I so love fashionindie's post about the 25 years relationship of my ultimate crush Tom Ford and fashion editor of Women's Wear Daily Richard Buckley.
Tom Ford and his partner of nearly 25 years, Richard Buckley, share their heartwarming love story with Out magazine. Turns out Tom’s then boss, Cathy Hardwick was responsible for their coupling: “Tender, get in here! Richard Buckley, the fashion editor of Women’s Wear Daily and editor of Scene, wants to go out with you. He’s very important. We need him. You take my credit card and go anywhere he wants to go.” Whoever said money can’t buy you love clearly never heard of a Black Card.
“His real name is Tom, but I call him Tender.”
Hardwich referred to Ford as Tender to “distinguish between her two Tom turkeys…one was Tough (her husband) and the other (Ford) was Tender.”
Tom and Richard’s is a story that almost restores one’s faith in true love…almost.
They met by chance at a fashion show after which Tom — being, as he describes himself, “extremely, almost pathologically shy” — ran away from Buckley.
“[W]hen the show was over I literally bolted out the door and down the street to avoid him.”
10 days later they met again at a photoshoot for WWD, got to talking, and on the elevator ride down Tom decided he was going to marry Richard. Through their 24 years together they’ve weathered illness and lowered expectations.
As Tom explains:
“One of the things that always amuses me – amuses isn’t even the right word, because it doesn’t amuse me — but often, I’m at dinner parties with very close friends, straight, and they realize that Richard and I have been together 24 years, and the response is often, ‘Wow, you guys have been together 24 years! That’s so amazing. I don’t think of gay men being together that long.’”
Honestly, I don’t think of gay men being together longer than one night, so I understand their shock. Unlike the lesbians, who mate for life, the gays seem to float aimlessly from one experience and one partner to another, guided, if by anything, their need for sexual gratification wrapped up in the guise of emotional fulfillment.
Tom and Richard are, sadly, the exception, rather than the rule. They’re lucky not only to have found one another, but to escape the height of the AIDS outbreak unscathed.
Richard describes getting throat cancer and how his supposed friends, assuming it was AIDS and terrified that they might catch it, refused to see him:
“Tom just cut them out — wouldn’t even speak to them if he ran into them on the street.”
Losing so many friends to the disease also affected Tom’s views on sex:
“[I]t damaged the way I think about sex forever. You just associated sex with death—or at least I did.”
This strikes me as particularly strange considering Tom Ford’s relationship with sex and sexual imagery over the years.
When one thinks Tom Ford, the next thought is usually sex; an exposed breast, bare buttocks, a jumpsuit cut down to there. But when one thinks of Tom Ford they also don’t think of a pathologically shy man with a “good heart” who has been in love with the same man for 24 years.
Perhaps that’s the brilliance of Tom Ford: he’s an iconoclast, a provocateur and a helplessly old-fashioned romantic. Those elements are found in everything he does, whether it’s his collections, his first film (the heartbreaking A Single Man) or even a gig as a guest editor. He brings his own viewpoint, which never ceases to be interesting.
Source: fashionindie
