From the ground up
What it can look like for a queer couple to build themselves a home.
Cassie gives Taylor a kiss on the cheek. // Photo courtesy of Cassie Andresen and Taylor Speegle
Written by Jordan Oliver
Inside the apartment owned by Cassie Andresen and Taylor Speegle, tucked above a one-way street in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle, one thing immediately strikes anyone who steps inside: the home is a place of love.
Bookshelves packed with paperbacks and DVDs reach from the floor to the ceiling on either side of the TV. Fairy lights line the edges of the room, emitting a soft glow that reflects off of the exposed brick of the living room walls. On the windowsill, a plant rests on top of a vintage radio piece, its leaves extending upwards and outwards — flourishing.
Cassie entered the room from the adjoining kitchen, placing a bowl of salad down on the coffee table in front of her fiancee, Taylor. Cradling a bowl for herself, she plopped down on the corner of the blue velvet couch and flicked a piece of her long pink hair over her shoulder.
“So, what do you want to know?” she said with an eager grin.
The two women met when they participated in the glee club on campus at Western Washington University. When they first met, Taylor was dating someone else who was also a member of the club. A year later, only a month after breaking things off with her boyfriend, she and Cassie were hanging out almost constantly.
“We hadn’t ever [hung out] before because I thought she was very Christian and very obnoxious,” Taylor said with a laugh. “I did not grow up religious … I was not loud … She was a little loud.”
Cassie grew up in Littlerock, Washington — which she describes as the Little Rock, Arkansas, of Washington. The tiny town south of Olympia, with a population of less than a thousand, didn’t offer her much exposure to the idea of gayness at a young age. In fact, the first time she can remember ever seeing a gay person was on the show “Modern Family” when someone brought DVDs to watch on a church camping trip.
“I had, like, kind of a very.. peripheral view of gayness, because I didn’t really think it was an option,” Cassie said. “So I had a lot of boyfriends and pretended to be boy crazy, and that was a whole thing.”
Only a few months after starting college at Western, Cassie came out as bisexual — but she clarified that that was not the final step to understanding her identity.
“I am a lesbian,” Cassie said. “This is not for everyone, not contributing to bi-erasure, but for some people like me, [bisexuality] was a stepping stone, because that was kind of easier to say and easier to still perform.”
Taylor, on the other hand, grew up in Lynnwood, and had a different level of exposure to the idea of being queer than her fiancee. Even so, she said that being gay in Bellingham felt safer and easier than it had felt in high school. The pressure to conform to heteronormative ideals in high school was immense, and she feared being bullied by the straight popular kids. Taylor identifies as bisexual, but she noted that she dated men very compulsively to negate the risk of being bullied.
She remembers it being hard to start dating women in college because of her introverted nature.
“I’m like, ‘I don’t have the social skills to make a friend, how am I supposed to make a girlfriend out of this?’” she said, laughing. “But with men, there’s like, just a script that’s easier to follow.”
Both Cassie and Taylor recalled feeling trapped in gendered roles in their past relationships with men. A lot of their ideas of what a romantic relationship should look like were informed by visual media, such as movies and TV shows, which almost always cater to a heterosexual audience.
Studies conducted by GLAAD showed that even in 2019, only 18.6% of movies released by major studios had LGBTQ+ characters. The further back we go, the worse these numbers get: in 2010, only 3.9% of all regular TV characters on five main broadcast networks were LGBTQ+, and in 2005 these characters numbered less than 2%.
The main thing Cassie and Taylor took away from heterosexual relationships in media was that the man was to be the caretaker, physically and financially. Cassie remembers her high school boyfriend paying for almost everything during the time they were together — a habit that she saw reflected in her parents as well. She said that on her first date with a woman, it was so much more comfortable to just split the bill than for one person to depend on the other to pay for it.
Once they started dating other women, it gave them the opportunity to build their own expectations for what a romantic relationship could look like, without the gender roles present in society.
