Short stories of love from NPR's Pride ERG

This year for Pride Month, we are celebrating with love stories from members of NPR’s Pride employee resource group. You will find an array of stories about their partner, grandma, dog, etc., all just 140 characters or less. Happy Pride Month!

TLDR - We met during dinosaur times on Yahoo Groups, think Reddit of the day. We survived over a decade long distance, lived through “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and I forgave him for kidnapping me to go to not one, but TWO dry weddings. After making it through all that, we had the perfect wedding date…of 10.10.2020, but we still held a pandemic party and got great photos out of it. Didn’t want kids, but now we’re unexpectedly raising 3 siblings. If life taught us anything, it’s that life doesn’t always give you what you want (or don’t want) - let’s hope we’ll always have wine! -Gary Duong

Meeting and making friends in New England is hard. When I moved here eleven years ago for a job, I knew very few people and worried it would stay that way. My roommate, a college friend, invited me to an informal potluck dinner, hosted weekly at a big apartment in Harvard Square. We started going weekly, and soon after, I found myself dating a fellow regular. I’m sure he and I wouldn’t have dated if I hadn’t been forced to see him every Sunday, for good and for bad, but we’ve now been married for 18 months and the entire potluck crew attended our wedding, where my old roommate served as the officiant. A shared meal became a shared life, and I’m grateful for the power of good food and an open table for helping me to find my husband. - Nick Andersen

My grandma came out as lesbian just before I was born. She and I have always been close, like minded even aside from our shared sapphism. We wrote letters back and forth throughout my childhood, talking about books, family, our inner worlds. She was thrilled when I came out to her, excited about my queerness even when I was trepidatious and a little ashamed.

Recently, her memory has begun to fade. She'll tell the same stories over and over, forget where she is, forget how exactly we're related to her. It's hard to watch someone so brilliant and vibrant lose pieces of herself. One silver lining: I get to come out to her again almost every time I see her. And every time I get to see the love and delight on her face at the good news. - Abi Inman

Coming out at 24 gave me a second chance at giggly first love – the kind you get wrapped up in as a teenager. I didn’t know I was on the precipice of it once more when I saw her at a club on Halloween, dressed as a zombified prom king. We were both late-blooming queers. There was a matching earnestness to our relationship, the kind reserved for first girlfriends. We coyly swapped numbers on the dance floor – and, 6 months later, swapped “I love you”s at our first Pride Weekend. The months have passed us by, and we’ve both settled into our queerness. But our love remains the same: earnest, young at heart, first queer love. - Margaret Cirino

Long story short, the dog I've had since college just died and I've been so scattered. That said, more in love with my partner and our current animals than ever. We met because I posted on Lex after a bad date that I was looking for a dog park and snuggle date. She reached out almost exactly a year and a half ago and now we live together in a house with a small zoo and so much snuggling. This is both an apology and our story. - Izzy Rode