Gay couple photo themselves across three decades to prove it’s not ‘just a phase’

“It’s just a phase.”

The number of times that young – and not so young – LGBT people have heard that comment, and felt invalidated, like the identity that they had discovered and nurtured wasn’t worth a damn.

At best, you can dismiss the comment in the same way the other person dismissed your true self, but at worst, it is utterly destructive.

And the most difficult aspect of being on the receiving end of a throwaway comment like this is that there’s only way to disprove it.

Time.

And with two pictures – one taken in 1993, and one in 2017 – Nick Cardello and Kurt English showed how long love can last.

The married couple, who met 25 years ago, captured their love together at Washington Pride in 1993, and then again at the same parade this year.

The two images, placed side-by-side, were reposted by multiple accounts until one Twitter user framed it with the remarks: “it’s just a phase”.

The post exploded, and now has more than 150,000 retweets and 600,000 likes.