At first, it was difficult to engage in relationships that went against society’s mainstream idea of what a partnership should look like, but ultimately it ended up being so much more comfortable and freeing for both of them.
“It feels like the difference in music between a really stuffy hymn that no one wants to sing and is boring, versus improvised, really passionate jazz,” Taylor said. “No rules, you’re completely authentic, and you’re not just compulsively following something else.”
According to a sociological study conducted at West Virginia University, lesbian and queer women are significantly less likely to adhere to gender roles in their relationships than heterosexual women. They are also less likely to endorse traditional gender roles than gay men — likely because all men, regardless of sexuality, benefit from sexist gender roles in some way.
Creating their own expectations took a lot of work. Cassie said they both discovered a sense of joy in being self-sufficient, which led to the creation of a healthy interdependent relationship — where she said both individuals have autonomy and independence instead of lapsing into codependency.
Cassie and Taylor built their relationship off of honesty and clear communication, and this basis of trust is what makes their experiences together flow so smoothly.
They take each other everywhere. There’s really not anything that they would rather do alone if they have the opportunity to have the other at their side. When Cassie goes skydiving — something that she loves and that Taylor would never, ever want to try — Taylor is still happy to be there spending time with her, watching from the sidelines with a book and a fond smile.
The first time Taylor remembered knowing that she loved Cassie is when she texted Cassie while having a panic attack one night, and Cassie immediately came to her aid. There were no underlying motivations or expectations to receive anything in return.
“I felt like I could breathe for the first time,” Taylor said. “Like I was supposed to be born on land but I was born underwater on accident, and I had been waterboarded and drowning forever, and then finally I didn’t have to anymore.”
Cassie and Taylor started dating when Cassie was a second-year and Taylor was a third-year student at Western. They stayed together through college, even dating long-distance for a year while Taylor was in Seattle for graduate school and Cassie finished up her bachelor’s degree.
The couple got engaged in June of 2022. They both proposed to one another — Taylor did so first, during a concert at a pride event on the streets of Seattle. Even flooding toilets and the venue being evacuated for safety reasons couldn’t stop her from proposing to her love. While being serenaded by one of their favorite musical artists, Annie DiRusso, on the street outside of the busted venue, Taylor proposed in front of a crowd of delighted girls and gays.
Cassie proposed to Taylor in a rose garden in Seattle, with a choreographed song and dance involving many of their friends from the glee club at Western. After being dragged around and forced to walk much further than she had anticipated, Taylor was directed to have a seat on a picnic blanket surrounded by roses in bloom. It was there that their dearest friends from glee club emerged from the bushes, performing a beautiful dance routine as Cassie sang and played the guitar.
Having their friends from Glee participate in one of their proposals was incredibly special. Their experiences at glee club were one of the main things that drew them together, and the friends they made in glee club became their chosen family.
“Our family are those people because they loved us through day one to now,” Cassie said, blinking back tears of some unnamed emotion. “There weren’t any, like, hiccups, you know, there’s not any lags in love.”
The concept of found family is one that is common for LGBTQ+ individuals. A survey conducted by Pew Research Center found that 39% of queer individuals have faced rejection of some kind from their blood family on the basis of their sexuality or gender identity.
Cassie and Taylor are still working on finding a core group of people as close as their college friends in Seattle. Because they moved when the COVID-19 pandemic was happening, many opportunities for volunteering and meeting new people were not available to them.
Taylor said that the strongest sense of community they feel in Seattle is when they attend drag shows.
“Because it’s everyone celebrating, like, someone’s creativity and beauty and talent, and everyone’s just gathered around celebrating each other,” she says.
At the end of the day, though, Cassie and Taylor’s number one source of family and support is found in one another. Most days when she goes to work, she just wants to stay home with Taylor, Cassie admitted with a fond smile.
Taylor looked at her from across the coffee table, a matching smile on her own face. The soft glow of fairy lights reflected in her glasses.
“Sometimes we just talk about us, we always talk about our family… We talk about just the two of us,” Cassie said. “And that’s our little queer family.”