoke that day in November, the Gillums told the story of a couple still very much in love, albeit nursing bruises, as they traded flirtatious barbs and lovingly cut o≠ each other’s anecdotes. They told me that their marriage survived through the kind of work familiar to any partnership that has navigated infidelity: hours of tearful talks, couples therapy, and a new policy of “radical honesty”—all of which occurred while they were confined at home.

There was nowhere to hide, which they now believe is exactly what they needed. “I think that the pandemic probably saved our marriage,” R. Jai told me. “In the sense that we couldn’t go anywhere,” Andrew chimed in.

the Gillums began just a few miles away, on the campus of the historically Black Florida A&M University, where they both served in the student senate. As an ambitious freshman charged with overseeing senate decorum, Andrew approached R. Jai at a meeting to chide his future wife, a biology student two years his senior, for her skirt being too short.

The standard-issue black business skirt in question had been purchased the previous summer, after R. Jai had saved up enough money to buy it for an internship in THE STORY OF

“You start to wonder, ‘What all happened?

How did I get to this?’”

—andrew

gillum

LYNNE SL ADK Y/AP/SHUT TERSTOCK.

San Francisco. “I went to Nordstrom,” R. Jai explained proudly. “I had never even heard of Nordstrom.” She continued: “Needless to say, we were friends, but never dated in college.”

“We weren’t friends,” her husband interjected. “We were friendly,” R. Jai conceded.

After college, Andrew spent months failing to become more than a friend: He got her number from a mutual acquaintance, but she never called him back; he gave her his number after running into her at the mall, but she never called. Finally they were set up by friends at an FAMU tailgate, which led to a goodbye kiss after a late night of conversation at Bennigan’s.

By then Andrew was a 24-year-old phenom: As a Tallahassee city commissioner, he was one of the youngest Black politicians ever elected to public o∞ce in Florida. He’d gone from campus activist to city o∞cial, with just the right mix of intelligence, ambition, and passion to earn loyal supporters. Most in town assumed he was eyeing the mayor’s o∞ce; he was also “one of Tallahassee’s most eligible bachelors,” recalled R. Jai, who had by then returned to FAMU for a master’s in health policy.

The status of their relationship oscillated on and o≠ for five years while they both dated other people. By the time Andrew wanted to get serious, R. Jai had broken things o≠ altogether. She was a gubernatorial fellow with the state health department, so Andrew showed up at her job, approaching her at an event at the governor’s mansion to plead for a chance to talk. Before long they were back together for good, and it was time for Andrew to reveal something important about himself.

Andrew had figured out as a child that he was attracted to both boys and girls.

But back then, especially in the churchgoing South, the concept of bisexuality wasn’t widely acknowledged as real. “As I understood it, it was basically gay men who were trying to pass in a heterosexual relationship when that wasn’t really what they were attracted to,” Andrew explained. “I still think it’s very much misunderstood within the Black community, that people don’t really accept that there is bisexuality as an identity.”

Even today, Black male bisexuality is still predominantly discussed through the lens of “the down-low,” the stigmatized term for men who maintain a facade of heterosexuality while secretly sleeping with other men. It casts bisexuality as deceitful, even inherently shameful, which can in turn create a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: When your identity is seen as false or deviant, keeping it to yourself can feel like the only safe option.

It’s easy to imagine the torment of navigating all of this as an adolescent. When Gillum was in 10th grade, a teacher assigned Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin’s agonizing account of a bisexual man who, soon after proposing to his girlfriend, finds himself passionately entangled with an Italian

Andrew and R. Jai on the campaign trail in Miami, just before losing the 2018 gubernatorial election. Opening pages: The Gillums outside their home in Tallahassee.

bartender. “But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents,” Baldwin’s protagonist relays in the book’s early pages. “Life gives these and also takes them away and the great di∞culty is to say Yes to life.”

“I remember…getting completely stuck emotionally, not being able to deal with it psychologically,” Andrew recalled to me. “I actually didn’t end up finishing the book at that time.” But in the years since, he’d become more comfortable with his sexuality, dating both men and women in adulthood. He knew that if he wanted R. Jai as a life partner, he’d need to tell her.

R. Jai had also been raised in the Southern Black Belt, though she’d grown up with a college health-education professor for a mother in a home in which sexual identity was openly discussed. Still, she admits, she had concerns.

“I had a lot of questions, some of which he could answer, some of which he couldn’t,” R. Jai recalled. “But I guess maybe it was that confidence in me really believing what he had to say about me and us [that] made it better.… It made me want to at least say, ‘Okay, let’s see. Let’s figure this thing out.’ ” According to R. Jai, “What mainly concerned me, it was for me: What does this mean for our relationship? How does this work?” They decided that Andrew’s sexuality didn’t have to mean much at all for them. It was part of who he was but didn’t mean that he wanted to be with anyone else or loved her any less. “Once we got past all that, nothing has changed [from] the Andrew that I’ve dated on and o≠ for about six years, Andrew that I’ve known as a friend for even longer,” she said. “So now I’m like, ‘We’re just a couple dealing with the same things that other people deal with.’ There is nothing di≠erent.”

Yet there was something di≠erent about the Gillums: Their partnership was a public one. By the time they married in May 2009, Andrew had been an elected o∞cial for six years. They briefly considered having him come out publicly before his 2014 Tallahassee mayoral run—Andrew said he knew the fact that he had dated men in the past could be revealed and thought sharing his personal story would aid his advocacy for marriage

equality—but feared losing what remained of their private lives and prompting public questioning about their marriage. “I had a political adviser whom I’d spoken to who was not just ‘No,’ but like, ‘Hell no!’ And Jai said no too,” Andrew recalled. And so he continued his public life as presumptively straight, even as his growing prominence soon brought waves of new attention.

“A political person has his share of admirers, whether he’s married or not,” R. Jai told me. “It’s like, well, in addition to having women who are sometimes disrespectful, you now also have men?” fortunes were rising in Florida, Andrew Gillum hadn’t planned to run for governor. He had spent the better part of 2016 campaigning for Hillary Clinton and thought there could be a potential role in her administration for him. But Donald Trump’s victory changed all that, and Gillum spotted an opening for himself in the 2018 race. With twoyear-old twins at home, the Gillums assumed a campaign would put their plans for further family expansion on hold. What they didn’t know as they first considered a gubernatorial run in the fall of 2016 was that R. Jai was already pregnant with their third child. That meant they spent much of the campaign apart, other than the month he took o≠ from campaigning during a crucial stretch of the race to be home for their child’s birth.

“It created an indescribable amount of stress on our own life,” Andrew told me.

“We’ve got twins and a newborn, and she’s got a full-time job, and I’m running around the state for governor.”

The Gillums say their marriage became mechanical: When he was home, his time o≠ was spent primarily with the children, leaving little for them as a couple. After he pulled o≠ an upset and won the primary, Andrew asked R. Jai if she would step away from her job at the Florida Dental Association and join him full time on the trail. She declined, wanting to preserve the individual identity that her career provided.

“I kind of packed it away,” Andrew said of her decision. “Like, I said it was okay. And it probably wasn’t.” That frustration hardened into resentment (continued on page 106) THOUGH HIS POLITICAL

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OnlyFans is empowering sex workers, challenging old stigmas, and making porn more intimate than ever.

It also offers the possibility of life-changing money—for those willing to take the plunge.

BY JENNA SAUERS

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY CHARLOTTE RUTHERFORD

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He moved to Nashville to make it as a singer but wound up working as a barback, a job that in three years had gone from tolerable to marginal to almost unbearable. At 26, his dream of a career in music had already begun to feel hopeless. And now Brayden Bauer’s anxiety was spiraling. “Every time I would buy something, I would think that I should be spending this money on a song,” he says.

“Even when I would buy food, it would be like, ‘What am I doing?’ ” Then, last March, Brayden’s circumstances grew even more precarious. The coronavirus pandemic temporarily shuttered the bar.

When the place reopened, it felt unsafe, and he made up his mind not to go back—even though he wasn’t quite sure what else he’d do. He turned to Twitch, the livestreaming platform popular with gamers, and he began selling merch—sweatshirts and hats with little weed jokes screen-printed on them. He was earning around $2,000 a month, which was enough to make rent, but Twitch involved streaming himself playing video games for seven or eight hours every day. He had no time for music. It wasn’t sustainable.

Yet his foray into performing online opened his mind to certain new possibilities.

In May, after a little encouragement from some of his followers, Brayden started an account on OnlyFans, the subscription platform that allows creators to charge for photos and videos, notably explicit ones—a kind of Patreon of porn. He had no experience with sex work, but out of some measure of desperation he decided to give it a go. “I realized it was kind of my only choice,” he says.

