Ever find yourself wondering, “What do Sarah Paulson and Holland Taylor know?” The screen gems have 16 Emmy nominations and a 32-year age gap between them, and are approaching a decade of crowding our vision boards with adorable photos. Not that we have to look as far as Hollywood to find plenty of proud age gap couples sharing their experiences on social media, at times to dispel the assumptions of casual observers.
Intergenerational pairings are not a uniquely queer phenomenon, but LGBTQ+ people have a tendency to form romantic bonds within a broader age range. According to 2021 census data, same-sex spouses are more likely to have larger age gaps, with 5% who were 20 years or more apart, compared to 1% of opposite-sex couples. Straight spouses were also 10% more likely to be within two years of age.
And while there are instances where age-gap pairings can be predatory, especially when there are financial imbalances or one partner is particularly young, research has found that on the whole they tend to be more egalitarian than is often assumed. “Older-younger pairings between adults are an important part of the cultural life of gay and bisexual men’s communities,” says Tony Silva, assistant professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia and co-author of Daddies of a Different Kind: Sex and Romance Between Older and Younger Adult Gay Men, a qualitative research study.
Regardless of whether an intergenerational relationship has elements of mentorship, partners may find in each other a tenor of love and affirmation absent from their families of origin. Many queer couples with significant age gaps would agree that forging connections across generations fosters the sort of cultural inheritance that shapes the queer community. Queer people learn about our history, and to embrace who we are, from the families we choose. And the inheritance goes both ways, with older partners modeling a younger generation’s more radical sense of self-acceptance.
Below, we spoke to queer couples with more than a decade between them, who share what brought them together, how their partners enrich their lives, and why they’ve embraced their difference in age. Here are their stories, in their own words.
Robin Cloud, 49 and Katie Lindsay, 34, Los Angeles
We met at an Ivy League lesbian mixer in New York that both of our friends dragged us to separately. It was my first evening out after a divorce and I was 40 at the time. When Katie came up to me and told me she was 26, I literally walked away. My friends invited her out to dinner with us afterward and she won me over. When we started dating, a lot of my friends were like, “Girl, no, she doesn't have a frontal lobe!” A friend of mine was also dating someone who was very young at the time, and we joked that we were having our “Snow Leopard Summer” [laughs].
I wasn’t sure I was ready for the commitment, but also realized that I couldn’t imagine my life without her. That was 9 years ago. Now, we’ve been married for 5 years and have a son who is 7 months old.
Being the older queer, I was married before and have been in other long-term relationships. I was Katie's first live-in partner and there was a big learning curve from her standpoint of what it's like to live with someone and the level of compromise. She also hadn't brought anybody home that was this level of seriousness, whereas my parents had been down that road with me before. It can be an interesting dynamic, because her parents are young Boomers and feel like contemporaries to me.
A lot of my friends have children who are elementary school age, whereas all of Katie’s best friends have had babies in the last year. But at any other time in my life, I don't think that I would have been prepared to be a parent. I've been able to really, truly live and I don’t feel bad about the sacrifices I have to make now because I've had so much time to myself. It’s challenging when you start running the numbers, and I realize that I might not meet my grandchildren. But certainly it's been done, and I’ll make the most of the time I have.
Our relationship is also very much defined by being interracial. Our cultural differences are more prevalent in our lives and our age gap, which feels like something we joke about but never get stuck on.
If you're gonna date someone younger, you have to ask: do you have the patience to walk with someone who is still figuring themselves out? I've gone through many incarnations in my queer identity, from femme to butch to nonbinary and getting top surgery. Where I am now is where I wish I could have been in my 20s. The younger generation is very keen on being who you are, and that's been modeled to me. Having Katie’s immediate support during my own journey of identification has been incredible.
Sterling Cruz-Herr (they/them), 61, whose late partner Judith was 19 years their senior, Kingston, NY
I met Judith in 1984, when we taught high school across the hall from each other in San Antonio, Texas. She was a force of nature: an activist and a communist who ran absolutely counter to everything a Texan was supposed to be. I was blinded by her and immediately smitten. She was 40 and I was 20. She was openly bisexual, which sort of freaked me out at the time. I hadn’t really known I was interested in women until we met. I remember the principal called me in to warn me that she was a really bad influence.
Judith got me involved with radical political organizing, and we fell in love. We traveled to Central America to protest the wars. I became a Jesse Jackson delegate to the Texas state convention with her guidance — she completely transformed the course of my life. She was a radical feminist and not someone who would be owned, so she was also with someone else at the time.
