In June 2018, Billy Jacobson met a man on the dating app Grindr whom he recognized online.
At the time, she was watching a lot of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and had come across a video of Evan Ross Katz, then senior style editor at the media company Mic, interviewing contestants Trixie Mattel and Katya Zamolodchikova.
“As Belinda Carlisle once sang, ‘Heaven Is a Place on Earth,’ and today I am joined by not one but two slices of heaven,” quipped Mr. Katz, introducing his blonde guests, who immediately complimented their his hair. then painted a bluish grey.
When Mr. Jacobson saw Mr. Katz in that video, he thought he was “kind of cute,” he said. “I could date him.”
Mr. Jacobson, now 30, “was on a little mission to find a boy,” he said. He was trying to expand his social network — and dating pool — by traveling to Cuba on a Jewish mission trip and volunteering at the LGBT Community Center in Manhattan.
“You did ‘The Secret,'” Mr. Katz, now 35, joked.
A few weeks later, they appeared on each other’s Grindr grids. they lived near each other in Lower Manhattan. ”I’m a vibration person,” said Mr. Katz, who had never had a boyfriend until Mr. Jacobson. “I just wanted to keep vibrating towards him.”
Today, on a shelf in their Downtown Brooklyn apartment, where they moved in together in 2021, there are two photos. One is from the day in late 2018 they made their relationship official — at dinner after watching “A Star is Born.” The other is from September 2022, when Mr. Katz proposed to Mr. Jacobson during a picnic on their favorite beach in the Hamptons. (Mr. Katz had produced a paperback book that told the story of their relationship; Mr. Jacobson cried repeatedly.)
In April, on a night as cool as Trixie and Katya’s banter, a rabbi summed up the bride and groom’s relationship to about 175 of their friends and family. Their wedding ceremony was held at the Current, an indoor event space at Pier 59 in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.
Several rows of people laughed when Rabbi James Feder of Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ, and a former gay magazine editor, referred to Grindr only as “a certain” app. It wasn’t the only joke that happened that day.
This was a couple who loved nothing more than a callback—a shared wink, a private joke made public. Even the April 20 date nodded to Mr. Katz working as a weed dealer while attending NYU By the end of the night, a bowl was filled with pre-rolled joints, a reference to Mary-Kate Olsen famously (if you’re a pop culture junkie, at least) furnishing her 2015 wedding with cigarette bowls.
The programs placed on each guest’s chair revealed that the ceremony had been given a title: “Big Goose Wedding: Live!”
“Goose” was “the first term we ever added to our shared lexicon,” Mr. Katz said. The couple first heard it on the “Drag Race” podcast, “Alright Mary,” whose hosts sometimes referred to people as having “goosebumps.” Prompted by a call from Mr Jacobson, the hosts defined the term as “dear – a goose is stupid, but not necessarily stupid”.
“Mostly, it’s a matter of sweetness,” Mr. Katz said in his oath. “We call each other goose out of reverence for each other’s quirks, which are many.” (More laughter.)
“You are undeniably a goose,” Mr. Jacobson said in return. “When I’m down, you tell me it’s only for a moment. When I overthink, you remind me that I can stop.”
Early on, they learned that their differences brought balance to the relationship.
Mr. Jacobson, who grew up in New York, was analytical and pragmatic. He had an accountant and knew how to install a TV. He had been working at Google since graduating from Washington University in St. Louis in 2015 with a degree in computer science and mathematics. (He still works at Google as a senior engineer.)
Mr. Katz, who grew up in Pittsburgh, had a theater degree from NYU, a growing social media profile — he now has about 350,000 Instagram followers — and liked to go out five nights a week. While he considers himself “rule-ignorant,” one of his nicknames for Mr. Jacobson is “Ms. Rules.”
The mystery of their connection intrigued him.
ONE author and host of the pop culture podcast “Shut up Evan,” Mr. Katz used to interview actors whose personalities best suited him — performers or extroverts. (A few, like Jennifer Coolidge and Ariana Grande, have become real-life friends, though neither could attend the wedding. However, Ms. Coolidge ordered a handmade animatronic wooden sculpture imagine their wedding day.)
Mr. Jacobson was more difficult for Mr. Katz to read than his interview subjects.
“We really have a lot of differences in how we approach life,” Mr. Jacobson said. “It’s one thing I’ve learned more to embrace than push.”
“We are big fighters,” Mr. Katz added. “But we build very quickly.”
Within pop culture, the pair found common ground. A common obsession was “Survivor.” They spent 40 seasons of the CBS reality competition during the Covid-19 lockdown, three months of which were spent in a rental house in an upstate New York borough.