Brayden has curly brown hair, brown eyes, a slim build, a warm singing voice, and 26 tattoos. He often wears nail polish. On Twitter, his display name used to be Discount Pete Davidson, as he bears a close resemblance.

He’s amassed more than 43,000 followers there—an audience that OnlyFans would enable him to monetize on his own terms.

The platform allows creators to charge what they like for subscriptions, income they can supplement with tips and fees for customized photos and videos. In exchange for hosting the content, OnlyFans takes a flat 20 percent cut of performers’ income, far less than most camming sites take and closer to the terms set

by Patreon and Substack.

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In November, Brayden started posting nude photos and solo videos of himself, often in the shower, for an audience that he says is roughly 50-50 women and men. (Brayden is straight, which he mentions on his page, but he also doesn’t care if anyone assumes otherwise.) He set his subscription price relatively high ($14.99 a month) to take advantage of the initial wave of curiosity, produced a lot of content, and promoted it on Twitter. Then the money started coming in. In his first month he made $20,000.

“It was just crazy,” he says. “I’d never really had more than a couple thousand dollars in my bank account at one time in my entire life.

I was able to pay o≠ multiple credit cards.

Put some money aside for taxes and music and still be able to do whatever I wanted.”

And buy things: eight pairs of new sneakers, a bunch of tattoos, a new TV, a PS5, and a VR headset. Since then his monthly income has stabilized at around $3,500, and he spent the winter recording new songs that he hopes to release this spring. “It’s been nice to have a little bit of disposable income without exhausting myself,” he says. “Because anytime I would have a decent amount of money working at the bars, it was because I had just worked two 14-hour shifts in a row on a weekend.”

Brayden is part of a wave of former lowwage workers turning to OnlyFans during what has been a boom year for the platform.

With screen time (and general horniness) soaring during quarantine, the site’s tra∞c more than doubled over the first six months

of the pandemic, and by December the company boasted that it was adding 500,000 new users a day. The number of creators on the platform has likewise skyrocketed during the pandemic, from 120,000 at the end of 2019 to over 1 million at the end of 2020. Out-of-work service workers like Brayden found themselves vying for online attention alongside career sex workers, models, influencers, and, increasingly, celebrities. Cardi B joined to premiere the behind-the-scenes video of “WAP,” Teen Wolf star Tyler Posey made his debut by singing naked with a strategically placed guitar, and Bella Thorne earned $1 million in a day—and the wrath of Twitter—after her followers believed she’d promised a nude photo that was not, in fact, a nude.

Mostly, though, these creators are not famous. They are ordinary people trying to make a living by appealing, with an unprecedented digital intimacy, to your fantasies. And the life-altering financial success they’re chasing remains intertwined with a simple cost: the old stigma that still goes hand in hand with doing any kind of sex work. As the pandemic rounded year one, I set out to talk to OnlyFans creators making erotic content—newcomers and veteran sex workers alike. Joining OnlyFans is a great pandemic gamble, and most of all I wanted to know: Was it worth it?

How to Make It Big (and Why You Probably Won’t) Among the savviest and most successful creators on OnlyFans is a 28-year-old woman who goes by the name Aella. A shrewd and data-driven former tech worker, she has earned as much as six figures in a month, and the story of her success is also one of liberation. She grew up in the Northwest, the eldest daughter of evangelical Christians who homeschooled their kids. Her father, she says, was particularly strict, which prompted her to break from the family at 17 and enroll in college. Unable to pay the tuition, she was forced to leave school before completing the first semester. She ended up working at a factory

“It was just crazy,” says Brayden Bauer. “I’d never had more than a couple thousand dollars in my bank account at one time in my entire life.

I was able to pay off multiple credit cards.”

Brayden Bauer, a former barback, made $20,000 in his first month on the platform. Opening page: Cam girl turned OnlyFans star Aella.

in Eastern Washington, assembling electrical components for $10 an hour and living with five roommates in a cramped apartment where she slept on a mattress on the floor. She did not always have enough money for food.

After about a year, a friend mentioned camming, and one night, Aella tried it. In her first session, she wore a padded bra, not quite realizing she would be taking it o≠ during the stream. But she made $60 in three hours, twice as much as her rate at the factory, and camming became her profession for the next five years. She often worked on a site called MyFreeCams, which she says took 50 percent of her earnings, but her take still averaged around $200 an hour. In her best month, thanks to a fierce contest with a fellow model, she made $50,000. The money enabled her to travel widely in her early 20s, working from Turkey, South Africa, and Europe. For a time, she moved to New York City and, seeking a higher hourly wage, began escorting. Last March, she started posting on OnlyFans and

is now making far more than ever before— about $60,000 a month, and in two di≠erent months as much as $100,000.

In a way, Aella’s evolution as a performer parallels the rise of OnlyFans itself. The company’s founder and CEO, Tim Stokely, created the site in 2016 after launching two other online adult businesses: GlamWorship, a “financial domination” site, and Customs4U, a cam site. Two years later, Stokely sold a majority stake in OnlyFans to Leonid Radvinsky, whose long career in adult businesses includes owning the camming giant MyFreeCams, the site where Aella worked.

With its structural similarities to social media, OnlyFans quickly proved a hit: The site draws on influencer culture as much as it does the adult world, a dual identity that set it apart from your average camming site. The platform also capitalized on what Lux Alptraum, a writer and sex educator who’s reported on the adult industry for 13 years, says may be a wider cultural shift around paying for adult

content. Because of Tube sites, younger millennials and Generation Z have always known internet porn as abundant and free; following a performer on OnlyFans can feel exclusive in a way that simply watching a video of unknown pedigree does not. “I suspect there is a weird phenomenon whereby paying for porn is almost more taboo and more special and kinkier now,” says Alptraum. “It’s like, why do people buy artisanal water, you know?”

According to Aella, OnlyFans is a big improvement over camming for performers too. “OnlyFans is a much easier way of earning money,” she explains. For one thing, she says that OnlyFans’ 20 percent cut o≠ers much more advantageous financial terms to its creators than any cam site. All the adult creators that I spoke to for this piece agreed that the cut was surprisingly modest, especially given that adult websites pay higher fees to payment processors than other businesses do. “It’s fair compared to industry standard, but I also think it’s actually fair, which never happens in entertainment or sex work,” says Stoya, a 34-yearold porn star and writer, who started an OnlyFans account in March. As a comparison, she points out that PornHub takes a 35 percent cut from its a∞liated performers’ video sales.

“I don’t want to get too excited,” she says, “but OnlyFans feels like it’s really put the power in the hands of the performers themselves. And that’s groundbreaking if true.”

For Aella, OnlyFans also o≠ers vastly improved working conditions. She describes camming as a kind of Glengarry Glen Ross of sex work; it’s intense, and models are at the mercy of an algorithm that pushes or buries their content in real time. In addition, like many cam models, she would usually make the majority of her money from a single anchor client. “It becomes a weird power relationship, which can be very toxic,” she says. “A lot of girls would be beholden to emotionally abusive members.” On OnlyFans, by contrast, Aella’s earnings are much more widely distributed; her biggest client might spend $800, or about 1 percent of her monthly income.

Aella has pale skin, hazel eyes, and long chocolate-brown hair. Her self-produced content is well lit, with good production values, and often accentuates her slight goofiness: For example, she might post a video of herself working out topless wearing a VR headset or playing the accordion. Her monthly subscription price is high, at $22.92, and she posts content to her page as often as four times a day. To hear her (continued on next page)

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talk about OnlyFans, you’d think she might be running any small business experiencing first-year growth. “The majority of what I do is thinking about how to market my product,” she says. Fan turnover is high, she adds—many people subscribe for a month, then drop o≠, so to be successful, a creator needs to consistently draw in new subscribers. She says that posting free content on NSFW subreddits (those that do not ban users for posting consensual adult material) is a common method of promotion. Aella says some creators also prioritize Twitter, which she thinks, among social media platforms, is relatively tolerant of sex workers and of adult content.

That kind of attention to marketing is what can make an OnlyFans performer truly thrive, according to Alptraum. “I think fundamentally, it’s the non-sex parts of online sex work that make someone succeed or fail, which is counterintuitive for a lot of people,” says Alptraum, who herself ran an early independent porn site. “Like, yes, making good content is important. But good content without good marketing won’t get you anywhere—just like with all other online stu≠.”

“OnlyFans feels like it’s really put the power in the hands of the performers themselves,” says Stoya. “And that’s groundbreaking if true.”

