What Does New Love Look Like in a Pandemic?
A West Village story of social distancing and blossoming romance
As everyone’s lives ground to a halt in March, author and photographer Bill Hayes was in Manhattan’s West Village, navigating a new relationship under the strictures of social distancing and wandering the streets, camera in hand, to document the strange effect of the pandemic on his city. What follows are excerpts from his diary, published alongside his photographs in the new book How We Live Now: Scenes from the Pandemic.
I’ve done some dating over the past five years, since my partner Oliver Sacks passed away. I gave it a concerted effort with two guys in particular, both good guys, both around my age, but neither relationship lasted more than two months. Maybe I never wanted to date in the first place, it strikes me now. What I wanted was romance. Electricity. The kind of electricity I felt when I moved to New York. Or when I first met Oliver. Or when I laid eyes on Jesse last Christmas.
I had made a deliberate decision to approach the holidays this time not as the holidays — which had made me blue for years — but just as workdays. I worked all day on Christmas and had no plans to go out. But by 6:00, I was feeling restless and I decided to take a walk. I wandered through the West Village, passed by a bar on…
