S.I. couple tackles barriers to acceptance, equity: ‘We’re not asking for anything more than what anybody else has’ (2024)

“Pride 2024″ is a collection of stories from members of Staten Island’s LGBTQ+ community, the milestones they have reached and the challenges they still face. If you have someone you would like to nominate for a profile, e-mail their name and a brief nomination totips@siadvance.com.

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Brandon Girouard says he took a big risk five years ago in his first social media message to his now-fiancé, Christopher Cicero.

“You look like husband material,’’ he felt compelled to write, he recalls with a chuckle. Cicero’s response came a few days later: “I do?”

No risk, no story.

That’s what Girouard says.

It’s a mantra worth clinging to as the two plan their married life on Staten Island — New York City’s most conservative borough — where the couple says support and acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community is growing, but is far from mainstream.

The couple will be married on Sept. 6, 2025, following a storybook proposal delivered by Cicero on a New Zealand mountaintop. Each has the support of his family.

And they have plenty of company. The number of recorded same-sex married couples in the United States has grown significantly over the past decade, more than quadrupling from 181,922 in 2012 to 740,523 in 2022, research found.

The couple already purchased their dream home on Ward Hill, a mid-century modern originally built in 1990, which Cicero, a project manager for the engineering firm AECOM Tishman, has renovated from the ground up.

“He’s created such a great home for us,’’ Girouard says.

Girouard, a professional dancer and choreographer who has a passion for information technology (IT), earned a master’s from NYU and a bachelor’s in dance from Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. He spent the earlier part of his career bouncing between Manhattan and Los Angeles, where he did commercial work with the likes of singer Ariana Grande, performed with the national tour of “West Side Story,’’ and also performed aboard Carnival cruise ships.

They two are polar opposites, which makes the relationship work, says Cicero, a college basketball fan who was president of his fraternity at Villanova University. “He’s much more of the creative mind; that creative, artsy type,’’ he says of Girouard. “His brain goes in a million directions. I have a mathematical brain. I’m much more regimented.”

Currently, Girouard divides his professional time between running the local dance company he founded, Quest Intensive, and his position as vice president of service delivery for a sizable IT company based in Dallas.

In addition to his corporate career, Cicero recently started his own Staten Island-based interior design company, Nixon Modern.

First date

Upon meeting for the first time, the pair says they both knew it was meant to be.

“I knew he was for me by the way he looked at his family, by the way he talked about his love of Staten Island,’’ Girouard says. “I knew he was for me by the conversations we had about the bigger picture.”

Cicero says Girouard “has the biggest heart,’’ and is the most genuine, authentic human being he’s ever met.

He is completely about family and prioritizes family over everything, Cicero said. “For me, that was something new.”

Coming out

Girouard, 38, says he knew he was gay as early as age 3, and jokes with people that he was born carrying a top hat and cane.

He was raised in a very supportive environment in suburban New Bedford, Massachusetts, where dance classes filled his days, along with acceptance of his individuality.

Cicero’s experience was quite different.

Growing up in a traditional Italian family in Great Kills, with extended family all around, he was raised thinking hom*osexuality was wrong.

“It took me a while to really get comfortable coming out to my family,’’ he said. “It wasn’t until my sophom*ore year of college that I had the confidence to do that, and even then, it was a bit of a challenge.”

Cicero said his parents initially didn’t take the news well, though he knows his mother’s emotional reaction wasn’t about her personal opinion. It was based on fear.

“I think she just was worried about me being bullied about it, what her friends or other family members might think about it,’’ he said. “I know it was always about love for me and just general concern. They want the best for me, and I never held it against them.”

Hostile behavior, social media comments

Cicero, 34, says the hurtful comments he recently saw on Instagram below a An Advance/SILive.com profile of another gay couple reveal a painful truth.

“I know the type of people I’m surrounded by,’’ says Cicero, who graduated from Staten Island Technical High School before earning an engineering degree from Villanova.

In the posted comments, readers disparaged the couple for “talking about their sex life,” and “rubbing it in our faces,” Cicero said.

“It’s not just a sexual thing,’’ he said. “It’s about understanding. When you’re in the workplace and somebody asks you if you have a wife and you don’t feel comfortable saying, ‘no, I have a husband,’ that affects you at the end of the day.”

They don’t want to throw anything in anyone’s face, he said.

“We’re not here to parade around our sexuality,’’ he said. “But people don’t realize that there are people in other parts of this country that would rather see us dead than be married.

“I hope that people realize that we’re not here asking for anything more than what anybody else has — just the ability to experience life and everything that comes with it without feeling like there (are) people out there that think you shouldn’t exist.”

Girouard says they do, unfortunately, experience hate during their daily routine, “when we walk down the street and are called slurs.”

“On the ferry, there will be abrasive behavior,’' he said. “We can’t walk down the street holding hands.”

Celebrating publicly at pride activities — and even being profiled on SILive.com — brings risks, Cicero said, but it’s about more than his own personal acceptance.

“If some little kid out there is gay and in the closet, and could be suicidal because they don’t think their family is accepting . . . to see other people who are accepting and celebrating each other . . . For them to see that is perhaps the most important aspect of pride,’’ he said.

Felt like home

Girouard says he loved Staten Island’s rural feel and beauty from the day he discovered it. But, he hopes for more open minds and acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community.

“I think it’s a lack of understanding,’’ he says. “I think that can be reversed by love, community outreach, coming together to make Staten Island a better community.”

Cicero pleads with those who favor inclusivity to speak up to those who don’t.

“Just because they may not be hom*ophobic themselves doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there that are and are looking to cause harm to people like myself,’’ he said. “When you don’t do something about it, you’re actually doing something against it.”