When Parker Daniel Allen Harwood first met Aquil Lamir Lemons at a photo shoot for the actor David Oyelowo, he felt an instant familiarity.
Lemons was the photographer, and Harwood was assisting the stylist, Von Ford, who also happened to be their mutual friend. The morning before the shoot, in February 2025, Harwood was gathering items from his car outside Oyelowo’s home in Los Angeles when he saw Lemons and waved as if they’d met before.
“He looked at me like I was crazy,” Harwood recalled, realizing this was actually their first encounter. “I felt like such a dork.”
But Lemons thought Harwood, who was wearing a jacket from a collaboration between Dickies and Supreme and baggy jeans paired with Uggs and a beanie, was cute — and intriguing. “I was just like, what in the metrosexual is happening here?” said Lemons, who goes by Quil.
When Harwood stuck out his hand, Lemons batted it away, saying, “‘I don’t do handshakes,’” Harwood recalled. “‘I do hugs.’”
Lemons, 28, immediately went over to their mutual friend, Ford, and asked, “Hey, is your assistant L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+?”
“Do you have eyes?” Ford responded. “He’s clearly queer.”
At one point, Harwood, 33, poked fun at Lemons for accidentally falling into a four-foot hole at the home. But apart from that, they didn’t interact much until Harwood invited Lemons to join him and Ford for tacos.
They hit it off, and the following day, Lemons invited Harwood to a Santigold performance at Living Room, a private members’ club in Los Angeles. Two hours into the show, there was still no sign of Harwood, who had said he would come after a friend’s birthday gathering. Lemons was getting nervous that Harwood wouldn’t show up.
“Respectfully, he can sweat a little bit,” Harwood recalled thinking at the time. After they met, Harwood had learned that Lemons was an adored photographer — widely respected for his portraits of Black and queer subjects — who had become the youngest person to shoot a Vanity Fair cover at age 23. Harwood assumed he had a lot of dating options: “You really think all these boys are not on his line like that?”
“But he’s cute, too,” Lemons said. “So I expected the same.”
Harwood decided not to put too much pressure on the prospect of seeing Lemons. When he was done with the birthday party, he headed to Living Room, figuring he and Lemons would bump into each other.
And indeed, shortly after he arrived at the party, Lemons turned to his left, and there Harwood was, talking with two mutual friends: Ford and the music producer Kaytranada. Lemons approached him. “It was kind of like a Mr. Pac-Man meets Mr. Pac-Man moment,” Lemons said.
The two danced and grabbed a bite at Prince Street Pizza. Then Harwood drove Lemons to a friend’s home, where Lemons was staying while in Los Angeles for the shoot. At one point, while talking in the car, Harwood serenaded him with a few Justin Bieber songs. “He fell asleep while I was singing, and then woke up acting like he didn’t fall asleep,” Harwood said. (“I’m slightly narcoleptic,” Lemons said.)
The following day, on his way back from visiting the Frieze Los Angeles art fair, the car Lemons was traveling in with a group of friends was hit. The vehicle was knocked through two lanes of traffic, spinning front to back twice. All Lemons could think about was Harwood.
“I just remember everything slowing down, and I thought to myself, ‘I still have not taken this man on a date,’” Lemons said. They got out of the car, and while his friends called the ambulance, he called Harwood. (Everyone in the car sustained some injury, Lemons said, but none were critical.)
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That night, the two went on their first proper date, meeting at Soho House for a drink before grabbing hand rolls at KazuNori. That night, at Harwood’s apartment, Lemons fell asleep on his chest while watching an episode of “Sex and the City.” That was the moment Harwood felt their connection was something different.
For Lemons, that realization came the next day. Forty-five minutes into his flight back to New York, he realized he had accidentally left 40 rolls of film at a T.S.A. checkpoint at LAX. He texted Harwood, who went to the airport and managed to retrieve the film by showing T.S.A. agents a screenshot of Lemons’s expired ticket and explaining he was there to pick it up for his husband.
He mailed the film to Lemons, who also felt an inkling of a spousal connection. He recalled texting his mother later that day: “I actually think this guy might be my husband.”
Harwood’s gesture “kind of set the tone for our relationship,” Lemons said. From then on, they spoke every day.
“We have so much in common,” Lemons said. “I started believing in soul mates in a different way.” They related over growing up Black and queer in spaces where they felt supported for one or the other, but not both. They had the same fashion sensibility, and felt “unafraid to be eclectic,” Lemons said. They love rap and E.D.M., as well as art and sweet and savory food combinations.
