AU's Queer Love Stories

Art done by sophomore Alexis McMenamin

Curated by Lucas Trevor

Below are stories submitted by our own readers (and some of our writers). They are stories of love in the face of repression, discovery in opposition to what is expected, and the randomness of who we are and what we want. Each is deeply personal and important to the author, and we encourage you to read and share them with respect. These are AU’s Queer Love Stories, each as deserving of a movie as the last. Love is love.

The submission drive will be open all week, and we want to share more of your stories.

Hello, it’s your future wife.

She went to a different high school, but we met when her best friend started dating my best friend. I told her I wanted to listen to the new Adele album, she offered to burn me a CD that we could listen to together. Bear in mind, this was 2015 and it was entirely possible for her to send me mp3 files. We drove around the city listening to the album. I almost killed us when I ran a red light because I was looking at her instead of the road. When I dropped her off at home, she kissed me on the cheek and ran away. Four years later and we're planning our lives together.

Moe Shein and Hein Htwe Maung

We met at the boarding school when we were 14, in Myanmar, where homosexuality is still illegal and can be sentenced to 10 years in jail or life sentence. I fell in love with him at first sight and I pursued his love for a year. I got expelled from boarding school when the teachers found out we were dating. I was outed to my family and friends. My boyfriend got bullied by teachers for dating me although he didn't get expelled because he is masculine and I am more effeminate that they accused me of being a predatory gay. We went through so many problems and internal conflicts, like suicidal thoughts and other mental issues, but we made it through. It has been 8 years that we are together. I made a short narrative film, inspired by my experiences, called A Blue-Sky, which will be uploaded on YouTube by the end of the year.

Proud Daughter

This is actually about my mom. My parents (mom&dad) divorced when I was young and my mom came out years later, saying this she always knew but she would have never been able to live her truth in her family at a younger age. Now that she had children, she felt more free to come out and be her true amazing gay self. However, she always told my sister and I to not tell too many people that she was a lesbian because it could negatively impact us. She had also reenlisted into the military and could have been fired due to Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

10 years ago, she met her now wife in a very cliche lesbian way: mutual sports friend. She played soccer, my stepmom played rugby, and there was one woman who played on both teams (haha). My mom had a crush on my stepmom, who I will now refer to as Rugby, and so her friend invited Rugby to my mom's WILD birthday party. Several beers and shots later, my mother escorted the lovely Rugby home and stayed over. In the morning, when my mother tried to hightail it out of Rugby's Brooklyn townhouse, she could not find the door. She also ended up making too much noise because Rugby woke up and started making plans for their day together. Rugby had decided that they were now dating, and they have been (kinda) together ever since!

My mom and Rugby have two beautiful baby boys now and got married last summer. I am obviously happy to be alive, but am happy that my mom is now living as her truest self.

Amelia + T

On a Friday night in DC, we walk to the bar we know doesn’t scan IDs. We light a clove cigarette on the steps of some important looking building, to get out of the wind, and an authoritative megaphone somewhere tells us NO TRESPASSING. We cackle and run away, our cigarette lit, and they fling their arm over my shoulder. (It feels like something that would happen in a movie, and it’s fun to be an awful cliche.)

On a Saturday afternoon, we sit lazily on my couch. Our eyelids droop over red eyes as we laugh at whatever Noah Centineo says to a girl in a dress on the laptop screen. It’s all very funny. We build a tower with empty Coors Light cans while they wear my Coors Light t-shirt. We’re goofy. “Would you still date me if I walked like this?” “No.” Laughter. (We’re late to the concert that night, because we lose track of time laughing).

On a Sunday morning I wake up to sunshine and the breathing of the person I love. I pad quietly into the kitchen of my bittersweet apartment, fill my cup with water from a Brita with a questionable filter, and walk back to the living room to keep looking at them (I always drink more water when I’m with them, and we laugh about fluoride-water conspiracy theories, which I half-believe in). I watch the shifting light shine through the wind-blown curtains, and I run my thumb gently on their arm. Later we’ll eat bagels and fruit in the sun.

Even before we started dating we were always going to be together.

We were best friends, first, and now. We met in a Victorian Literature class, where I thought they must be cool because they had a cool notebook. (I am a pen and notebook enthusiast, ever on a quest for a bound notebook that lays flat on a desk, so spotting one was understandably intriguing for me).

I remember the day we went for a hike, around the time when we first met. We took off our shoes and put our feet in the river, and watched the little scintillating fish crowd around our toes, and the sun refracted off the water, and I felt like I belonged.

Two days before we started dating, I sat with their friends in North Carolina, sprawled out on the back porch. They asked me if I would ever date T. I laughed. "No, no, we’re just friends."

I could laugh now, at how in love we were before we knew it.

Taco Bell Queen

I met my best friend during AU welcome week pulling weeds in a park. We got along because we were from the same area back home and we both thought we were working the hardest pulling the weeds. We both became even greater friends when we both realized each other was queer.  She was my first friend at AU and now we are roommates for our senior year and are very happy and supportive of each other. I love her so much and love that the rival is doing this super cute and wholesome thing my heart is happy.

1BD w/ theirs and theirs closets

Sometimes it takes a little growing up to get it right. Our first date was a product of putting one of those "does anyone want to see the new spiderman movie with me tonight" tweets into the stratosphere. We walked back to our apartments afterwards, mine, the Berks, theirs the Av, (peak summer 2017 vibes, for sure) and talked about who we wanted to be and how we wanted to change the world.

The second time, I called them, high off of powerful queer energy after organizing the coming out monologues and said "I'm not sure why we stopped hanging out after the summer was over... do you want to go out again some time?" We started spending all our time watching Riverdale and worrying about what was next. Then, they went abroad and I stayed here, probably working really hard to pretend that I didn't miss them as much as I did. After an awkward coffee debriefing who we were and all the stuff we didn't say before, our third first date was walking around the monuments and getting milkshakes. We crushed that summer together, from gay baseball to Pride to party after party, we finally figured out how to be adults about this little gay thing called love. Almost a year later, we've grown together in so many ways. I love how they always challenge me to be better and how I have learned so much about loving another person fully from them. I love how smart they are (did you know that they speak French, have over 20 pages of a scholarly work on the relationship between the Western Sahara and Morocco, AND that that wonk gets messy with friends and talks about the ideal form of post-colonial government-- I've watched them do it).

I love that they are kind and always work to be honest and know themself and others fully. I know that no matter what kind of ridiculous stunt I pull, they're going to be right there, by my side, working it into our 10 year plan for world domination. We're moving in together and picking out plates and sheets and other parts of our shared young professional life and it's frankly adorable, you guys could not believe how emotional they got about the image of our cat tearing down our Christmas tree.

All this to say, while our story is still being written, it's the story of two young queers, with a lot of big feelings, trying hard not to fuck it up but also rolling with the punches when we do. I hope you stay tuned for the next episode, and for Riverdale when the latest season FINALLY gets put on Netflix... I know I can't wait for it.