If you would like to be included in my ongoing photo series of Wisconsin’s LGBTQ+ elders, please send an email with your age and city of residence to [email protected]. I’m honored to preserve our community’s rich history for the edification of future generations.

I walked through the house, my wife’s hand at the small of my back, and pointed to a yellowed watercolor landscape hanging on the wall. “My great-grandpa painted that,” I said, as we drifted from one bedroom to the next. I was looking for clues; two parallel indentations on an empty bed, matching water glasses on opposing nightstands, a set of gold bands left in a porcelain dish. Anything that might suggest that I was standing inside an everyday love story.

I visited this house as a child, too. Each wall is appointed with art, all hand-selected by my great aunt, who had been a school teacher. Before we came, my dad told me that she was a collector, and I knew from his tone that I should be impressed by this. Her collection was an eclectic mix of local artists and curious antiquities, and to be clear, I was impressed. But more than anything, I was struck with a pang of abject wonder that she shared this home with another woman; a gym teacher that she’d met when they were both college students. Prior to this moment, I had not yet considered that two women could buy a beautiful lake house and fill it with objects gathered across a lifetime together. I would revisit this revelation occasionally in my adolescence, often when I considered what kind of future could be in store for me. 

As a budding Christian fundamentalist, I was quickly learning that the innate truths of my identity would prove incompatible with the future my conservative family imagined for me: marry young (and marry a man), then devote my life to ministry and motherhood. While I did my best to adhere to the rigidity of their expectations, there was a lingering resistance in my heart, and this is where the memory of my great aunt’s idyllic life-partnership lodged itself.

Though their relationship—spanning more than six decades—has only ever been declared platonic, I spent the afternoon of my great aunt’s memorial service hoping to find evidence to the contrary. What I was really looking for, I suppose, was confirmation that I was not the first of my lineage to betray the rules of heteronormativity.

So many older LGBTQ+ people came of age in a world that demanded discretion from them—where love was encoded in gestures, lifelong companionships, and stories told sideways. The summer before my great aunt’s passing, the same impulse that sent me searching her home for hints of a lesbian romance had also prompted me to begin a photography series documenting queer elders from across the state. I wanted to witness them fully and to preserve the texture of their lives before it could be softened by time or omission. I wanted to create irrefutable proof that they had been here, had created vibrant and dynamic worlds for themselves. 

I began my series with Kim and Josie, a Milwaukee couple with 20 years together under their belts. We were joined at their Riverwest home by Kimi, who met Kim at a Michigan gay bar in the mid-80s. Now each in their 60s, they reflected on their respective journeys to the communal queer life they now share. While Kim came out at just 18 and Josie at 28, Kimi’s path to the LGBTQ+ community was more winding. In her late 20s, she joined a church that pushed her to choose between her sexuality and her eternal fate, and for close to two decades she chose the latter. She married a man and built a family with him. “As my kids started to get older, I realized that I couldn’t legitimately tell them that I would always love them no matter what kind of life choices they made, if I didn’t extend that same love and care to myself.” After years of living what she describes as a “half-life,” Kimi made the decision to dissolve her marriage and pursue something that felt liberating and whole. The three friends now spend most days together, walking their dogs, sharing meals, and finishing projects in Josie’s basement workshop.

On a rainy April day, I met Kate along the shore of Lake Mendota. Originally from Nebraska, Kate has planted deep roots in Madison; the city where they met their late partner, Sashe. While attending a workshop, a femme in a shimmering pink beret caught Kate’s eye. The pair would eventually fall in love, a mutual passion for grassroots organizing compelling them to devote their lives to community activism. Together, Kate and Sashe would advocate for disability justice, fat liberation, and the broader needs of LGBTQ+ people all the way until Sashe’s death in 2022. Walking through the mist at Tenney Park, Kate shared stories of their work to save Drumlin Farm, visiting The Land in its early festival days, and the heartbreak of losing their beloved partner. Kate considers the queer community to be their refuge, saying, “We are so amazing when we take care of each other…so beautiful and strong.”

Garth, a retired teacher living in the Fox Cities, has spent recent years exploring state and national parks with his loyal companion, a scruffy white dog named Bear. The two began their travels after the passing of Garth’s husband and have been crossing scenic destinations off their list ever since. Like Kimi, Garth initially settled in a straight coupling, but eventually came out as gay at age 50. “Being gay,” he says, “allows an individual to be empathetic, show humility, and question teachings and beliefs from the world around us.” Walking the shores of Lake Michigan with Garth and Bear, I found myself thinking of beloved poet Mary Oliver, her partner Molly Malone Cook, and the many small scrappy dogs they shared. Both Garth and Mary Oliver became caretakers when their partners fell ill, and in their bereavements, each turned to the natural world not as an escape from grief, but as a place to carry it gently. 

Through Josie and Kim, I was connected with Angela, a lesbian in her 80s who settled in Milwaukee after a life of international travel. Originally from Germany, Angela once worked for an airline, jetsetting through her younger years. In her dining room, she showed me a portrait of her that painted by an artist while she visited Mexico City. Her home was full of treasures like this; a veritable trove of memories overlooking her small garden and an orange tabby purring in the her bed. She posed for me in a wooden rocking chair, a petite bespectacled woman sitting beneath a canvas of Marilyn Monroe clad with a glowing pink neon light. Unassuming as she may be, there was a palpable sense of how unabashedly she had created a life of color for herself.

At the LGBT Center of Milwaukee, Max invited me to his home to photograph him with his husband, Terry. In a deep voice that sounds the way that black coffee tastes, Max told me how he met Terry while working at a local hotel. Terry would visit him in the lobby, where Max supplied him with day-old pastries and conversation. They were married after Obergefell v. Hodges was decided; Max proudly showed me a glossy printed photograph of the two of them at their wedding, noting how beautiful the day had been. Though time has not been gentle with Terry, Max has. He tenderly watches over him, keeping tabs on his medications and appointments, smoothing his graying beard with soft hands, ensuring there’s a steady stream of old westerns to watch from their couch. My time with Max, as well as Garth and Kate, reminded me of how often queer lives are built not around convention, but around the small ecosystems of care we create for one another. 

I found no viable clues at my great aunt’s house that day. No hint of long-rumored lesbian conduct, no rainbow flag tucked away in a drawer. Instead, I left her home hand-in-hand with my wife, snowflakes falling on our cheeks, filled with gratitude that our love will never disappear into implication.