Essential to good marketing is market research, which is partly how Aella has set herself apart. She’s always been drawn to data—for a while she left sex work and joined a cryptocurrency start-up—and throughout her years in the adult industry, she’s conducted careful research to help optimize her earning potential. Last winter she surveyed nearly 400 female OnlyFans creators about their incomes from the platform, unearthing some important findings: Showing your face in content, posting more frequently, and charging higher subscription prices are correlated with higher incomes.

She also graphed her respondents’ monthly earnings, indexed to their OnlyFans percentile rank. The resulting distribution looks like a hockey stick. Though she surveyed only a relatively small group of female creators, Aella’s research could suggest that fully half of OnlyFans’ more than 1 million creators net no more than $100 a month. Earning $750 puts you in the top 10 percent. Given the

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stigma against sex work, it seems there is a very large pool of people at the bottom of the OnlyFans income pyramid who are entering the precarious and risky world of sex work for what appears to be very little reward.

Last April, a blogger calculated OnlyFans’ Gini coe∞cient—a common index of income inequality, with 0 being perfect egalitarianism and 1 being the most unequal distribution possible—at 0.83. Based on this data, if OnlyFans were a country, it would likely be among the most unequal nations on earth.

It’s hard to square this analysis with talk about OnlyFans democratizing porn, yet few professions o≠er such high potential rewards to young people with no formal qualifications and no family or other connections. For Aella, it’s taken her far from the life she was raised to want—that of a submissive Christian wife and mother—and enabled her to live with a fierce independence. “I want to save up enough in a couple of years and then never have to work again if I don’t want to,” she says.

Today her life outside of sex work revolves around writing, an interpersonal meditation practice called Circling, and various forms of community-building. She recently moved back to Washington, largely because it has no state income tax, and may use some of her earnings to buy land; she’s exploring the idea of creating a commune. “Making $100,000 a month,” she says, “I was like, ‘Oh, I could actually buy a piece of land pretty soon and start building on it.’ ”

Porn’s Great Equalizer During the early months of the pandemic, American sex workers saw their incomes evaporate. Porn sets shut down, as did clubs where strippers and go-go dancers performed.

In-person work like escorting and dominatricing became too risky for most clients and workers to contemplate. But sex workers were cut o≠ from most forms of public support, even if their labor was legal. Federal law barred those whose work is of a “prurient sexual nature” from receiving PPP loans.

Among those who pivoted to OnlyFans was Sinnamon Love, a 46-year-old Brooklyn-based sex-industry veteran who has held almost every job in the adult world imaginable—porn star, porn director, webcam model, phone sex operator, full-service sex worker, fetish model, and co-owner of a cam studio. When the pandemic hit, she was working in online porn and as a freelance professional dominatrix, catering to in-person clients. Soon she shifted much of her energy to an OnlyFans account she had created in 2018 and earned $61,000 on the platform last year.

Now Love feels the site can do more than provide a paycheck; she thinks it can also upend a lot of the old racist behavior and tropes that have hampered her porn career for years, even after she became a major star.

“It really is blatant,” Love says, pointing out that mainstream porn has a racial earnings gap of up to 50 percent for performers, according to research by U.C. Santa Barbara associate professor Mireille Miller-Young. “If everything that you’re producing with marginalized people in it has some sort of derogatory terminology, or the lighting is shitty, or the makeup is bad or whatever, it’s like the companies are

putting less e≠ort into these projects,” she says. “They’re giving movies with primarily Black talent less budget.”

By putting creators in a direct relationship with their audience, Love says, OnlyFans cuts out porn’s often problematic middlemen, makes sex work scalable, and welcomes creators of all identities and body types.

“Subscription-based platforms really have the potential to be the great equalizer in our industry,” she says, “because people have the opportunity to set their rates and make whatever money that they want to make.”

Love is now aiming to further equalize the industry through her work as the director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Peep.me, a subscription-based adult-content platform (and an OnlyFans competitor) set to launch in 2021, which will be structured as a workerowned cooperative.

She’s also the founder of the BIPOC Adult Industry Collective, a group she started during the pandemic to provide mentalhealth services and direct aid to sex workers of color and advocate for fair pay and the rejection of racist tropes and language in porn. Among the workshops she’s set up is an OnlyFans 101, and one of the collective’s founding members, Mickey Mod, a 41-yearold porn performer and the creative director of the site Kink.com, echoes Love’s thoughts about the platform’s transformative possibilities. “For BIPOC performers, OnlyFans and these direct-to-consumer platforms have been sustaining a lot of people and showing people that these gatekeepers that say ‘Oh, your look doesn’t sell’ or ‘Oh, I already have a Black person on the site this month’ just how wrong that is and how strong the demand is,” Mod says. “People are making content on their terms, with the people who they want to perform with, on the timelines that they want to do it, and reaping all the benefits.”

The fact that OnlyFans creators work for themselves and set their own rates should, in theory, ease the income disparities between white and Black performers. But Love says some of the adult industry’s fraught racial dynamics are surfacing on subscriptionbased platforms. Discovery algorithms on these sites need to become more equitable, she says, so that Black and brown performers are adequately represented—something she’s trying to get right with Peep.me.

“When I came on board, I didn’t want to see us utilizing an algorithm that favors cis, white, thin, commercially attractive people,” she says. “It’s super important to make sure that marginalized people are at the forefront of your advertising. If you’re only posting a certain type of person, you’re only going to get customers looking for that type of person.” (When reached for comment, a representative from OnlyFans said that the platform’s “suggested creators bar changes frequently and showcases an inclusive range of creators.”)

Love also wants platforms to ensure their creators’ safety by banning racial and other identity slurs—a step OnlyFans says it has taken. “It only benefits them to do it,” Love says, “because if the creators feel safe, then the creators are going to stay. They’re going to want to be there. And they’ll make more money.”

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Stigma’s Long Shadow The first thing Evelyn Harlow does most mornings after waking up is check her OnlyFans inbox to see if any new subscribers have materialized overnight. “For some reason, porn is just really active, like in those wee hours of the night,” she says. “I get a lot of my subscribers at midnight to 2 a.m.” Evelyn (who asked to be identified by the pseudonym she uses on OnlyFans) is 26 and lives in Canada.

She started her account last summer, after losing her $14.50-an-hour retail job, and she took to the site naturally: Sometimes her videos give the impression that you might be hanging out with a beautiful roommate who is casually chatting while, for instance, making over-easy eggs in the nude. She’s now bringing in about $1,300 a month from her page, which—given that she’s only six months in and didn’t start with a big social media following— she’s satisfied with. Her goal is to make $5,500 a month.

“People are making content on their terms,” says Mickey Mod, “with the people they want to perform with, on the timelines they want to do it, and reaping all the benefits.”

But as her following grows, she also fears one of her posts getting too much attention— and drawing the scrutiny of those in her life who don’t know about her online alter ego.

“I worry sometimes, where I’m making a post and part of me is like, ‘Oh, it would be so good for the business if this did really well,’ ” she says. “And then I’m like, ‘If this did really well, there’s a higher probability that someone I know will see it.’ ” Gradually, Evelyn has told most of the people she’s close to about her current line of work. She’s not out to her family, except her sister, who’s her roommate. Revealing herself as someone who makes money from creating homemade porn is still stigmatizing, she says, even in an age when watching porn and sexting is normalized. “It’s a di≠erent thing to say you do porn or you post nude pictures online and get paid for it, or you share intimate details about your sex life online and people pay a subscription for that,” she says.

“There’s just something about sex work where it combines the taboo of sex and the taboo of money and you put them together and some people say, ‘Oh,’ and then they change the subject. And then I’m sure they go home and they tell their boyfriend their friend’s lost their mind.”

She’s also experienced the feeling of seeing a romantic partner, or a suitor, reevaluate her after her disclosure. “Some people look at sex workers di≠erently too, and then they might be like, ‘I can push her into having sex now,’ ” she says. “Some people see you as a little bit lower or more easily manipulated.”

OnlyFans creators who are new to sex work, like Evelyn, are now navigating the minefield

of the occupation’s stigma for the first time and doing it mostly without a strong support system. Among the biggest risks faced by online sex workers are harassment and doxing: Late last year, the New York Post revealed the identity of an EMT who had an OnlyFans account to make ends meet. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came to the woman’s defense, tweeting, “Leave her alone. The actual scandalous headline here is ‘Medics in the United States need two jobs to survive.’ ” The EMT deleted her OnlyFans account and kept her job, but the episode showed the precarious existence faced by newcomers to sex work as they seek to reconcile their day jobs with their online personas.

