From the Editor: Love stories without illusion

LGBT people run gamut when it comes to views on love. In most ways we’re no different from heterosexual couples, but one thing our community is full of – since ideas about romance are bound up with gender and the gender we are or want is what makes us LGBT – are really diverse ways to be in love.

Many of us are wildly romantic. That’s true especially when we’re young, seeking love we can’t imagine happiness without: half-holding our breath through life to meet (not choose, but find) “the one” – perhaps a stranger we’ll recognize in an instant as our soul mate, swept off our feet, lonely years abruptly lifted like a spring dawn so that every day after – days yet lingering on an imagined horizon we can almost touch – will be poetry.

Many of us approach relationships with strict practicality. We will not live as though we have a role to fill – nor entertain notions of jealousy or exclusivity. We will not lose our own identities in love, we will not compromise our life’s goals, we will not long to be with one person forever and ever with white roses and bells just because that’s what our parents did. If we are ever in a lasting union, it will be a civil, chosen family, of respect and commitment built through good days and bad days over time.

Then, between those extremes, with elements of both, are the majority of us.

As a gender-nonconforming group, we’re not beholden to see our own partners as gender stereotypes – not musing with our buddies about how “women need to be approached this way” or “men see relationships that way.” It may well be that your girlfriend is the noncommittal one wanting a short-term thing, your would-be boyfriend is the one waiting to be courted. We’re not confined to facing our partners across an irreconcilable chasm of differences, thinking – wrongly – that we need a book to explain what motivates our partner’s sex. We see each other in all our humanness, real similarities and differences that have nothing to do with being women or men. We only carry those popular illusions when we want to.

Our cover story tells the true love stories of four local LGBT couples. One relationship emerged during a dramatic custody battle over a partner’s child from a prior relationship, yanked through legal hoops to access rights otherwise denied to same-sex parents. Another is two men who met at a leather bar almost 30 years ago, their bond through the decades tinged, but undiminished, by HIV. Another is between a woman and a well-known DJ who is sometimes “he,” sometimes “she.” These relationships – all with aspects that are unique to LGBT people – share a universally-familiar love.

This issue’s conversations about love cover more than romance. You may be surprised, reading the latest parenting column, how lesbian mother Jasmine Peters sees love for her children – not obligatory the way one would expect a parent’s love to be, but a cultivated, free (though inevitable) affection. With the cynicism many feel towards the sappiness of Valentine’s Day, you may be glad to see the broader take on love in our latest Faith & Spirit feature.

Speaking of love, it’s unavoidable we mention civil unions – not only because it’s Valentine’s Day but civil unions will be law in Colorado soon. When that’s achieved mere weeks or months from now, Colorado’s local corner of the LGBT movement will debate what struggle comes next here, as our Panelists do in this issue. Are civil unions going to be enough? (We know from comments from our readers that most of you think they won’t be). But more specifically, will we feel substantially different with them? What’s more important to us – the practical state-level legal rights and responsibilities civil unions will provide, or is there something more for which we’ll still half-hold our breath – that inevitable next step in our fight, true equality wound up in that evocative, romantic word: marriage?

Are we pragmatic, or romantic? Empirical, or poetic? How about you? Thumb through this issue and I think you’ll see that Out Front is lot of both. We speak both languages, especially when it comes to the historic – though imperfect and incomplete – political victory that is coming soon with civil unions. But one thing I hope you’ll recognize is that we do still see the difference, knowing where one take is just a sliver of the whole. And we only carry illusions when we have to.