[ad_1]
Andrew McCaskill slid into Marcus Dwayne Johnson’s Instagram direct messages in September 2019 with a flirty note, telling him that he looked really cute in a suit he was modeling. The message he finally got back six weeks later wasn’t quite as playful.
“I’m thinking he’s going to be like, ‘Hey, Big Papa,’” Mr. McCaskill said with a laugh.
Instead, “Marcus was like, ‘Hi Drew, I see you’ve recently made a career transition, and I have a current career scenario I’m navigating,’” he said.
Though the corporate speak they settled into just after wasn’t exactly a love language, Mr. McCaskill, then an independent diversity, equity and inclusion consultant in Harlem, felt a tug to pay it forward. “Sometimes, being Black and gay, you’re sort of like a double minority,” he said. “What I didn’t want to do was be the guy who didn’t help out another Black gay man who was having a career issue. Especially one who was younger.”
Mr. McCaskill, 46, told Mr. Johnson, 30, to send him his résumé. Minutes later, it was in his inbox. “I was at a crossroads,” Mr. Johnson said, about a potential move between corporate jobs in Atlanta, where he lived.
Mr. McCaskill’s skills as a workplace negotiator had preceded him. “I had been following his career online a little bit,” Mr. Johnson said. “I thought, he’s cute, he’s smart and he’s older than me. Maybe he has some experience he can share.”
Mr. McCaskill, now a career expert and global communications leader at LinkedIn, didn’t hold back: Over phone and FaceTime, the two spent more than a month that fall hammering out a deal that included an exit package from Mr. Johnson’s old company, Altria, and a better salary at the new one, PepsiCo. Mr. Johnson, now a senior talent acquisition manager for early careers and diversity, equity and inclusion at IHG Hotels & Resorts, came away grateful.
In December 2019, “he said, ‘this was amazing. I really want to thank you for helping me,’” Mr. McCaskill said. But by then Mr. McCaskill had arrived at a crossroads of his own. “I said to Marcus, ‘Look, Mr. Mentor has left the building. If you really want to thank me, you’ll let me take you on a date.’” Two days later, he was on a flight to Atlanta. The “gay game face, the GQ Mack Daddy vibe” he said he had tried to put on months earlier on Instagram was back in play.
Mr. McCaskill grew up on a dirt road in Sandy Hook, Miss., a town so small it doesn’t have a traffic light, he said. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father an offshore engineer; he has an older brother and an older sister. Before he left for Morehouse College, where he graduated in 1999 with a bachelor’s degree in English and political science, he came out to his family. “I said, ‘Hey I’m gay, see you at Christmas,’” he said with a laugh. In his early 20s he settled into a relationship that lasted eight years. “And then I was single for a very long time.”
A lot of those single years were spent in New York City, where he worked as a senior vice president for the public relations firm Weber Shandwick and then the media company Nielsen; in 2012, he earned an M.B.A. from Emory University. The shift to independent consulting that coincided with meeting Mr. Johnson gave him a break from corporate America. But it didn’t give him a break from dressing to impress, which is what brought him in 2019 to the brand Lavoisier’s Instagram page.
Binge more Vows columns here and read all our wedding, relationship and divorce coverage here.
Mr. McCaskill, who is 6-foot-2, had heard from a friend that Lavoisier’s designer, Cortez Jackson, specialized in custom suits for large men. He started scrolling. “He had great suits,” he said. But the good looks of one of the men modeling them thoroughly distracted him: “Marcus is gorgeous.”
Mr. Johnson was raised in Detroit, where he alternated between two loving homes. “My parents were best friends, but they were never together,” he said. He has eight stepsiblings. In 2015, he graduated from Texas Southern University with a bachelor’s degree in public affairs. Three years later, he earned an M.B.A. from American University. When he went to work at Philip Morris (now Altria) in Atlanta in 2018, Mr. Jackson, the designer, was a co-worker. In 2019, hoping to increase Lavoisier’s social media traffic, Mr. Jackson enlisted Mr. Johnson to model.