For Mickey Mod, that kind of shaming shows how sex work is still e≠ectively “quarantined” from other forms of work in most peoples’ minds. “ ‘It’s fine if that’s what you’re going to do and that’s all you’re going to do—but I don’t want that person to be my accountant,’ ” he says of the prevailing attitude. “And I feel like that is a big hill to have to climb.” Mod attributes this view to simple misogyny. “People can’t accept that things are being done consensually, which is fucked up and mostly deeply rooted in an extreme misogyny that is so ingrained in our culture that most of the time people don’t even recognize it,” he says. “People don’t recognize that people other than women do sex work and can’t rationalize that women could choose sex work or choose it consensually.”

Evelyn weighed the decision to begin her OnlyFans account very carefully, down to choosing her pseudonym. “I realized there’s kind of a line you cross over. You can’t step back from it,” she says. “There is an online footprint now, and what happens on the internet stays on the internet forever.” She says she thinks about her parents finding out all the time. “I know it’s going to happen at some point,” she says. “I would much prefer to tell them myself. I would hate for them to find out through finding me online. Yeah, I think about it a lot.” But she hasn’t yet brought herself to begin the conversation.

Aella did not get to control the circumstances of her family finding out about her sex work. During her camming career, she says, her identity was discovered and someone interrupted the livestream of her father’s Christian radio show and posted a screen capture of one of her cam shows. “Which is how my parents learned that I did this,” she says.

“And that was really terrible.”

She has also been stalked—primarily online, though she says one man tried to find her in person—and has dealt with “people who think that we’re in a relationship or in love, and that’s a little bit scary.” Much of what she knows about online security comes from veteran sex workers, and by this point, her safeguards are automatic. “It’s, like, built into my blood to be very, very careful about the kind of information I give online,” she says.

Looking back, Aella feels that in a strange way, her evangelical Christian upbringing gave her the tools to live a life as a member of an out-group. She grew up with the sense that the rest of the world was “just never going to understand, and that you, culturally, are very di≠erent from them,” she says. “I felt like, ‘Oh, okay, I can live a life and be okay like this.’

I don’t think I have the strong fear reaction to

it that a lot of other people do, who never got the opportunity to experience being safe while the outside world hated them.”

Brayden also grew up in a conservative family; his father was music director at their church in Texas for two decades. His parents have become more accepting of the choices he’s made that they don’t understand—the tattoos, the weed he smokes partly to manage his anxiety. “But something like sex work is the very end of a spectrum that I don’t think they’re anywhere near,” he says. He fears them finding out in some way he can’t control but hasn’t yet brought himself to tell them.

“Everything circles back to Christianity for them. There are things that they think are wrong and immoral, obviously that don’t actually hurt anybody,” he says. “If something like an article was how they found out, then that’s something I’m totally okay with.”

For Sarvani, a 23-year-old tattoo artist in Washington State who started an OnlyFans account to make up for income lost during the pandemic, that was a conversation she was forced to have prematurely. Last April, she posted an eye-catching tweet, one that played into a popular genre of boasts about what people had bought with their earnings on the platform: “Say whatcha want about OnlyFans but I just moved into my dream house at 22,” she wrote, captioning a photo of herself posing proudly in the doorway of a two-story suburban house. Truthfully, the home was rented, and Sarvani had only started her OnlyFans account a few weeks earlier, in March. But she seemed like the ultimate OnlyFans success story, and within hours her tweet was on its way to almost 270,000 likes and 17,000 quote tweets, many of them highly critical. A popular alt-right account mocked her, and its audience subjected Sarvani, who was born in India, to racist abuse. Strangers called her a whore and said that she should die, and she endured weeks of vile harassment and death threats.

Her Twitter account is under her real name, so individuals who wished her ill had a head start in seeking out her personal information.

Sarvani, who studied a form of Indian classical dance from the age of four, is the sole nonnude OnlyFans creator I interviewed. (She shares bikini and lingerie shots.) In the wake of the tweet, someone sent a screen recording of her OnlyFans page to her mother, who was unaware of her work. “It was awful,” says Sarvani. “She’s not thrilled that this is what I’m doing. We just talked about it on Christmas, actually. And she was like, ‘I don’t like that you’re in sex work, but I am happy that you’re happy and that you found your niche.’ ” However, Sarvani notes, “going viral really, really did boost my tattoo business, and I’m really grateful for that. And that’s what I want to do with my life.” She’s still on OnlyFans for now and is on track to make about $100,000 in her first year on the platform. In January, she tweeted a since-deleted photo of a key: She’d signed a lease on her own tattoo studio, which is set to open this spring, pandemic permitting. “You know what I’ll probably do is try and make another viral tweet,” she says. “I have an inspiration. I could probably say something about OnlyFans giving me this opportunity to open a new shop and then boost my tattoo

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business, because I know that will do really well. And then also announce that I am done with OnlyFans. That’s probably what I’ll do.”

The Fans: A New Intimacy The money is the big draw, of course, the possibility of financial salvation that makes all the stigma and fear worth enduring. But a number of the OnlyFans creators I spoke with also mentioned something else they found on the platform—a sometimes unexpected connection with their followers, a sense of power that came with understanding and unlocking their desires. “Sex work is fundamentally about manufactured intimacy,” says Lux Alptraum. Something about OnlyFans seems to make the manufacturing part a little easier, a little more natural. Mickey Mod describes it as “this private club that your friend who happens to be hot is inviting you into.”

Sometimes those conversations stray from the purely erotic to the life of the mind. Stoya lights up when talking about her 737 OnlyFans subscribers, and not just because the nearly $54,000 in income the site provided her in 2020 has allowed her to give her assistant a raise and a promotion. “I open up my inbox most mornings and it’s, like, a conversation about Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs with the fan who bought it and sent it to me, and a conversation with a di≠erent fan about The Land of Laughs because he asked for a topless picture of me reading and that was the book I was reading at the time and he’s also read it,” she says. “It makes me wish we could do group threads on OnlyFans.”

Stoya typically exchanges messages with about 25 fans a day. Not every fan interaction

is pleasant—some messages are “weird to awful,” and she occasionally hears from someone who is “unhealthily fixated, and blocking them doesn’t work; they just make a new account over and over. And that can be alarming.” But she’s been in the industry for over a decade, she has security measures in place, and the vast majority of her fans are people with whom she enjoys interacting within the boundaries of her paid inbox. She has gotten messages asking about techniques for anxiety management during the pandemic and questions about sexual health. “Some of it’s so banal,” she says. “Like, someone’s like, ‘I have trouble sleeping. Can you record a bedtime voice memo for me?’ Well, of course.”

Aella says that being a sex worker and creating content for people on OnlyFans has made her more empathetic toward men. “They’re people,” she says. “I think there’s a lot of dehumanization that occurs for horny men—which is understandable. I hate horny men a lot of the time. But if you can get past that, these horny men are people experiencing drives that they didn’t ask for, and it’s really tough to be in the grip of that. I have a lot of compassion for that.” Prior to becoming a sex worker, she says, “I think I wasn’t fully aware that men often use sexual intimacy as a proxy for emotional intimacy, or that sexual intimacy is sort of a requirement in order to have emotional intimacy, and they don’t really know how to have it with anyone else.”

As a man in an industry where women are typically the stars (and the bigger earners), Mickey Mod finds OnlyFans refreshing because he’s actually the focus for once.

“I feel most of the time in my in-person performing, I’m mostly kind of an extra or an afterthought,” he says. “They usually cast the

other performer or performers and then me.”

Mod says that OnlyFans has been “a perception shift,” and he sounds surprised when he talks about how di≠erent it is to be the person everyone is coming to see.

Sometimes sex work connects with some of the deepest and most personal human drives— the desire to be known and to be understood.

For Evelyn, online sex work represents the latest development in a long process of getting in touch with herself again after su≠ering from eating disorders throughout her adolescence, college, and acting school in her 20s. Gradually, in recovery, she began to connect the shame she felt about food and her body to sexual shame that she’d absorbed growing up in a devout Catholic family where she says purity was emphasized and no one spoke openly about sex.

As an adult, accepting her body was like a test, and learning to enjoy herself sexually—to embrace her desires and sexuality without shame—was in a way the ultimate repudiation of her illness. “I just got really hooked on the theory that if you’re ashamed of something, you should do the opposite of hiding it,” she says. “I use my fear as my guide, and that might seem reckless to some people, that might seem ridiculous. But fear, it’s useful also.”