It might be uncomfortable to admit that in queer relationships with an age gap, there can be an element of affirmation that we didn't receive at home. Judith definitely gave me the kind of unconditional love that my mother wasn't capable of, and it was profoundly healing to be adored like that. Judith connected me to a sense of queer history and changed my life forever in ways that I can never offer enough thanks for. We remained close for 20 years, and our relationship became more like sisters until she later passed away.
My wife Shannon is 13 years younger than me. When we married, I identified as a butch lesbian and transitioned during our marriage. My trans parent is also 18 years younger than me, and my transition was enabled by younger queers who invited me into a sense of possibility. We need younger people, and they’re hungry for connection with queer elders. I bemoan that my peers are not so good at listening to younger people and recognizing the opportunity for reciprocity in connecting with them. We desperately need each other. In the straight community, biology forces generations together, but we have to choose one another — and continue to choose one another again and again.
Marlene Bellissimo, 29, aka Avelo on TikTok; John McDermott, 62, Berlin, Germany
I met my husband John on a dating website when I was 22 and he was 56. I was just finishing up school in Rochester, New York, and would drive five hours into the city almost every weekend to see him, so it was clear we had a strong connection. I’ve always been attracted to men over twice my age, so it wasn’t out of the ordinary for me. When I realized how serious it was between us, I felt insecure and started to think about mortality, but I quickly learned to just embrace the relationship. Anyone can come and go at any time, so it's important to live in the moment and love without being scared of the risks.
I moved back to Berlin to pursue my music career, and John stayed in New York, where he’s a professor and set designer. John has always been very supportive of me having my own adventures. We’re committed to each other in a very strong way, but also acknowledge that we're both at different stages in our lives. When he said he was okay with doing long distance, I proposed to him a week later. We’ve been together for seven years and he’s moving to Berlin this year. Because nothing about our relationship is traditional, we wake up and choose each other every day.
When I originally met John, I was very masculine presenting and involved in the bear community. It felt natural to me to grow a beard as soon as I could, because those were the men I was attracted to. I learned how to be a man from being with older gay men. After a while, I realized that I was reading off a script that wasn't really mine. I came out to John as non binary a few months after we met, and two years later, told him I was thinking of transitioning. I kind of thought that it would be the end of our marriage, but our relationship has grown so much stronger. John has also realized that sexuality is more complicated than he thought it was. He prefers not to label himself, but would say that he’s queer.
I understand why people might have certain knee-jerk responses to queer age-gap relationships, but I think it’s important to interrogate the impulse to conflate something that makes you uncomfortable with something that is morally wrong. Much of the anti-queer hysteria going on right now is essentially doing the same thing. There is a responsibility, especially in the current climate, to acknowledge that grown-ass adults can do what they want.
Susana Walas, 37, Lashun Walas, 53, Atlanta, GA
I met Lashun in a church group that was supposed to help us with impure thoughts. We were both religious at the time, and had been taught that it was a problem being attracted to the same gender. We ended up falling for each other, so needless to say the group did not work [laughs].
Lashun was 45 at the time, and I was 29. She's so youthful in appearance and energy that I was shocked when she told me her age. I was also intrigued and excited, because I had always felt a little bit bored dating people in my age group. She was my first relationship with a woman. Lashun had been with women previously, but I was her first relationship out in the open. We both had to try to make sense of what we felt, and how it aligned with the faith we were raised in.
It was harder for Lashun to adapt in our first few years together, because she had spent a great deal of her life hiding that part of herself. I'm from Jamaica, and while my culture is coming around — we've had our first couple of Prides — it’s definitely still a very touchy subject. But I still had a mentality of saying, “I really don't care what anyone thinks, I'm gonna be me and be free.” We got tired of being mistaken for mother-daughter in public, so we decided to create an apparel line for same-gender couples in a similar position.
I remember when we saw on TV that gay marriage was legalized in the U.S. We looked at each other and said, “That's just too much. We're not going to take it that far.” But we did the lesbian U-Haul thing and wound up getting married about two years after we met. We’re going to Greece in April to renew our vows.
There is a beauty in watching her go through the different stages of life. One subject that’s not talked about enough is menopause, which has been very hard. But I have a unique level of compassion because I know that in 10 years or so, I will be in the same place. There's also a beauty in her sureness versus me trying to figure out the right path. Sometimes I find myself wanting to catch up, but then I have to remember that I need to step back and go through my stages. She’s so settled in who she is and it's almost like a little peek into my future, the level of stability and assurance that I'm gonna have as a woman.
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