When the artist Tourmaline met Cameron Bills, she felt an immediate spiritual connection—one that was only magnified by the significance of where they were.
After matching on Tinder, they met for their first date in September 2022 on the Christopher Street Pier in Manhattan, a longtime sanctuary for the queer community. At the time, Tourmaline was living nearby on Christopher Street and Hudson Street, and was immersed in the history of Christopher Street as she was writing her book Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, a biography of the revolutionary Black trans LGBTQ rights activist.
“The whole street feels sacred to me,” Tourmaline says, thinking back to that first date on the Christopher Street Pier. “So I should have expected a peak life experience event.” She still remembers the first time she saw Cameron, who was then a law student and is now an attorney.
“Walking up, I just remember Cameron’s presence, poised with perfect posture, reading what I thought was a law book,” Tourmaline says. The book was actually “her sister’s sci-fi novel about inhabitants of a dystopian world needing to learn to rely on each other,” Tourmaline says, adding: “I was deeply intrigued immediately.”
The two found themselves talking about God, their experiences attending services at the Metropolitan Community Church, and their shared admiration for the church’s legendary Reverend Pat Bumgardner, who was the reverend of gay liberation and trans rights activist Sylvia Rivera. “I was moved to my core listening to Cameron talk about sitting in the back of MCC, tears falling uncontrollably as she felt what she described as God’s love for the first time,” Tourmaline says. “Our date was electrifying, completely overwhelming my system in a good way.”
As they continued to see each other, they discovered their worlds overlapped in many ways. The first time Tourmaline went to Cameron’s apartment, she noticed a poster of the Miami home of Marjory Stoneman Douglas—a leader in the fight to conserve the Florida Everglades—and texted it to her friend Sasha Wortzel, who was making a film about Douglas and the Everglades.
“I couldn’t have imagined two months later, I would be visiting the Florida Everglades with Cameron, kayaking through alligators as Sasha gave us a tour,” Tourmaline shares. A year later, Tourmaline and Cameron moved to Florida together for Cameron’s environmental law fellowship. While moving was a big change for Tourmaline, who had lived in New York City for two decades, she knew it was “meant to be” because their new home was near Douglas’s house—the very same one from Cameron’s poster.
In October 2024, Cameron proposed to Tourmaline during a weekend getaway to West Palm Beach. “Tourmaline and I love to metal detect together—over the years we’ve found lots of trash but one night when metal detecting in South Beach, Miami, we found a silver ring with a heart-shaped stone,” Cameron says. “She took a photo of me digging it up and it almost looked like I was proposing to her. That idea stuck with me.”