Posting nude photos online, Evelyn says, is awesome. It’s taken years for her to become comfortable enough with her body and her sexuality to be able to do it; she still experiences some fear, but she has freed herself from the shame. “It feels,” she says, “like being seen.”

jenna sauers is a freelance writer who splits her time between Brooklyn and New Zealand.

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after Andrew lost to Republican Ron DeSantis by just 32,000 votes.

“You go through the process of all the things you could have done di≠erently,” he said, “and sinking deeper into a depression.”

For the first time in almost 16 years, Andrew was not an elected o∞cial—his mayoral gig ended just days after he lost the governor’s race. Rather than fully process the loss, he kept his schedule packed. He took a Harvard fellowship, launched a statewide voter-mobilization e≠ort, and accepted a slew of speaking gigs.

For the first three months of 2019, he spent nearly every day on the road. That February, his father died suddenly. “I just wanted every

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opportunity I could to escape,” he recalled.

“And then the drinking got more intense.”

It started with whiskey in his morning co≠ee; then he switched to a clear liquor whose smell was easier to conceal from his wife. They’d always been deliberate about drinking—Andrew’s father had struggled with alcoholism—but now he was quick to order another round. “Always the drinks were too weak,” R. Jai recalled. “And you know, I finally tell him, ‘Every bartender at every event we go to is not making you weak drinks. Something’s not right here.’” She asked that they start couples therapy. He said no.

“I really can’t say enough how much the rift was between us,” R. Jai told me.

“I was done asking you to come to therapy with me. I had given up on you; you had given up on me,” she continued, addressing her husband. “I think I had convinced myself ‘He needs help, I cannot help him, and he refuses to go get help. I’m out.’ And what does that look like…? How do we make this amicable for our children? Because this is not working for me.”

When the couple traveled to Atlanta in October for the launch of Tyler Perry Studios, the most Black-and-bougie event this side of the Obama years, Andrew drank so much at the hotel bar beforehand that he began to fall asleep

at the table as dinner gave way to a Mary J. Blige concert. “I can’t hide him anymore because everyone from our table has gotten up to go dance,” R. Jai said. “And I’m literally standing in front of him trying to make sure no one can see him.” At one point, the Gillums said, Keshia Knight Pulliam tapped Andrew on the face and urged him to go get some co≠ee. R. Jai dragged him home early, prompting a flurry of texts from friends about everything they were missing at the party. She was furious. Andrew was hungover. “All I know was, I woke up the next morning in my tuxedo, but I had a 6 a.m. hit for CNN,” he recalled. The lowest, most public point of the spiral was still months away.

he spent most of the day of March 12 boozing on Miami Beach.

He had a few hours before R. Jai and their friends would arrive at the house they had all rented for a wedding, which Andrew was set to o∞ciate. Eventually he needed to pick up a rental car from the airport, but instead he drank his way up and down the beach. At some point in the early evening, he decided to meet up with Travis Dyson, then a 30-yearold nurse and sex worker, whom he said he had met a couple of months prior. Andrew A N D R E W S A I D T H AT

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left the beach, took an Uber to the Mondrian South Beach, and went up to room 1107.

“He o≠ers me something to drink.… I’m not really sure, like, what it is and what’s in it because I’m already kind of [drunk].… The last memory that I have is sitting up drinking,” Andrew recounted. “Because I didn’t take a drug test until two or three days later, I don’t know if there was something in my drink. But all I know is, I’m knocked out. At the point that I come back present, it’s like 11 at night and I’m in the bathroom. I don’t have any clothes on. I have no idea why. And I’m there with like five, six police o∞cers.”

It was only later, Andrew said, that he saw the photo of himself incapacitated. He insists he did not knowingly consume drugs that night. “What I’m reading in this report is some tryst, some three people, this, that, and the third, and all of these are things that I have no recollection of. I never even met this third person,” Andrew said. “So at this point I’m like, ‘This is set up.’ ” Still, he said, he should have never been in that hotel room. “Me being and putting myself in this situation to even communicate with another adult at that level was a mistake on my part,” Andrew told me. “I’m an adult, and I know that you don’t put yourself in certain situations. And I still made choices to put myself in that.”

Andrew elaborated, his wife looking on: “The non fidelis [unfaithful] part was I put myself in a situation where anything could have happened, including something that could have betrayed or would have betrayed my vows. And that’s the part that I wanted to own outright. Because I knew that much.

Given the state that I was in, I knew that much was possible.”

That’s the version the Gillums have shared publicly, insistent that no one is owed further explanation or details. And until now, Dyson— the other man in the room—has declined to provide any confirmation or denial.

But when I later reached Dyson by phone, he told a very di≠erent story and maintained there was no setup. Although the Miami New Times reported that Dyson and Gillum had met the previous spring, Dyson told me the reporter had misunderstood him. In fact, Dyson said, the two first connected a week or two prior on the gay-dating app Grindr and in the days since had met up multiple times for paid sexual encounters. He said Andrew passed out after taking “G,” an ecstasy-type drug often used by gay men to enhance their sex drives, which when combined with alcohol can knock people out. He said that on that night and others, both he and Andrew used G and other drugs.

Dyson acknowledged taking photos and videos, and sending some of them to friends, but said he took them in order to be able to later show Andrew what had happened. He said he then took care of Andrew for several hours before accidentally overdosing himself. He said the third man in the police report, whom I could not reach for comment, was another client who had never met Andrew and called 911 after showing up for a separate appointment.

“Everything I did was trying to help Andrew,” insisted Dyson, who said the incident has also scrambled his life: He and his fiancé separated, he was forced to leave his graduate

nursing program, and he now pays the bills by selling nudes and porn on OnlyFans.

How one of the photos Dyson took that night, showing a naked Andrew seemingly passed out in his own vomit, ended up on a conservative political blog is a saga of its own.

Dyson maintains that he never gave it to the media. Enrique Tarrio, of Proud Boys infamy, told me he began texting contacts in Miami after seeing news reports about the incident and before long had been sent a screenshot of the photo. He then contacted Jacob Engels, a right-wing journalist in Florida, who published it on his blog. Tarrio—who recently denied a Reuters report that he was a federal

“I think that the pandemic probably saved our marriage.”

—r. jai gillum and local police informant in Miami in the early 2010s—and Engels wouldn’t reveal their source but said that to their knowledge Dyson was not involved directly or indirectly in their acquiring it.

What precisely happened that night remains unclear. After learning that I had contacted Dyson for comment, the Gillums canceled our scheduled follow-up interviews and declined to respond on the record to Dyson’s version of events.

As we spoke in the living room, Andrew recounted the incident in slow, deliberate sentences and said he is still wrestling with its implications. He embarrassed his family. He reinforced misguided stereotypes of bisexuals. He shouldn’t have been in that room. And still, he believes, he was wronged.

“All these images that I am not aware of, that I’m not conscious of, that I didn’t give consent to, that I did not participate in… To see what these things have been done around you without your knowledge or consent.

And then at that point you start to wonder, ‘What all happened? How did I get to this?’ ” Andrew told me. “And you start to feel like one of those people who don’t have power, which is not a cool place. Because even in bad decision-making, I want to know that I have the power, the choice.”

A C R O S S T O W N that night in Miami, R. Jai and their friends were growing increasingly worried. For most of the day, their minds had been elsewhere—with the number of COVID19 cases rapidly rising throughout the U.S., the wedding venue had abruptly canceled, leaving them with a 48-hour scramble to find a new one. Andrew had been texting with her throughout the day, but when she got to the rental house that evening, she discovered that he had never shown up. “I am thinking that Andrew is somewhere drunk, and I am scared that he has either been arrested for a DUI or that he’s had a bad accident,” she told me. “I am kind of slowly losing my shit.”

After a round of frantic phone calls, she discovered that he’d never checked out of his hotel room or picked up the rental car. She assumed he’d taken a nap and passed out for the night,

and her worry turned to anger. She sent a scathing text, took a Tylenol PM, and went to sleep.

She awoke the next morning to find Andrew, who’d gotten to the Airbnb a few hours earlier, pacing the front yard on the phone. “He’s like, ‘I need to tell you something.’ ” R. Jai recalled.

“I am so confused because it just sounds like something out of a Lifetime movie. Police, O.D.?

It just doesn’t make any sense.” They talked on the ride to the airport to pick up the rental car Andrew had abandoned. As they pulled in, Owens’s tweet posted.

For the next hour or so, the Gillums sat in a parking lot calling their families. He wanted to get back to Tallahassee. She insisted they not abandon the wedding. “My life has come to a screeching halt, but one of our very best friends says they’re not going to get married unless I marry them,” Andrew recalled.

