‘After we kissed, I told him I was engaged to a woman and getting married in two weeks’
The closeted strangers
Steve Atkinson (left) and Ted Kincaid, Dallas (pictured top)
Ted and Steve were sitting at traffic lights, waiting to turn in opposite directions, when they first locked eyes. It was June 1987 and both men had driven to Cedar Springs strip in Dallas that night, but neither had summoned the nerve to walk into its gay bars, instead driving away and pulling up at a crossroads to turn home.
“I looked to my right, Steve was in his car and we caught eyes. It was electric,” says Ted, 58.
Steve, 61, remembers: “I had a strong feeling that I had to meet this person. I thought he was gorgeous.”
Steve changed route and followed Ted for three blocks until both pulled over: “We got out and sat on the sidewalk in a restaurant parking lot. Neither of us had done anything like that before. He said: ‘Hi, my name’s Ted.’ I panicked and said: ‘Hey, my name’s Jason.” They shared a jumbo Coke, spoke about themselves and exchanged numbers: “Whatever you do on a first date … but we never admitted it was a date,” says Steve.
Both men were in their 20s and had been raised in conservative Christian households in Texas. “Being an openly gay man was not in either of our consciousnesses,” says Steve. “I wasn’t out to myself or anyone. I didn’t even have the vocabulary to say, ‘I’m gay but I’m going to suppress it.’ I’d never driven to the strip before that night.”
Ted knew from boyhood whom he was attracted to, but being gay felt like “something I had to deal with alone”.
They spoke by phone a couple of times after their “non-date” until Ted asked Steve not to call again. He spent the entirety of his next year – at college – thinking about him. The following summer, before leaving for university, in Kentucky, he called Steve.
They spent three nights together, talking in the same bar until 2am then driving around the city. “On the second night, I pulled into a parking lot and we kissed. I’d never had that feeling,” remembers Ted. For Steve: “It was the first and only time I had fallen in love.” At the end of the third evening, Steve made a confession: “I was engaged to a woman. I told him I was getting married in two weeks.”
Ted says: “I was crushed. I went home, packed and left for Kentucky.”
Steve went through with his wedding but, on the first day of the honeymoon, he called Ted: “In the same way I will never forget how I felt when I saw Ted in his car, I will never forget how I felt as my wife and I were driven away from our wedding in a limousine. I thought, ‘Fuck, I will never stay married. I love Ted.’ I told him, ‘I’ve made a mistake.’”
Steve and his wife separated after six months and he came out to his family. “They were wonderful,” he says. His Baptist friends dumped him.
Ted and Steve spent New Year 1990 together in Dallas, and made a commitment to be a couple. That’s still the anniversary they celebrate, but Ted says: “We didn’t know how we’d make it work.” He came out to friends, then his parents, who refused to recognise the relationship and spent 18 years in limited contact.
The couple set up home; Ted started his career as an artist and Steve rose in prominence as a gay rights activist. Once gay marriage became legal in British Columbia, Canada, in 2003, they married in some friends’ back yard, then again, in San Francisco, in 2008. When Ted’s parents grew old, it was Steve and Ted who took care of them, despite their rejection.
“From the first conversation, I thought Ted was charming,” Steve says. “His smile, the way he thought and talked, I fell for it all.
“Sometimes I almost pinch myself about our relationship. There were constant roadblocks yet we’ve outlasted other couples in our lives and have nieces, nephews and godchildren who look up to us as relationship role models. Neither of us had ever dreamed that the life we have would be possible.”
“I felt complete when I met him,” Ted says. “Ours wasn’t a gradual falling in love, it was falling off a cliff. Over the years, it’s grown deeper and just gets better.”
‘I was Catholic. My family said: “You’re better off sticking to your own”’
The couple divided by religion
Kathleen and Graham Gilman, Greater Manchester
Graham Gilman was 14 when he first saw Kathleen, a year younger and dressed in the local convent school’s brown uniform, on the bus, in Manchester, in 1951. “I quite fancy her,” he thought to himself and made a quiet pledge to talk to her next time he saw her, which happened not long afterwards, at a nearby cinema. Kathleen, now 86, the daughter of an Irishman who arrived from County Mayo in 1919, was a cinema buff. “I went as often as possible,” she says. “Graham had this chiselled jawline that made him look like a young James Dean.”
“She was the double of Elizabeth Taylor,” says Graham, 87. They agreed to meet at a ballroom dance class although it became quickly apparent that they were from backgrounds that were polar opposites.
