In June 2018, Billy Jacobson met a guy on the dating app Grindr whom he recognized from the internet.
At the time, he’d been watching a lot of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” and had come across a video of Evan Ross Katz, then a senior style editor at the media company Mic, interviewing the contestants Trixie Mattel and Katya Zamolodchikova.
“As Belinda Carlisle once sang, ‘Heaven Is a Place on Earth,’ and I am joined today by not one but two slices of heaven,” Mr. Katz quipped, introducing his blond-wigged guests, who immediately complimented his own hair, then dyed a bluish gray.
When Mr. Jacobson saw Mr. Katz in that video, he thought he was “kind of cute,” he said. “I could date him.”
Mr. Jacobson, now 30, “was on a bit of a mission to find a boyfriend,” he said. He had been trying to expand his social network — and dating pool — traveling to Cuba on a Jewish mission trip and volunteering with the LGBT Community Center in Manhattan.
“You were doing ‘The Secret,’” Mr. Katz, now 35, joked.
A few weeks later, they appeared on each other’s Grindr grids; they lived near each other in Lower Manhattan. “I’m a vibrational person,” said Mr. Katz, who had never had a boyfriend until Mr. Jacobson. “I just wanted to keep vibrating toward him.”
Today, on a bookshelf in their Downtown Brooklyn apartment, where they moved together in 2021, are two photos. One is from the day in late 2018 that they made their relationship official — at dinner, after seeing “A Star is Born.” The other is from September 2022, when Mr. Katz proposed to Mr. Jacobson during a picnic on their favorite beach in the Hamptons. (Mr. Katz had crafted a hand-bound book telling the story of their relationship; Mr. Jacobson cried repeatedly.)
In April, on an evening as breezy as Trixie and Katya’s banter, a rabbi summarized the grooms’ relationship to about 175 of their friends and relatives. Their wedding ceremony was held at Current, an indoor events space at Pier 59 in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.
Several rows of people laughed when Rabbi James Feder of Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, N.J., and a former editor for gay magazines, referred to Grindr only as “a certain” app. It was not the only joke made that day.
This was a couple who loved nothing more than a callback — a shared wink, a private joke turned public. Even the April 20 date nodded to Mr. Katz working as a weed dealer while attending N.Y.U. Toward the end of the night, a bowl was filled with pre-rolled joints, a reference to Mary-Kate Olsen famously (if you’re a pop-culture obsessive, at least) furnishing her 2015 wedding with bowls of cigarettes.
Programs placed on each guest’s chair revealed a title had been given to the ceremony: “Big Goose Wedding: Live!”
“Goose” was “the first term we ever added to our joint lexicon,” Mr. Katz said. The couple first heard it on the “Drag Race” podcast, “Alright Mary,” whose hosts would sometimes refer to people as having “goose energy.” Prompted by a call-in question from Mr. Jacobson, the hosts defined the term as “endearing — a goose is silly, but not necessarily goofy.”
“Mostly, it’s about sweetness,” Mr. Katz said in his vows. “We call each other goose out of reverence for each other’s oddities, of which there are many.” (More laughter.)
“You are undeniably a goose,” Mr. Jacobson said in return. “When I’m down, you tell me that it’s just for a moment. When I’m overthinking, you remind me that I can stop.”
Early on, they learned their differences brought balance to the relationship.
Mr. Jacobson, who grew up in New York City, was analytical and pragmatic. He had an accountant and knew how to mount a TV. He had been working at Google since graduating from Washington University in St. Louis in 2015 with a degree in computer science and mathematics. (He still works at Google as a senior engineer.)
Mr. Katz, who grew up in Pittsburgh, had a drama degree from N.Y.U., a growing profile on social media — he is now up to about 350,000 Instagram followers — and liked to go out five nights a week. While he considers himself a “rule ignorer,” one of his nicknames for Mr. Jacobson is “Ms. Rules.”
The mystery of their connection intrigued him.
A writer and host of the pop-culture podcast “Shut up Evan,” Mr. Katz was accustomed to interviewing actors whose personalities more closely matched his — performers or extroverts. (A few, like Jennifer Coolidge and Ariana Grande, have become real-life friends, too, though neither could attend the wedding. Ms. Coolidge did, however, commission as a gift a hand-operated animatronic wooden sculpture imagining their wedding day.)
Mr. Jacobson was harder for Mr. Katz to read than his interview subjects.
“We really have a lot of differences in how we approach life,” Mr. Jacobson said. “It’s a thing that I’ve learned more to embrace than push up against.”
“We’re big fighters,” Mr. Katz added. “But we make up very quickly.”
Within pop culture, the couple found common ground. One shared obsession was “Survivor.” They binged 40 seasons of the CBS reality competition during the Covid-19 lockdown, three months of which they spent at a rental house in an upstate New York hamlet.
