Author Doug Cooper Spencer, 67, almost let the opportunity to fall in love again pass him by. In 1998, sitting in Fountain Square, a busy plaza in downtown Cincinnati, as he continued to work on his first novel, he noticed someone walking by.

“I saw these nice legs walk past, and I glanced at them, like, ‘Oh, he’s got nice legs.’ That's it—because I'm an introvert,” he said.

Doug had dissolved a relationship a year and a half prior and wanted to focus on writing. While glancing up from the legs that caused his temporary distraction, he caught the eye of the person to whom those legs were attached.

“He catches me [looking up] and he stops and I'm like, oh God, here we go. No, I do not want to be bothered,” Doug recalls thinking to himself.

In June, Alphonso Mills, 30, and his fiance Ja’Mel Ware, 33, will become fathers. They shared the news of their expanding family in a short video posted on their respective social media accounts on Feb 22, marking the 22nd week of their baby’s development. While Black queer couples are frequently raising children that are both biological and adoptive, especially in the South, Ware, who identifies as a queer transmasculine man and was assigned female at birth is carrying the couple’s first child. On testosterone for over a decade, Ware says he never imagined that he’d one day have to decide to stop receiving gender-reinforcing hormones in order to conceive, but that was before he met Mills.

Ware proposed in October 2020, during a trip to Walt Disney World after dating Mills for two years. It was a surprise affirmation of their commitment to each other that Mills later reciprocated with a proposal of his own.

“There was just something about our connection that made me realize as long as I could do this, I would do it,” Ware says.