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Read These Lips

Read These Lips
Sean Adl-Tabatabai, left, and Sinclair Treadway kiss each other as they are announced officially married during a wedding ceremony in the Council Chamber at Camden Town Hall in London, minutes into Saturday, March 29, 2014.
Sean Adl-Tabatabai, left, and Sinclair Treadway kiss each other as they are announced officially married during a wedding ceremony in the Council Chamber at Camden Town Hall in London, minutes into Saturday, March 29, 2014. Matt Dunham, AP

From out columnist Frank Bruni at The New York Times:

A KISS is nothing. On the sidewalks, in the park, I see one every few minutes, a real kiss, lip to lip. It barely registers. It’s as unremarkable as a car horn in traffic, as an umbrella in rain.

And yet a kiss is everything. A kiss can stop the world.

The football player Michael Sam recently demonstrated as much.

[…]

I still sometimes feel panic when my partner, meeting me in a restaurant, gives me a perfunctory kiss on the lips. And yet I feel robbed — wronged — if I sense that an awareness of other people’s gazes and a fear of their judgment are preventing him from doing that.

We shouldn’t be bound that way, and on the day of the pro football draft, in front of the cameras, Sam rightly declared that he wasn’t. He did so with a gesture at once humdrum and heroic, a gesture that connects everyone who has been in love and affirms what every love shares: physical tenderness, eye-to-eye togetherness. It was something to behold. It was something to hold on to.

Read the full essay here.

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