Love beyond labels

At first blush, when businessman and car racer Angelo King married model and TV host Joey Mead, it looked like a match made in hetero heaven.

That’s why, when it was subsequently reported that Angelo was in the process of “transgendering” into Angie, many members of the media’s peanut gallery were left with mouths agape.

The second “shock” wave came when they learned that the Kings’ marriage was not breaking up.

In fact, Joey had decided not just to keep standing beside her spouse, even if he had opted to no longer be the man she had wed—but to keep loving, living with and supporting his decisions, all the way!

This adds another trendier layer and level to the traditional marital view to love one another “in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer—and transgender?”

The question in many media and social media kibitzers’ minds is, who “wears the pants” in this family now made up of “two wives”?

That quivering query, along with many nagging and niggling others, were answered by the new “reality TV” show, “The Kings,” which debuted on TLC on June 22.

Both Angie and Joey opened their home and hearts to viewers, hoping that their candid revelations would help viewers understand this perplexingly new (and for some, confounding and even threatening) phenomenon known as LGBT.

For starters, to answer that “who wears the pants” question, both Joey and Angie favor the mannish fashion, which both tall and svelte spouses wear interchangeably, like copacetic siblings. Is that perplexing enough?

The point is, in the King household, pants no longer retain their psychologically dominant and “breadwinner” status of old, biting the dust along with many marital and gender totems and clichés.

They’ve been replaced by a brave, new world of evolving “signposts” for living and loving that even fully “hormonal hetero” viewers would do well to figure out, because everyone’s world is changing.

“The Kings” gives viewers a lot of help in this regard, because Angie and Joey share even private and intimate moments with them, all for better understanding and empathy’s sake.

This takes courage on their part, because many dissers and bashers lurking out there are just waiting for any opportunity to label their unconventional love a gross perversion.

To make their reality show even more helpful, the Kings should go into even greater detail about the early factors and influences in Angelo’s life that set the stage for his eventual decision to transition.

As for Joey’s backstory, viewers need more input on how she was predisposed and thus prepared to be more “open” about unconventional relationships than most spouses.

The Kings being wealthy is yet another hurdle for the show to leap over, if it seeks to be a more empathetic viewing experience for “ordinary” and “less privileged” people.

We trust that subsequent telecasts of “The Kings” will address these and other concerns, so that enlightened empathy is achieved by viewers, as we all rush, pell-mell into a brave new world, where some people need to learn how to live and love—beyond labels.