At their wedding, reality TV was a motif in a toast given by Mr. Jacobson’s father, Rich Jacobson. The couple had exposed him and his wife to “TV shows that we would never have seen without their recommendations,” he said, though he joked that the “Survivor” motto, “get through, get through, get through,” isn’t exactly great advice. marriage.
After the toasts, another figure appeared in the couple’s Venn diagram of pop-cultural appreciation: singer and actress Mandy Moore.
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As they planned the wedding, they decided they wanted a live performance for their first dance – something “iconic”, Mr Katz said. They scoured Mr. Katz’s star-studded social media following for ideas.
When Mr. Katz asked Ms. Moore if she would consider singing for them, she readily agreed. She offered the show as a gift, with no agents or managers involved, and wrote in an email that she was “surprised at the thought of it being included in your big day.” (He is “the best kind of celebrity,” Mr. Katz said.)
With her husband Taylor Goldsmith on guitar, Ms. Moore performed “I Wanna be With You,” her 2000 song from the movie “Center Stage,” for the couple’s first dance. They swayed to the song, watching her, too stunned to actually dance.
“Would ‘Candy’ Get The Dance Floor Moving?” Ms. Moore had previously asked Mr. Katz. He certainly did. For most guests, Ms. Moore’s two-song set was a total surprise.
“This is the symbol of my high school,” said Mr. Jacobson’s sister, Rachel Della Femina, after “Candy” ended. “My nerdy quiet little brother has the most wonderful guest list.” He ran to Mrs. Moore to happily introduce himself.
It was an evening of many happy introductions. Like when Mr. Katz’s sister met fashion designer Christopher John Rogers wearing one of the technicolor floral gowns. Or when Mr. Rogers met Sarah Hudson, a singer who appeared as a guest judge on the first season of “Project Runway” — an episode that aired when Mr. Rogers was 11 and made him want to be a designer, he said. Mrs. Hudson.
Make no mistake: This was a fashion wedding. For the ceremony, the groomsmen wore custom Loewe suits. Their satin lapels were adjusted with handmade pins. Mr. Katz wore a marijuana leaf and Mr. Jacobson an anthurium, inspired from Loewe’s spring-summer 2023 collection. The anthurium broke when Mr. Jacobson hugged Mr. Katz very tightly at the end of the ceremony.
The pair later changed into botanical button-down shirts, also by Loewe, printed with artwork by Erwan Frotin.
“I wanted fans, buffoons,” Mr. Katz said.
Guests were wrapped in designer clothes, including former “Real Housewives of New York City” cast member Dorinda Medley, who hung layers of Chanel pearls around her neck and a Saint Laurent tuxedo jacket over her shoulders. During the cocktail hour, he offered the following marriage advice, paraphrasing a line attributed—perhaps dubiously—to author Susan Sontag: “Love is friendship on fire.”
“It’s friendship on steroids,” said the TV star. “You have to have a kind of deep-seeded, loving, trusting friendship.”
Laughter also helps. Before the ceremony, Mr. Jacobson recalled, he and Mr. Katz were taking portraits on the pier when a goose passed by. Was it fate? The serenity;
In a photograph taken at the time, Mr Jacobson looks towards the goose, leaning slightly towards it. Mr. Katz holds him, smiling in disbelief at the camera.
“Evan got a bit scared because he started whistling at us,” Mr Jacobson said.
On this day
when April 20, 2024
Where Stream at Pier 59 in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.
In Remembrance Many tributes were made to Mr. Katz’s father, Gary Katz, who died in January 2023. The pennies were placed above the wedding programs. Since his death, when Mr. Katz met pennies on the ground, he felt as if his father was with him.
Perks of the job(s) Mr. Katz works full-time on digital strategy at Warner Music, but also contributes to the content platforms of luxury fashion brand Loewe. As a gift, Loewe provided 258 candles, which were stored in the couple’s apartment until the wedding and generously spread around the event venue.
Mr. Jacobson, who loves spreadsheets, estimated that the candles, which start at $120 for the smallest size on the brand’s website, weighed about 300 pounds in total. Aromas included marijuana, cucumber, honeysuckle, mushroom, hazelnut and oregano. Guests joked about being robbed at the end of the night – some were more serious than others. Other brand gifts included cannabis joints (from Edie Parker), custom-wrapped chocolate bars (from Tony’s Chocolonely) and boxed water.
2D VIP Posing with guests throughout the night in the photo booth was a life-size cardboard version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that Mr. Katz has had since he was a child. In 2022, he wrote a book for the TV show.