“I was Catholic,” says Kathleen. “My dad was a staunch Labour voter, Daily Herald reader and Manchester City supporter.” Football matters in Manchester. “We went to mass on Sundays and holy days and I thought most of the Church of England lot were heathens.” As for Graham: “I was from a Conservative background and was a Manchester United fan. My father was a keen churchgoer and I went to Sunday school. There was a strong anti-Catholic feeling where I grew up.”
Kathleen remembers being afraid of derision when she told Graham about her upbringing: “You didn’t tell people you were Irish or Catholic.” She was equally apprehensive of telling her parents about him: “My family was stricter than Graham’s. They weren’t horrible to him, but were very cautious. They told me: ‘You’re better off sticking to your own.’” But as the years went on, the teenagers couldn’t be dissuaded. When Kathleen was 18, Graham proposed.
“I was nervous to tell my parents,” Kathleen says. “No one thought these ‘mixed’ marriages could work. Divorce was off the cards and everyone in the family had their little bit to say. Nobody thought it was a good idea.”
Except for the couple, says Graham: “I’d made up my mind. I had to fight off a lot of fellas for Kathleen. There wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance anyone would persuade us otherwise.”
Graham served in the RAF for his national service and returned to his future mother-in-law’s house for dinner on Saturdays. “As they got to know him, my family saw what I saw. They began to give in. They grew very kind towards him,” says Kathleen.
They married in May 1959, six weeks after Kathleen’s 21st birthday, but the parish demanded a pared-down ceremony because she wasn’t marrying a Catholic. “The Catholic church was fairly cruel. I couldn’t have music, flowers or a nuptial mass,” she says. Graham had to attend a 10-week course to learn about bringing children up in the Catholic faith.
“I could have persuaded him to convert,” says Kathleen, “but I thought it was ridiculous doing that for convenience and not because it was something he wanted.”
In the years that followed, Graham qualified as a solicitor while Kathleen stayed at home with their three children. If people looked at her family differently in church, Kathleen says it never bothered her: “You grow immune to what others say.”
This year, they celebrate 73 years together and 65 married. They have five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren, and Graham still thinks his wife has movie-star good looks: “I still think she’s gorgeous. I wouldn’t change a thing about our life together.”
Kathleen agrees: “We knew we were doing the right thing. I look at Graham and see my very best friend who worked hard to provide me and the family with a lovely life. It’s what my family came to love about him, too.
“We’ve had rows about all sorts over the years, but never about religion. For all the things they said would go wrong, none of them did.”
‘There was another lodger. My first thought was, ‘Gosh, she’s quite tall’
The duo with a height difference
Fiona Cross and Joe Zamirski, Cambridge
At 8in (20cm) shorter than his wife, Joe Zamirski was offered a box to stand on for their wedding photos. “The photographer went on about it all day. He had me stand on the hotel steps, one higher than Fiona, for the pictures and kept joking, ‘Where’s your box?’ I eventually told him to shut up,” says Joe, 55, who is 5ft 7in to Fiona’s 6ft 3in.
That was 25 years ago and it wasn’t only society’s preoccupation with their height difference that threatened to derail their relationship.
They met in 1993, when Joe answered a spare room ad in Cambridge, where he’d been sent for work. “The landlord showed me around and there was another lodger, Fiona, standing on the back step. My first thought was, ‘Gosh, she’s quite tall.’”
Fiona, now 60, doesn’t remember that first encounter. Joe was dispatched elsewhere and didn’t move in but returned six months later to find the cellar room still available. That time, he took it.
“A month after I moved in, Fiona split up with a boyfriend.” Joe says. “She had curly blond hair, and I have memories of coming through the kitchen to get to the bathroom and seeing this mop of hair crying.” He comforted her and they became firm friends. Fiona adds: “We had a couple of hours off work one week and wanted strawberries and cream. He asked if I preferred single or double. I’d never had someone care more about what I wanted than they did before.” She found it attractive. “Every Sunday, Joe did his ironing and spoke to his mother in [her native] Polish. I liked listening. He danced while he ironed, and I liked the way he danced.”
The attraction was mutual. “We had a laugh,” Joe says, “and the longer I knew her, I wanted to look after her.”
They got together in February 1994. “The cellar door squeaked, so the landlord soon caught on when he heard it at night,” says Joe.
Fiona had never dated anyone taller than her although Joe, she says, was one of her shorter boyfriends. “People passing comment on my height bothered me hugely in my teens and early adulthood. They made what I was already aware of 100 times worse.” As a couple, though, people rarely remarked.