Within hours, as conservative commentators frolicked in his embarrassment, a number of Democrats, Black public o∞cials, and former colleagues were encasing Andrew in private support. His former CNN colleague Van Jones reached out before they’d even left Miami and connected them with life coach Iyanla Vanzant. Tyler Perry volunteered as a prayer partner and set them up with legendary crisis fixer Judy Smith, the inspiration for Scandal’s Olivia Pope. “As you know, I’ve been there,” Andrew says Bill Clinton told him during a phone check-in. “I know what it means to feel at your lowest and make decisions at your lowest that you don’t recognize yourself in.” Andrew’s wife, however, was less soothing. “If you want a fighting chance at your family,” R. Jai insisted, “you’ve got to get help.”

As Andrew went o≠ to rehab, R. Jai took a leave from work to sort out homeschooling and consider her options. After thinking through the events of the past year, she decided she was done. She began wondering how to make a divorce most amicable for the children and rented an Airbnb apartment, unsure who would be moving into it once he returned from treatment.

“Neither one of us ended up going, because as soon as he came back, I just realized… I don’t want to scare my kids,” she said. “Their dad has been gone for 40-something days, and I can’t just leave. And then it just became ‘We can be civil and be friends and figure this out.’ And then it became a ‘For now, I want to fight for my marriage and so does he, so let’s just do that.’ ” The Gillums said they began having a series of di∞cult conversations—he answered any and all questions she had about Miami; she confided that she’d started moving money into a separate account to prepare for a divorce.

“He goes to therapy on his own, I go to therapy on my own, and we’ve had group therapy, couples counseling. And it is, I think for us, deep and intimate conversations that probably would have once been extremely painful and hard to do,” R. Jai said. “We bought these relationship cards where we just ask each other questions, and it’s been kind of cool to talk in a way that I think is just di≠erent.”

civilians now with civilian problems: which parent is picking up which kid from school, what to do about the stove that went out just days before THE GILLUMS ARE

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Thanksgiving, whether the local CVS still had Black Santas for sale.

But in recent months, Andrew has begun to inch back into public life. He launched a podcast that features a regular segment by R. Jai and co-anchored election night coverage for BET Digital. For the first time in adulthood, he’s not holding or flirting with public o∞ce, or confined to a government salary. But he bristled when asked if he’s considering a return to electoral politics. “No, and that’s not to say not ever.… It doesn’t tug at me in that way.”

It’s an open question whether, after the four years of moral shamelessness that was the Trump administration, the electorate still cares about the infidelities of its politicians. There’s certainly no lack of public figures who’ve been in a room with drugs or frequented sex workers. But no matter how far we’ve come from the America of Andrew’s boyhood, it remains to be seen if we’re capable of extending as much

collective forgiveness to a bisexual lawmaker as to a straight one. And whether, in order to earn such forgiveness, Andrew would need to resolve the factual disputes about what actually happened in that hotel room that night.

“Andrew and I would probably be the first test cases,” former congresswoman Katie Hill told me. One of America’s few out bisexual politicians, Hill resigned from o∞ce in October 2019 after photos of her naked and combing the hair of a female campaign sta≠er with whom she was romantically involved were leaked.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that in recent months, Hill and Gillum have struck up a friendship: two rising Democratic stars cut down by images depicting them in ill-advised and vulnerable moments. A younger, more sexually understanding generation of voters, Hill hopes, may eventually enable her or Andrew to again seek public o∞ce: “I like to think that it’s possible.”

Andrew isn’t talking about that yet, but he did perk up toward the end of our interview when I suggested perhaps R. Jai would consider entering politics.

“Oh, God no!” she blurted out. “Being married to Andrew and meeting some of the awesome elected o∞cials that I’ve had to meet, I think I’ve seen the beautiful parts of people who are political public servants—the public policy side, the people who have the true heart for it—but I’ve also had the misfortune of seeing the ugly side of politics. I just don’t have the skin for it.”

“I think she’s not giving herself enough credit,” Andrew interjected. “It’s for special people,” she fired back. “You are special,” he replied with a smile.

wesley lowery is a Pulitzer Prize– winning journalist who covers race and justice.

C I AR A A ND RUS S EL L W I L S O N “And I will also say,” Ciara says, “from day one we’ve been living life for us. Russ—I mean, he did talk about, you know, how he feels and this passion from a father’s perspective, but what’s always been beautiful about Russ is just to see him from day one, excitingly jumping in and changing diapers.”

She says, “He’s obviously really beautiful to me in every way, but the father in him is by far one of the things that makes him the most sexy to me. Hot. To me it’s hot.”

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anonymity. When the two of them married, a little over a year later, Wilson instantly became one of the more famous stepfathers in the country.

“When I got to meet Future, he was young,” Wilson says of his then nine-month-old stepson. “And the reality was that for me it was a blessing and an opportunity to really hopefully be there for him every day and try to care for him in a way that was important for me, that I always wanted someone to do for me. Like my dad did for me. And so I think the greatest thing that I’ve ever learned in life is probably in that relationship with Future, because the reality of being a stepparent is that biologically they’re not necessarily yours, but the reality is that you have to love them as if they are. They’re your own blood in a way. You get to love them that way. And I think every kid deserves that and needs that and yearns for that.”

At the time, the elder Future made no secret of his displeasure at the arrangement. It was an early test of a couple who seemed to aspire to perfection, and they responded, basically, by ignoring it. Did Future’s public toxicity make things hard for them?

“I don’t think anybody made it hard,” Wilson says. “I think it was easy for us. I think it was about us. It wasn’t about anything else.

It was about how we were going to love, and for me it was easy. It was easy to love. It’s easy to love C—every day I get to love her and take care of her and our kids is the greatest gift I have. So I cherish that every day.”

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I N T H E S E C O N D full week of January, the Seahawks lose unexpectedly to the Los Angeles Rams in the first round of the NFL playo≠s, and a couple of days later Wilson and I speak again. On the computer screen he looks a little bleary, a little vulnerable: big muscles, weary sadness. “It’s unfortunate,”

“The father in him is by far one of the things that makes him the most sexy to me. Hot. To me it’s hot.” — ciara he says, rubbing the top of his head. “We had a great year, did a lot of good things, broke some cool records and stu≠ like that, but the whole point of doing it all is to win it all, so, you know—if you’re second, you’re last.”

What do you do, I wonder, when a life built around perfection and winning doesn’t yield perfection, doesn’t yield a win? “You have to be able to accept the challenges and the tough times, too, because it really catapults you to the best version of you,” Wilson says. “And I really, fundamentally believe that. I think that any great artist, or painter, or inventor, or leader, or creator, or anybody, it’s not usually the first attempt.”

Ciara says she once got a piece of advice from Wilson that has aided her ever since. It’s scripture—James 1: 2–4. “And it says, Consider

it pure joy when you face trials and tribulations, for the testing of your faith produces perseverance.” She repeats the first part, as if to underline it: “Consider it pure joy when you face trials and tribulations. He told me that when I was in a really, really tough space. It was a tough time I was going through. And when he said that to me”—she repeats it one more time: Consider it pure joy when you face trials and tribulations of many kinds, for the testing of your faith produces perseverance—“to consider it pure joy in your lowest or your toughest moment, I just thought about that. For me a switch went o≠: What I’m going through is for a reason. Consider it pure joy.

And I’ve been there before, where I’ve had to tap into faith. When I’m crying out and not knowing fully what the light looks like at the end of the tunnel, but believing in the light at the end of the tunnel. And it allowed me to smile after I cry. The trials that we face in life are really what build our integrity. It’s really what shapes us: Consider it pure joy. Because there’s got to be something great on the other side of this.”

You or I may search for answers, especially in this hard year that is now bleeding into a second hard year. We may wonder how to take care of ourselves, let alone others. But Wilson and Ciara have been waking up with a certainty all this time, and acting on that certainty each day. “The one thing that we did know, me and Ciara,” Wilson says, “the one thing that’s going to always get us through— not just us, but the world—at the center of all of that is love. And so for us, that’s all we focused on: love at the center of it all in our mindset. It was really, like, okay, with giving back: love at the center of it all. With our family: love at the center of it all. With society and the social injustices, and all of the things going on: Man, love is at the center of it all.”

It’s been a whole year—years, really—of thinking about that word: love. “Every day that I wake up, that’s always my priority,” Wilson says. “To show up and be there and to love.”

zach baron is gq’s senior sta≠ writer.

N AOM I OSA K A AN D C O RDAE He’s the bridge between someone like me and Kai, who described his music as powerful.

