Second Day

Edie Windsor, on love:


“Ms. Windsor,” I ask her, “… What is love?”

There is just the sound of cameras clicking as Windsor pauses and looks a bit choked up.

“Love is a million things,” she finally says, noting you could be talking “about adult love, or love of kids. What was love with me and Thea? It started with tremendous respect for each other, and two mantras. Mine was ‘Don’t postpone joy,’ and Thea’s was, ‘Keep it hot!’”

The room full of reporters breaks into laughter. “Of course, love is much more than that,” she says. …

“It’s like the word marriage,” Windsor continues. “It’s magical. It’s hard, I hadn’t thought about it. There’s a hunk of a poem by Auden: ‘For now I have the answer from the face / That never will go back into a book / But asks for all my life, and is the Place / Where all I touch is moved to an embrace, / And there is no such things as a vain look.’”