Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples that give us hope for our own romantic futures, and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.
Queen Latifah has been on my mind lately—and not only because of that bizarrely brilliant “King Latifah” sketch from last week’s episode of Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney, nor because today, March 18, is her 55th birthday (although we do love a Pisces princess!). The truth is, as things get more and more dire for members of the LGBTQ+ community under the Trump administration, my admiration for queer public figures who have been navigating the not-always-welcoming milieu of Hollywood for years only grows. Also, in this era of constant social media overexposure, I’m kind of obsessed with how little I know about Latifah and her partner of 12 years, choreographer Eboni Nichols.
What I do know about the couple, though, I love. They both worked on the 2007 film Hairspray, but since neither one has spoken about whether or not they met, flirted, or even made eye contact on set, I’m choosing to believe that they fell in love at the craft services table. After all, what everlasting romance doesn’t start over free tuna sandwiches, Uncrustables, and room-temperature cans of seltzer?
Another thing we know for sure is that Latifah and Nichols share a son, Rebel, who was born in 2019. Though the moms have—true to form—kept their now-six-year-old son mostly out of the spotlight, Latifah did reference both him and Nichols in her 2021 acceptance speech for BET’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Amid the extreme pressure, in our momfluencer-filled moment, to put kids in the spotlight, Latifah and Nichols’s decision to do exactly not that really says something. I mean, do I want to see them posing adorably with Rebel in a family Gap ad? Absolutely, thanks to years’ worth of celebrity brainrot. But I value Latifah and Nichols’s privacy as a family even more, and I’m glad that they do, too.
Of course, being an out-of-the-spotlight couple doesn’t mean you can’t glam up and have fun once in a while, as Latifah and Nichols have demonstrated with appearances at the 2024 Met Gala and, more recently, the 2025 Oscars, where Latifah performed. “It was lovely,” Nichols said of their date night out at the Met last year, adding: “It’s just so exciting: all the cameras, everyone’s screaming Dana’s name. It’s lovely.” (Latifah’s birth name is Dana Owens, to those of you not gay enough to know that already.)
