Experts and readers reflect on LGBTQ love, sex and marriage

In the early 2000s, Watermark dedicated three issues each year to matters impacting every member of our community – love, sex and marriage. While these three topics had long resonated with readers, they weren’t often examined at length through an LGBTQ lens.

We wanted to change that. Our love issues tackled topics like finding love in the digital age and highlighted couples who already had, all while detailing resources to help others do the same.

After that, our sex issue solicited feedback from readers throughout Central Florida and Tampa Bay. We surveyed you and presented the “titillating poll results” not long after, sharing your fantasies and frustrations from the bedroom and beyond.

For marriage, we highlighted our community’s longtime fight for equality. Years before same-sex marriage became law of the land, and certainly before Watermark’s annual Wedding Guide, early issues examined the Defense of Marriage Act and couples who’d left Florida to marry elsewhere.

There’s no shortage of ways love, sex and marriage continue to impact readers. In just the first month of 2023, state legislatures across the nation have introduced hundreds of measures attacking the LGBTQ community on those and other fronts – and it was only last December that President Joe Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act, enshrining same-sex marital protections into federal law.

For those reasons and more, Watermark made the decision to reintroduce our annual love, sex and marriage coverage. Instead of an issue dedicated to each of these big three, however, we’re presenting a combination thereof.

We introduce you to Steven Borrero, a mental health counselor for 26Health in Central Florida. He shares his perspective on dating after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic here.

We introduce you to Larry Biddle and David Warner, a Tampa Bay couple who celebrates three major anniversaries: their first date, their civil union and their marriage, here.

And below, we present the results of our Watermark sex survey.