Joe says: “The height difference never entered my mind. It was never a negative. It’s not that I had a fetish for tall ladies, either. I just saw this person and found her tall figure elegant.”
In their dating days, they’d walk to the pub. “There was a kerb drop on the way, which put us at face height,” Fiona says. “We’d stop and have a hug. We called it our snogging step.”
In July, after five months together, Fiona became pregnant. “It was a surprise,” says Joe. “We hadn’t discussed kids or marriage. I was living in a cellar and didn’t have much money, but it reinforced that I loved her. I had a bottle full of coins that we converted to £50 and opened a bank account for the baby. Fiona put £50 in, too.”
Their parents met for the first time in the hospital lift, on the way to meet their grandson. The couple had a daughter 22 months later, then married in August 1999. When Fiona gave birth to their third child, a boy, an underlying autoimmune disease sent her body into crisis and put her in hospital for 10 weeks. “Joe would be up in the night feeding the baby and calling the nurses to check I was alive. He’d take the older two to school then sit with me all day. I don’t think there’s a greater expression of love.”
Their sons are 6ft 5in and 6ft 7in; their daughter is 5ft 8in. If they’ve ever cared about their parents’ height difference, they’ve never mentioned it, although it can’t have gone unnoticed. “For our daughter’s graduation, the photographer brought out a step and said, ‘This is for you,’” says Joe, who obliged this time.
“When I played cricket with the boys, I’d hear other teams remark on my son’s fast bowling. They’d double take when I said he was mine.”
Fiona, a tax partner in an accountancy firm, says little about their relationship has been traditional. She has been career-focused while Joe, a configuration analyst, spent more time at home.
“It’s only recently that we’ve become empty nesters,” Fiona says. “Having spent only five months together before I became pregnant, we’re finding our feet as a couple again.”
Their strength, she says, lies in companionship and trust – and he still looks after her. “Every single day he makes me porridge and fruit. Society might not have put us together but how does height influence the love, support and care that two people can bring to one another?”
“I have no idea what others think of our height difference any more,” Joe says. “It would have to be at the forefront of my mind to register whether they stare or even notice.
I’ve spent over half of my life with Fiona and we do everything together. She is my life in every way.”
‘I used to be afraid that he’d meet a younger woman and put me in a home’
The older woman and younger man
Sarah and Adrian Murray-Bradley, London
“We were never afraid of the judgment of others; that never mattered,” says Sarah of the 37 years she has been married to Adrian, who is 22 years her junior.
He was studying astrophysics and looking for lodgings when he walked through the door of her home in Queen’s Park, north-west London, in January 1985, having heard about a room.
“It was 8pm and she was cooking lamb chops,” Adrian says. “I just thought: what a really nice place. She was the architect of that feeling.”
Sarah was 42 and divorced with the younger of her two sons – only three and four years younger than Adrian, who was then 21 – still living at home.
Now 83, she says: “Adrian moved in, and we quickly got on. I liked how competent he was. We talked about all sorts. Six weeks later, he came in from karate grading. That’s when I saw him and thought, ‘Wow, he’s fairly gorgeous.’”
“Sarah was friendly and generous,” Adrian says. “Some weeks later, at a party, she tripped and fell, and I did the gallant thing and picked her up. I really rather enjoyed hugging her.”
They had their first kiss, at the kitchen table, not long afterwards.
For most of 1985, the relationship was off and on, says Adrian, 61. “We were both reeling from the shock of being in love with one another, giving in and backing off.” By 1986, they committed to being together. He says: “We kept it from our parents for some time. I knew they wouldn’t approve. Around six months in, I told them. My father shut up like a clam; my mother sat upright and said, ‘How bohemian.’”
Sarah’s parents thought the match inappropriate, too. She says: “My mother liked him but said, ‘It’s a pity he’s not a lot older.’” Her son had clocked, early on, that there was something between them. “He said, ‘For god’s sake, mum, don’t.’”
When Sarah, a United Nations educator, was offered a job in Kenya that summer, she took it. “I wondered if people were right, and our relationship was totally inappropriate. Maybe moving would finish it and that would be a good thing.”
But Adrian wrote to her every day: “I was 100% committed,” he says. When she returned over new year they discussed the idea of Adrian moving to Africa when a friend said, “Why don’t you get married?” He says: “We’d never discussed it but we looked at each other and said, ‘Why not?’ I knew it was what I wanted.”