And, despite being on-the-go fashion people, they are also low-key and spiritual, both dreaming of a future where they grow their own food on a farm.
“We bring peace to each other,” Harwood said.
Lemons grew up in South Philadelphia and graduated from the New School with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and design.
Harwood, who grew up in Seattle, studied communications at Bellevue College in Washington and continues to work as a fashion stylist.
Last May, after working together on an editorial shoot for Essence magazine’s 55th anniversary, Lemons took Harwood to South Philadelphia. “I wanted to see if he can handle it,” Lemons said. Harwood met Lemons’s large family, known for their big personalities, including his grandmother, Gail Lee.
“I’ll never forget that moment,” Lemons said, recounting the moment she looked Harwood up and down and looked back at her grandson with a smirk. “I like what I saw,” she said out loud.
“He passed the test,” Lemons said.
The proposal came a couple of months later, in July. The couple played house for a few weeks in Provincetown, Mass., where Lemons made his curatorial debut with an exhibition of queer artists at Twenty Summers. One night, they looked at each other and acknowledged that they could live together for the rest of their lives. There were no rings or grand gestures, just a mutual decision to get married.
“This is where it got real lesbian and, like, less gay,” Lemons said.
Later, when they returned to New York, they got matching gold rings with embedded diamonds, designed by Bernard James.
The couple now splits their time between New York, where Lemons maintains an apartment in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, and Los Angeles, where Harwood has a home in Chinatown. Together they go on hikes, work out, visit art shows and watch movies. Lemons introduced Harwood to queer cinema, including films by Gregg Araki like “The Doom Generation,” “Nowhere” and “Mysterious Skin.”
“I feel like seeing something like that or having exposure to that as a kid would have given me more light on accepting myself a little earlier,” Harwood said. But, he said, his relationship with Lemons has helped him heal from his childhood: “I truly think that we’ve healed each other — past trauma, past relationships, inner child.”
On May 19, the couple married at Brooklyn Borough Hall. Waldo Ramirez, a staff member of the City Clerk’s Office, officiated.
The couple hosted a dinner at Casino, a restaurant in the Lower East Side, with about 60 guests the following day. Harwood’s parents and several friends and family members flew in from Seattle. Lemons’s large family, many of whom had work the following day — it was a Wednesday after all — arrived in a Sprinter van from Philadelphia.
“We want to watch your love grow and grow forever,” his mother, Jade Lee-Bradley, shared in a speech in the candlelit restaurant decorated with deep purple calla lilies. “Quil is a hopeless romantic,” she said. “I guess he gets that from me.”
“Watching your connection,” she continued, “I saw something beautiful happening. All the hoping, the wishing and the dreaming turned into real life. You weren’t searching anymore. You were living the life you had hoped for.”
The couple wore custom black suits from a New York brand called Commission, Lemons in a double-breasted suit and Harwood in a single.
“We told all of our guests that they can only wear black. It’s going to be a very black wedding,” Lemons said a few days before the celebration. “No pun intended,” Harwood added.
They chose to get married in New York rather than Los Angeles since Lemons has a much larger family, and it would be logistically easier for them to travel by bus.
“Also, I mean, come on, New York in spring, are you kidding?” Parker said. “So romantic.”
On This Day
When May 19, 2026
Where Brooklyn Borough Hall
Shared Vows Lemons and Harwood wrote their vows together so that they would know what the other would say. “I saw ‘The Drama,’ and I will not have that be my drama,” Lemons said, referring to a disastrous scene in the 2026 movie starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson where a couple’s vows fall apart.
A Famous Wedding Photographer “It’s surreal to think this is my actual life,” Lemons said. “I am so honored that Ryan McGinley — who is now my godfather — agreed to document our ceremony in Brooklyn the day before the wedding.”
Haiku When the two started dating, Harwood had attended an event where a poet wrote haikus for guests. “Can you write a haiku for this guy that I’m falling in love with?” Harwood asked. Lemons saved the note, which read: “filtered mirror glass / rose-tinted reflection shines / your heart is my heart.” The couple printed the haiku on little cards that they placed on top of dinner plates for guests to read as they were seated.
Sadiba Hasan reports on love and culture for the Styles section of The Times.
The post A Spousal Connection Long Before Their Wedding Day appeared first on New York Times.
