“How can you believe in something you’ve never seen?”

It’s a question that plagued a young Jamal Jordan during his formative years in Mobile, Alabama as he acknowledged his same-sex attraction as the thing that made him different from some of the other boys in the Gulf Coast community that he called home. The something that he’d never seen was queer couples of color. It would be decades after a young Jordan’s initial realization of the erasure of Black LGBTQ+ couples in mainstream media that the adult journalist would take control of the narrative in a viral story for The New York Times, and the subsequent book by the same title.

A decade ago lesbian moms Juana Mendenhall, 44, and Angel Mendenhall, 41, were just writing their love story. They’d both ended long-term relationships, and Angel, a flight attendant based in Ft. Lauderdale was living her best life on the beach and getting paid to travel—motherhood and a life in Atlanta with Juana, a scientist and college professor was not on her to-do list. In fact, on their first date, Angel says she wasted no time making one thing clear to the beautiful stranger sitting across from her at a Midtown Thai restaurant: “I hope you know, I will never move to Atlanta because I will never commute again.”