As someone with a few alphabet identities who also comes from a small town in Louisiana, and has spent much of their life in small towns in Louisiana – except the past near-decade I lived in New Orleans – I related to this couple more than I realized I would. But even if you have very little in common with, I really think you will be able to garner some very helpful information from this read!

About the Book

LGBTQ+ influencers Terrell and Jarius open up about their joyful love story and family life—and the challenges they’ve encountered along the way—in this honest, powerful guidebook.

Terrell and Jarius Joseph—a picturesque home, adorable children, family businesses, and millions of fans online. Love Out Loud is Terrell and Jarius’s guide to help couples of all kinds sustain their relationship and nurture their nontraditional family. With the Josephs’s essential roadmap, you’ll learn how to:

Define your needs as individuals and as a couple to build the life of your dreams
Recognize growing pains before they hurt your marriage
Break tradition to discover your unique parenting style
Build a circle of support for your children
We all crave genuine love, belonging, and the freedom to be our true selves, no matter what our family unit looks like. Love Out Loud is the story of the Josephs’ quest to redefine fatherhood. After enduring a devastating miscarriage followed by two premature births by surrogacy just five months apart, Terrell and Jarius realized that to have the family of their dreams, they needed to live and love by their own rules. Filled with empathetic advice and a healthy dose of real talk, you, too, can discover how to build a relationship and family your way and build the life of your dreams.

My Thoughts

Obviously, I’m not a gay man with three children. Though, if it’s your first time, it might not be obvious. So, I’m a genderqueer, pan-ace mom in a hetero-presenting marriage – 17-year relationship and 13-year relationship. Panromantic (and pansexual) – as I define it because I felt this way LONG before I knew there was a term for it – is that love is far too beautiful and rare of a thing to be limited by such a thing as the social construct of gender. I struggled a lot with this as I served as a Sunday school teacher, dated what I thought was a very appropriate boy – who turned out to be gay, and battled what I had been taught were very inappropriate feelings for my female presenting classmate. So, many of the stories of this gay couple struggling to stay safe – both physically and even more so emotionally and spiritually – in a place that is still very backward when it comes to sexuality, gender, and so many other issues were very real and present to me. Recently, my husband and I were looking to move homes because of violence near our home rapidly increasing in one of New Orleans historic neighborhoods that we loved. We want to fight to help with that – a whole other rant – but I also asked him very seriously if he thought it was a good idea to buy a home in a state where the government doesn’t believe in the rights of people in bodies like mine – for myriad reasons – and our daughter’s. Ultimately, we decided to take our passing privilege as an opportunity to stay and fight, but it’s still a scary decision to make.

Decisions like these – the house-buying part – are big ones, and they’re covered in the pages of this book, which is told from the perspective of a pair of gay dads, but is very applicable to all married couples/lifetime romantic partnerships raising a family together. They offer a lot of really great advice, which I feel qualified to say having been with my spouse happily/successfully for approximately the same amount of time or a bit longer. I was a little vague on the idea.

Much like them, I feel a responsibility and passion for spreading the message to people like us on the LGBTQIAplus spectrum in the Deep South who are terrified – even though many places are so much better than when we were young. There are still so many places that are not safe for us, there are still places where children are suffering and need the message that who they are is valid and beautiful and that things will not always be this way. They need to hear from people like us who made it through in various ways and have come out the other side. I’ve shared a little of my story here, and I need to share more of it one day. I consider myself a fiction writer, but I was trained as a journalist, and my book reviews seem to mean a whole lot to a lot of people. So, I’ll write my fiction, but I might just find myself on my way to some nonfiction somewhere along the way, too.

This book is written in such a unique way. Each chapter has portions written by the couple together, then breakouts from each individual’s perspective. I’ve never personally seen this, and I enjoyed it. I got a lovely physical copy of the book from the authors, publishers, and Pride Book Tours as a part of this tour, but I also chose to use one of my very coveted Audible credits on the audiobook. I was excited to see that the authors read the book. Especially with nonfiction, it is my absolute favorite experience to hear the author(s) read me their words and let me experience them the way they intended, the way they meant them. It adds so much dimension and richness to the experience. So, if you’re an audiobook lover, I absolutely recommend that experience. But I did read the physical book, too, and it’s a quick read. And this sort of book is always nice to have on hand to look back on.

Who’s It For?

This is one of those books that I think everyone in a relationship, especially those who have children, would benefit from. Many people will want to think that they don’t relate to the Josephs because they’re not gay. But who you love doesn’t change love that drastically. We’re all people, and love is love. That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you all this time! And, I think this book is one of the best examples of that I’ve ever seen.

Content Warning: Pregnancy, Surrogacy, Infertility, Pregnancy Loss, Homophobia, Child Illness, Child Death, Relationship Issues

About the Authors

Terrell and Jarius Joseph are entrepreneurs and the proud fathers of three. They have been featured in Essence, Ebony, People, Forbes, and Out magazines, as well as on BuzzFeed, Good Morning America, MTV News, and OWN Network’s Breaking Black, and starred on Paramount Plus’s Wife Swap, and more. They live in Georgia with their children, Aria, Ashton, and Aspen.

Links

Amazon US: https://a.co/d/3MRwlxQ
Bookshop US: https://bookshop.org/a/25511/9781538766880
Amazon UK: https://amzn.eu/d/06VtLf3u
Bookshop UK: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/love-out-loud-building-a-relationship-and-family-from-scratch-terrell-joseph/7644187?ean=9781538766880
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203664299-love-out-loud
Author Website: https://www.terrellandjarius.com/

As a Bookshop.org (US) Affiliate, I may earn on qualifying purchases. Bookshop.org purchases support local, independent bookshops. My chosen affiliate bookshop is Tubby & Coo’s Traveling Bookshop, a local, queer-owned bookshop in New Orleans.