He was in a relationship when Mr. McCaskill stopped clicking through suits to message him. But that relationship was winding down. “That’s part of the reason my response was delayed,” Mr. Johnson said. The other part was the career conundrum Mr. McCaskill eventually walked him through. When Mr. McCaskill offered to fly to Atlanta to take him on a date, his first thought was, “This is aggressive, but I like aggressive.” By then, “I had a crush on him, too.”
On Dec. 19, 2019, Mr. McCaskill and Mr. Johnson had dinner at the Atlanta restaurant JCT Kitchen. “Then we walked around a nice part of the city holding hands,” Mr. Johnson said. “It was organically romantic.” On an unnamed bridge under moonlight, they kissed.
Their next date started Dec. 30 and didn’t end until Jan. 2. Mr. McCaskill, who had been visiting family in Mississippi for Christmas, asked Mr. Johnson to meet him in New Orleans. “For four days, we had a blast,” Mr. McCaskill said. But it was their final night there, over room service and a “Real Housewives” binge, that convinced Mr. Johnson he was falling in love. “We talked, we laughed,” he said. “I was like, Wow, we could have a good time even in the quieter moments.”
On March 26, 2020, in the very early days of the pandemic, Mr. McCaskill packed a duffel bag and backpack and left New York to quarantine with Mr. Johnson in Atlanta. “I didn’t spend another night in Manhattan until August,” he said. “My apartment became the most expensive storage unit in the history of storage units.” But the cost was worth it: By the end of that year, they had learned everything about each other, both said, including how each looked without haircuts. And they were inseparable anyway.
Mr. McCaskill made his move to Atlanta permanent in September 2020. “I knew it was only a matter of time until we decided to jump the broom,” Mr. Johnson said. “But I wasn’t putting any pressure on him to propose. I was happy.”
On Jan. 1, 2023, when Mr. McCaskill dropped to one knee in Los Angeles the day after a friend’s wedding, Mr. Johnson was surprised but ready. At the restaurant Avra Beverly Hills, “he told me how much he loved me, how much I had changed his life,” he said. When Mr. McCaskill pulled a diamond engagement ring from his suit pocket, “I was boohooing. I said yes.”
On Feb. 10, at the Biltmore hotel in Atlanta, Mr. Johnson and Mr. McCaskill were married before 230 guests by La Shaun Jones, the pastor at Refreshing Word Church of Atlanta. The grooms, in custom Tom Ford tuxedos, walked together down an aisle brightened with white flowers. The groomsmen they met at the altar wore Lavoisier suits.
In handwritten vows, Mr. McCaskill told Mr. Johnson he had turned on lights in his heart that had gone dark. Mr. Johnson said that every day, Mr. McCaskill makes him feel like the only man on the planet. The broom Mr. Johnson knew they would one day jump was waiting for them when Ms. Jones pronounced them married. But the moment, both said, wasn’t just for them.
In addition to honoring Black couples who started the tradition because they couldn’t legally marry, they were thinking of generations of gay couples whose lifetime commitments also went unrecognized. “We wanted to honor our partnership and honor them,” Mr. McCaskill said.
The rest of the room did, too: “People cheered, because they all knew the symbolism,” he said. “They were ecstatic.”
On This Day
When Feb. 10, 2024
Where The Atlanta Biltmore Hotel, Atlanta
Two Grooms and a Gizmo When guests arrived at the Biltmore, they were greeted with wine and champagne. After the ceremony in the Imperial Ballroom, they gathered in the foyer for cocktails and passed hors d’oeuvres, including lamb chops and deviled eggs topped with caviar. Supper in the Georgian Ballroom was presented as a dual entree: marinated braised short ribs and chicken roulade. A wedding cake topper featured two miniature grooms and a miniature schnauzer, a nod to the couple’s beloved dog, Gizmo.
One Plus One Equals Everything A harpist and violinist from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra played contemporary R&B songs as guests filed in for the ceremony. Minutes later, Caleb Sasser, a contestant on NBC’s “The Voice” sang the couple down the aisle to Beyoncé’s “1+1.” During cocktail hour, the Imperial Ballroom was transformed into what the couple called Club Love. “Our friends love to party, and we’re known for showing them a good time,” Mr. McCaskill said. Before the grooms danced the night away with friends, they shared their first dance as husbands to “Let’s Stay Together,” performed by Mr. Sasser.
[ad_2]
Source link