And the kid was right.

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Cordae, have you ever written lyrics about Naomi that don’t have her name in it?

CORDAE: “Thanksgiving.”

And what’s the lyric?

I’m not going to go into detail, but the song is basically about bringing a woman home for Thanksgiving for the first time.

CORDAE:

Who’s the more competitive person between the two of you?

NAOMI: Do you want to answer that, sweetie?

C O R DA E : I don’t know. But she’s a killer, though. I’ll just say that.

to tell me about Cordae, who went by YBN Cordae at the time, was my little cousin Kai. Which, if I’m being honest, didn’t make me, a 32-year-old, immediately run and listen to him.

It’s not that Kai doesn’t have good taste. For a 17-year-old, he has great taste. But I didn’t listen to him, because the current state of rap is manic. Rappers can amass huge followings nowadays with barely any music out and then THE FIRST PERSON

“I was always reading Harry Potter books. And my mom was like, If you can read a 500-page Harry Potter book, then you can read about your people.”

— cordae disappear. It’s harder than ever to know who has actual buzz and traction. Even harder to know who’s here to stay.

But Cordae is di≠erent from most other artists of his generation. The common move for a lot of young rappers is to pretend that they’re oblivious to history and the artists that have come before them, but Cordae is a proud student. Jay-Z and Nas are two of his favorite rappers. He’ll quote James Baldwin and W.E.B. Du Bois. He’s crafty with how he constructs his lyrics. Not too tricky, but there’s real care.

Yet the most impressive trick that Cordae pulls o≠ with his music is that it’s still fun.

It doesn’t have any of the backpack-rap mustiness or feel academic and prescriptive. That’s partly because he’s really good.

Ordained. But also partly because he’s actually having more fun than everyone else.

When you hear someone describe your music as powerful, does it make you feel like there’s a burden to make it that way?

C ORDAE: I don’t think I feel a burden to make powerful music. But at the same time, as artists we are the gatekeepers of time. We are the modern-day griots, 1 million percent.

And we do have some sort of responsibility to speak on the times and things that are going on. And it is a responsibility to speak on the things that are a≠ecting you in the community, because that’s what we have: a voice.

That’s actually the origin of hip-hop.

Who taught you about the elevated things in your music? Things like griots and whatnot.

My mom. I was always reading Harry Potter books. And my mom was like, If you can read a 500-page Harry Potter book, then you can read about your people. So I was 10 years old, no bullshit, reading The Souls of Black Folk, reading Thurgood Marshall’s biography, reading about Johnnie Cochran. You know what I’m saying? Fucking A. Philip Randolph.

Huey P. Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide. I’ve been rereading that as of late.

Who was your favorite rapper growing up?

Nas, Kanye West. In my early youth, for sure, Nas, Kanye West, Jay-Z. What is the most embarrassing moment you’ve ever had?

Damn. In life?

In life.

Okay! I was five years old. I performed at the talent show with my cousin Kari. And we performed Nas’s “I Can.” And my cousin started fucking up, and I literally fought him in front of everybody. Age five. My mom can attest to this story. I mean, she was so embarrassed.

I don’t think that was embarrassing for me, though.

Did you win the fight?

I don’t think so. I think my cousin whooped my ass.

Oh. Well then maybe that was the embarrassing part.

[Laughs.]

Why did your group, YBN, break up?

Jay and Nahmir are my brothers in real life.

I love them n-ggas to death. Sometimes you have di≠erent visions for what you want to do and you grow apart. But it’s never any love lost. Before I separated, I had a conversation and I asked for Nahmir’s blessing and he gave it to me. I asked for his blessing. Our legacies are forever going to be attached. Because of how we came up and so on.

How was your vision different from theirs?

What we want to get out of this music thing.

My ultimate goal is to make the Rock & Roll and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. And I hope there’s a Hip-Hop Hall of Fame. There needs to be, right? That’s my ultimate goal.

Whenever I create any song, I’m thinking about my catalog. I refuse to drop an album that I can’t stand behind. I will die behind this motherfucking album that I put out. Because I’m looking at my catalog.

You rap about your mom being a single mom. Where is your dad?

We lived in di≠erent states, and he was in and out of prison. But my dad is a good man.

I don’t want to put out any resentment toward him. I did at a young age. But as I grow older, I’m starting to understand him more.

What does he think of your success?

He proud as hell. He’ll be like, “What the fuck, n-gga! This shit crazy.”

What’s it like when you do a show back home?

My family’s just unapologetically braggadocious as fuck when I come into town. Ghetto as hell. And I wouldn’t change a thing about it. I love it.

What do you spend your money on?

I don’t. I really don’t spend money, bro. I live well below my means. I don’t own any jewelry. I’m always looking for what’s next, you know? Keep tunnel vision to keep pushing, but my gratitude is the highest. I’m blessed as fuck. I think everybody’s realized throughout this year that we’ve been paying more attention to the blessings. The fact I have a family, a mom that loves me to death. One of my biggest blessings is I do what I love for a living full time. My lifestyle’s hella regular.

I do like spending money on conveniences, if that makes sense.

Like what?

Every time I come home, I sleep on the couch at my mom’s house. And I still got to do my chores around the house. Mow the lawn, et cetera. I’m the man of the house.

Still to this day?

For sure. I’ve been the man of the house since I was four years old. I’ve never said this before, but my nickname growing up was Man. Real shit. Because it was me, my grandma, my aunt, and my mom all in a house. And so my nickname was Man since I was a little-ass boy.

And I say all that to say I came back home and my mom was just like, “Whatever, whatever,” and wanted me to clean the house. And I was cleaning it, and then I just hired a maid.

[Laughs.]

P O S S I B LY N O T H I N G Q U I T E sums up Naomi and Cordae’s relationship like their Christmas Instagram post. It’s a photo of the two of them sitting on a private plane wearing matching lumberjack pajama pants and Santa hats. Naomi’s face, smittened.

Cordae has a look on his face that says Fortune 500 CEO.

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Naomi’s caption: Merii Kurisumasu . Cordae’s comment below it: Happy Kwanzaa .

The post is a chef ’s kiss. A perfect encapsulation of everything that makes them special: a global power couple keeping it casual and not taking things too seriously.

Cordae, how did you know Naomi was your match?

CORDAE: I can’t really be with someone who doesn’t have any substance or doesn’t act or think on the same frequency and wavelength as I do. Like, you know, Naomi was born in Japan. So she has a very worldly perspective. My perspective has always been being a young Black man in America.

“We both move around so much that I’m not sure when we would have had a couple of months just to enjoy each other’s time and get to know each other better.” —naomi osaka But she thinks more worldly. I’ve only been traveling the world the last two years. We’d be recommending each other books and movies all the time. So, you know, just always feeding the brain.

How do you guys get through arguments?

CORDAE: Naomi?

NAOMI: Oh, my God. Okay, to be honest, he’s a very rational person. So it’s not like we have crazy arguments. We’re both very opinionated and hardheaded. I would say I’m more hardheaded than him. But from my side, I can’t really stay mad at him for too long, so I start giggling a lot. I would say he sort of takes the initiative. Unless I know that I’m really wrong. Then I’ll apologize.

Let’s say you don’t have anything to do on a Saturday. What would you do?

NAOMI: Just enjoy each other’s company. I’m very grateful for the time that we’ve spent during quarantine. Because we both move around so much, I’m not sure when we would have had a couple of months just to enjoy each other’s time and get to know each other better. So I would say I think we would just stay in the house and watch movies or something.

Quarantining has its benefits!

NAOMI: I definitely learned a lot from Cordae during quarantine. Whether it was good or bad things…I don’t know.… [Laughs and blushes.]

CORDAE: None of it was bad.

NAOMI: What? What?! Hey, sir! I was trying to finish speaking.

CORDAE: My bad. [Laughs.]

NAOMI: Yeah, whether it was good or bad…

I won’t specify.

mark anthony green is gq’s special projects editor.

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blame them, because it was the year that it was and the time that it was in our society. The irony is the early [league] taglines were ‘This is who I am.’ And yet I don’t think for anybody it was actually who we were.”

Bird realized she was gay while at UConn and first came out to someone—Taurasi—in the mid-2000s. She came out publicly in 2017 and says that even though the only people who seemed surprised were “a lot of dudes on Twitter,” she found relief in finally asserting her identity in such a clear, straightforward way.

“When you do come out publicly and it’s just known, [people] know exactly who you are on the first hello,” she says. “There’s something very liberating about that. You can just be.”