At their wedding, reality TV was a motif in a toast delivered by Mr. Jacobson’s father, Rich Jacobson. The couple had exposed him and his wife to “TV shows we never would have watched without their recommendations,” he said, although he joked that “Survivor’s” motto, “outwit, outplay, outlast,” is not exactly great marriage advice.
After the toasts, another figure in the couple’s Venn diagram of pop-cultural appreciation emerged: the singer and actress Mandy Moore.
Binge more Vows columns here and read all our wedding, relationship and divorce coverage here.
While planning the wedding, they decided they wanted a live performance for their first dance — something “iconic,” Mr. Katz said. They scrolled through Mr. Katz’s star-studded social media followers for ideas.
When Mr. Katz asked Ms. Moore if she would consider singing for them, she warmly accepted. She offered the performance as a gift, without involving agents or managers, and wrote in an email that she was “blown away at the thought of being included in your big day.” (She is “the best kind of famous person,” Mr. Katz said.)
With her husband Taylor Goldsmith playing guitar, Ms. Moore performed “I Wanna be With You,” her 2000 song from the movie “Center Stage,” for the couple’s first dance. They swayed to the song, watching her, too stunned to really dance.
“Would ‘Candy’ get the dance floor moving?” Ms. Moore had previously asked Mr. Katz. It certainly did. For most guests, Ms. Moore’s two-song set was a complete surprise.
“That’s my middle school icon,” Mr. Jacobson’s sister, Rachel Della Femina, said after “Candy” ended. “My nerdy, quiet little brother has the most fabulous guest list.” She ran over to Ms. Moore to gleefully introduce herself.
It was a night of several gleeful introductions. Like when Mr. Katz’s sister met the fashion designer Christopher John Rogers while wearing one of his technicolor floral gowns. Or when Mr. Rogers met Sarah Hudson, a singer who appeared as a guest judge on the first season of “Project Runway” — an episode that aired when Mr. Rogers was 11, and made him want to be a designer, as he told Ms. Hudson.
Make no mistake: This was a fashion wedding. For the ceremony, the grooms wore tailor-made suits by Loewe. Their satin lapels were customized with handmade brooches. Mr. Katz wore a marijuana leaf and Mr. Jacobson wore an anthurium, inspired by Loewe’s spring-summer 2023 collection. The anthurium broke when Mr. Jacobson hugged Mr. Katz too tightly at the end of the ceremony.
The couple later changed into botanical button-down shirts, also by Loewe, printed with artwork from Erwan Frotin.
“I wanted l-e-w-k-s, lewks,” Mr. Katz said.
Guests wrapped themselves in designer clothing, including the former “Real Housewives of New York City” cast member Dorinda Medley, who hung layers of Chanel pearls around her neck and a Saint Laurent tuxedo jacket around her shoulders. During cocktail hour, she offered the following marriage advice, paraphrasing a quote attributed — perhaps dubiously — to the writer Susan Sontag: “Love is friendship on fire.”
“It’s friendship on steroids,” the reality television star said. “You have to have a deep-seeded, loving, trusting kind of friendship.”
Laughter helps, too. Before the ceremony, Mr. Jacobson recalled, he and Mr. Katz had been taking portraits on the pier when a goose walked by. Was it fate? Or serendipity?
In a photo snapped at that moment, Mr. Jacobson looks toward the goose, leaning slightly toward it. Mr. Katz holds on to him, smiling in disbelief at the camera.
“Evan got a little scared because it started hissing at us,” Mr. Jacobson said.
On This Day
When April 20, 2024
Where Current at Pier 59 in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.
In Remembrance Many tributes were paid to Mr. Katz’s father, Gary Katz, who died in January 2023. Pennies were placed on top of the wedding programs. Ever since his death, when Mr. Katz has come across pennies on the ground, he has felt as if his father is with him.
Perks of the Job(s) Mr. Katz works full time in digital strategy at Warner Music, but he also contributes to the content platforms of the luxury fashion brand Loewe. As a gift, Loewe provided 258 candles, which were stored in the couple’s apartment until the wedding and spread generously around the event space.
Mr. Jacobson, who loves spreadsheets, estimated that the candles, which start at $120 for the smallest size on the brand’s website, weighed roughly 300 pounds in total. The scents included marijuana, cucumber, honeysuckle, mushroom, hazelnut and oregano. Guests joked about stealing them at the end of the night — some were more serious than others. Other gifts from brands included the cannabis joints (from Edie Parker), custom-wrapped chocolate bars (from Tony’s Chocolonely) and Boxed Water.
2D V.I.P. Posing with guests all night long in the photo booth was a life-size cardboard cutout of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that Mr. Katz has owned since he was a child. In 2022, he wrote a book about the television show.
Sumber: www.nytimes.com