They married in June 1987 at the register office. Afterwards, friends played jazz in the garden and Sarah cooked for guests, including their parents.
“All the people who’d been brought up with Edwardian values and were horrified by our relationship at first, switched when it became marriage,” Adrian says.
In almost four decades since, they’ve lived in Nairobi and London. The age gap faded into something they’ve thought of only occasionally. Adrian reflects: “I’ve wistfully wondered about children, at times, but it wasn’t big on my agenda then and Sarah didn’t want to return to baby days. Instead, I very quickly got a grandchild.” They now have four. He became good friends with Sarah’s sons, too.
Sarah had wondered if the decades between them would show more in older age: “I used to be afraid that he’d meet a younger woman and put me in a home.” She needn’t have worried. “I had a hip operation this year and I’ve been in a wheelchair. Adrian has been by my side. We still talk all the time. If I have a question at 2am, I know he’ll have the answer.”
For Adrian, the key to their longevity is simple: “Everybody can fall in love. Some fall out of love and come to a friendship. I’ve just never fallen out of love.”
‘We spent 12th grade talking about marriage. Our friends were focused on college and jobs’
The high school sweethearts
Christ-Lynn and Junior Smith, Florida
“Getting married, at 18, was to blow up your life,” says Junior Smith of the disapproval that he and wife Christ-Lynn faced from their parents when they got engaged straight out of high school. They married one month later, on a beach in Florida: “We were teenagers, doing this on a budget, and beaches are free. There were 25 people there. We had no expectations that our moms would show up.”
The couple met at high school, aged 14. Christ-Lynn, 29, remembers: “I was sitting with Junior’s twin sister when he came over campaigning for me to go on summer camp with them.”
“I thought she was cute,” Junior, 30, says. “I walked over and told her about math and science camp because I needed something that was low stakes and we were nerds.”
When he showed up to camp, she was there and they became friends. The following summer, they returned as boyfriend and girlfriend, but it didn’t last. Christ-Lynn recalls: “Junior told me: ‘I love you.’ I said I didn’t know what love was and broke it off.”
Junior describes being “a little bit heartbroken”. It wasn’t until Christ-Lynn saw him with a new girlfriend that she professed her love, now aged 16. “He was smart, sweet, funny. He had the characteristics of the good men in my life. I thought someone else might get him and I’d hate for him to not know how I felt.”
They rekindled their romance. “We spent 12th grade talking about marriage while our friends were focused on college and jobs. We never told anyone,” Junior says.
Their Caribbean families – Christ-Lynn is of Haitian descent and Junior, Jamaican – were equally focused on careers for their children. When Junior proposed, in 2012, the summer after high school, it derailed her parents’ plans, says Christ-Lynn. “Mom wanted me to go to nursing school. We yelled so much when I told her I was getting married she had to stop to take blood-pressure medication. She said she wouldn’t go to the wedding. It severed our relationship.” Her father wished she’d wait but agreed to give her away.
Junior’s mother was against both the wedding and a Haitian daughter-in-law. “She had a religious reaction,” says Junior. “She thought there was Voodoo on us and took me to be cleansed of my demons.” It only pushed him and Christ-Lynn closer together: “It was us against the world.”
Both mothers showed up at the wedding, to watch from afar. Neither spoke to their children, though. Junior says: “I wanted her support, to hug her, but I felt disgust.”
They both went to college and got jobs. They used Junior’s college scholarship money to rent a studio and pay bills. Friends filled their home with supplies as a wedding gift, but Junior remembers: “We had this fairytale, then life started straight away and it was rough.”
Within two years, a break-in, a stolen car and a move to a cockroach-infested flat forced Junior to pick up the phone to his mother. “We couldn’t take it any more. I swallowed my pride and asked if we could move in.”
They all lived together, but true reconciliation took another two years. For Christ-Lynn and her mother it took six years: “At one point our screaming matches turned into a conversation and she said the words: ‘I was wrong.’”
Junior worked as an English teacher and they had daughters – Eden, four, and Eve, two. Christ-Lynn completed her college degree, then a master’s in marriage and family studies. They also started a podcast, Black Marriage Therapy, inspired by their experiences. “Getting married so young, going through everything we have, felt like there had to be a purpose.”
“At 18, I made a choice between Junior and my family,” she says. “I trusted myself and it stuck. That trust and respect for one another has got us through.” Junior agrees: “We’re still using the resilience that we needed from day one to build things together. When the world out there is tough, it always feels easy with her.”
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