Those closest to her have noticed this release as well. “The minute she got with Megan, it was like, ‘Where’s the [pride] flag? I’m going to wave this thing up and down New York City!’”

Taurasi says, laughing.

That newfound comfort was also visible in Bird’s personal style. After Antigua, she and Rapinoe moved back to Seattle, where they set about combining their expansive closets. Rapinoe still gives Bird a hard time about a “MADE! WELL! BLOUSE!” she came across in the process.

“In an attempt to be feminine, I was in all these clothes that would be considered ‘feminine’ clothing, but it didn’t work for me,” Bird

“This summer…we were on TV a lot. Oh, what do you know? Viewership was up.”

—sue bird says. These days she’s more likely to wear gold jewelry and Dior Jordans than anything with spaghetti straps. Helped along by Rapinoe, who calls Bird “my ultimate guinea pig” when it comes to trying out looks, she has become a tomboy-chic fashion icon.

Learning to actively choose and curate her style, Bird says, “blew the doors open for me.”

It was a life-changing revelation: Her style could help accentuate her identity instead of suppress it. “Now I choose comfort and what feels right over what I think I’m ‘supposed’ to wear, and this whole other confidence comes out.”

played with gender conventions, pairing menswear-inspired clothing with more femme makeup and jewelry. Her style is fearless and in line with her public image, outspoken from the tips of her lilac RAPINOE HAS LONG

pixie haircut to her beloved Celine loafers. All of that exuberance, she explains, is strategic.

“I feel really proud that we’ve infiltrated GQ and LeagueFits, Upscale[Hype], whatever it may be,” Rapinoe says. “While they seem kind of superficial because it’s just social media, it actually has an impact in the market. It a≠ects how cool people think you are.

And if people think you’re cool, then they think that what you’re doing, your sport, is more legitimate. And then that a≠ects how sponsors see you. So that’s part of it too, for women, because we don’t get paid what the men get.”

Both Bird and Rapinoe have had to spend a significant chunk of their careers making the case that they should be compensated fairly for their work. For a while Bird, like most WNBA players, earned the bulk of her income playing overseas—spending her o≠-seasons in Russia to make the kind of money she deserved, potentially up to 10 times her WNBA salary. She became more active in the WNBPA during negotiations for the historic 2020 Collective Bargaining Agreement, which won players higher salaries, improved travel conditions, and paid

“I’m fucking sick of convincing people I’m great at my job. Fucking clearly I’m great at my job!”

—megan rapinoe maternity leave, among other things. (In 2019, Bird documented her own egg-freezing journey in a video series; the procedure is now covered under the new CBA, which will help transform the arc of WNBA players’ careers, in terms of when and how they can choose to plan pregnancies.)

Rapinoe and four of her USWNT teammates, meanwhile, filed a wage-discrimination complaint in 2016 against the U.S. Soccer Federation. She lays out the maddening figures in her book: On average, Rapinoe writes, “a top-tier women’s national team player would earn 38 percent of the compensation of her equivalent of the men’s teams.”

The 2016 complaint paved the way for a 2019 gender-discrimination lawsuit filed by 28 members of the team. In December of last year, players and the USSF agreed to a settlement on working conditions; the team continues to fight its equal-pay claims.

These are di≠erent battles, but Bird and Rapinoe share the project of convincing people in positions of authority that what they do has value. Evidence comes easy: “This summer, there weren’t a lot of sports, so we were on TV a lot,” Bird says. “Oh, what do you know? Viewership was up.”

But viewership can increase only if corporate higher-ups give it the chance to, Rapinoe says. “There was such a lack of belief in the potential for women’s sports to even be popular,” she says. Her celebrity is a testament to that potential, but the work is unending.

“I’m fucking sick of convincing people that I’m great at my job,” Rapinoe says. “Fucking clearly I’m great at my job! We did everything

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on the field. We pretty much did everything o≠ the field. We’re good role models, you know? We are profitable. For them to consistently dig their heels in on an issue [where] it’s very clear where the world is going is a colossal waste of time.”

Every person I interviewed for this story is an LGBTQ+ professional (or formerly pro) woman athlete. All seemed to over-explain their work—Bird taking pains to describe why she and her fellow WNBA stars had to play in Russia, Harris and Krieger making

“I hope all the kids that come behind me are way richer than I am.”

—megan rapinoe sure I understood they’d spent many years playing with Rapinoe, even King laying out how she and the Original 9 of women’s tennis fought for better prize money in the ’70s. The tendency probably comes along with being a conscientious, media-trained athlete and public-facing woman, but I also wondered if the instinct was learned: from having to make the case for yourself constantly, from being forced to convince the skeptical that what you do has merit.

Gradually, these athletes’ work is making a di≠erence. King remembers begging newspaper editors to send interns to cover her tournaments in the ’70s. The 2019 World Cup final was the most watched in tournament history, and in 2020 average WNBA viewership grew by 68 percent. In January, every major outlet covered the players’ Warnock campaign. The more that the work is made visible, the less it will be taken for granted.

When she first joined the league, Bird says, “I never challenged. I never pushed the limits in that way. Younger generations are now doing that. That is a part of our legacies, to get

to this point where the younger generations are expecting these things. I can only imagine the next 20 years—[they’re] going to get even more pushy.”

She pauses. “Or maybe in 20 years they won’t have to be pushy, because it’s a given.”

W H E N W E C H AT again, in early January, Rapinoe is feeling properly rested for the first time in forever. She’s been glad for the long stretch o≠. If the Tokyo Olympics happen this summer, they could be her last with the national team, and while she’s aiming to play in the 2023 World Cup, she is starting to think about life after sports. “I want to play as long as possible,” Rapinoe says. “When you’re in it, it can be like Groundhog Day. But once you’re done, you’re done. I don’t want to cut it short.”

Bird is also contemplating the end of her run. “It’s not necessarily the competitive part that I’m going to miss,” she says the next day when Rapinoe has stepped away for a workout. “It’s the purpose part.” She remembers reading that NBA star Dwyane Wade planned to enter into therapy when he retired and says she’ll consider doing the same. “They say athletes die two deaths: when they retire and then when they actually die. That’s a huge void.” For the past five years or so, she’s begun preparing, purposely digging into the business side of basketball—she’s gotten more involved with the players’ union, done color commentary for ESPN, and even worked in the front o∞ce of the Denver Nuggets. (She’s now interested in team investment and ownership, particularly with the women-owned Storm and the possible resurrection of the NBA’s SuperSonics.)

Both will make sharing women’s stories a part of their future. Rapinoe hosted a roundtable special on HBO last summer.

Bird is working on ways to elevate women’s voices—“so,” she says, “they don’t have to

fucking go out there and explain it all the time.” Rapinoe is also interested in mentoring.

“I would love to help female athletes with their brands,” she says, “to have them understand that there is a business around you, whether you’re profiting o≠ it or not.” She grins. “I hope that all the kids that come behind me are way richer than I am.”

When it is safe to do so, they’ll plan and host their dream wedding, somewhere warm.

Maybe, when they’re retired and married, they’ll think about having kids. (“Right now we couldn’t even have a goldfish,” Bird says.)

“We would love to have the type of life where we can just, on a whim, go on a vacation or do some of the things that sports inhibited us from doing,” Bird says, “whether it’s…” She pauses, trying to imagine that kind of freedom. “I don’t know. Who knows? Maybe it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s your mom’s birthday. Let’s go see your mom on her birthday.’ ” “I’m excited,” Rapinoe says. “Because there’s like”—she mimes separate boxes with her hands—“Megan, and Sue. And then there’s Megan and Sue. And I think that there’s so much to be done in all of those three buckets.”

It can be hard to appreciate progress as it’s happening, but the life King and other athletes of her generation couldn’t imagine for themselves is the one Bird and Rapinoe are living now. They’ve already set a bold new standard for athletes by unapologetically asking for (and getting) what they want and deserve at the bargaining table. But they’ll leave an equally powerful mark by merely existing together—by being gay and joyfully in love in public.

That freedom, Rapinoe says, is their legacy.

“I hope people see it doesn’t have to be this slog where you’re just a selfless servant. You can have fun, you can be successful. You can do it your own way.”

emma carmichael is a writer living in Los Angeles.

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FINAL SHOT

For our cover story on super-couple Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird, see page 50.

On RAPINOE: Turtleneck, $450,

by Wolford. Pants, $990, by Givenchy.

Vintage boots

by Helmut Lang from David Casavant Archive. Her own watch by Rolex.

Ring, her own.

On BIRD: Swimsuit, $350, by Agent Provocateur.

Ring, her own.

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