KBIA News

Alphabet Soup

What radical courage does it take to love in the face of hate? Through portraiture and personal narratives highlighting joy, belonging, found family and meaningful romantic and platonic relationships, KBIA’s Alphabet Soup challenges the notion that Missouri’s LGBTQ+ community is a monolith.Tucked away within the amalgamation of letters that makes up the LGBTQ+ community and the complex identities each represents is joy: rebellious, resistant, radiant. If you have a story you would like to share, visit https://tinyurl.com/LGBTQJoy or contact news@kbia.org.Created by Bailey Stover.

Anna Porter & Lydia Bennett: "I think we just naturally fell into this very deep and loving and caring relationship."

KBIA | By Reporter & Photographer: Bailey Stover, Producer: Rebecca Smith, Photo Editor: Nick Sheaffer

Published May 23, 2025 at 2:00 PM CDT

Anna Porter, right, sits with Lydia Bennett, left, with whom she has been partners for about the past year on Tuesday, April 2, 2024, at Porter’s apartment in Columbia. Porter is bisexual and polyamorous. “My journey kind of started growing up in a pretty conservative religious household. There wasn't a lot of talk about being gay or being queer in any way other than, ‘It's just a sin.’ And so the transition to college was a really interesting time for me because I kind of got out of my bubble and started to meet a lot of people that were much different than I was. And I was like, ‘Well, this is really cool. It's awesome to meet all of these people and start understanding their stories and learn through them,’” Porter said. “And I think, through that process, I started to feel more comfortable kind of delving into my own identity and went through sort of a process of figuring out, ‘Hey, maybe I also like women as well as men.’ And I think that was just a really big time for me to explore that part of myself.”

Partners Lydia Bennett and Anna Porter are both queer and polyamorous.

They spoke about finding joy and comfort in a loving relationship grounded in friendship and shared experiences.

Alphabet Soup shares LGBTQ+ Missourians’ stories through portraiture and personal narratives.

Anna Porter: I guess Lydia kind of was my introduction into a polyamorous relationship. We met on a dating app; we started talking and then had our first date at a coffee shop and talked for hours and hours about all manner of subjects.

Nerded out on some academic topics, and yeah, just generally, I think, really enjoyed each other's time, and it just really developed naturally from there.

I got to know Lydia a lot more. I met Lydia's other partners. And, yeah, I think Lydia has been really great for me in terms of coming into the polyamorous community and learning more about it, and having someone to like, bounce things off of, and also just a great model of just like an outstanding partner in all ways, I think.

Lydia Bennett: That seems very, very flattering.

I do know that initially, Anna was planning on making me just a casual fling –

Anna Porter: Yes.

Lydia Bennett: – and figure things out, but we definitely hit it off. Not just emotionally, but I think, like, we got, like, the friendship chemistry in addition to the romantic chemistry that it couldn't be a fling.

A salt cellar, which Anna Porter’s partner Lydia Bennett gifted to her, sits on a table on Tuesday, April 2, 2024, at Porter’s apartment in Columbia. “I think Lydia shows that she cares in a lot of ways. I think Lydia is someone who will pay attention to small things, and then they come up later. We went antique shopping a few months ago, and I just mentioned one time that I wanted a wooden salt cellar, and I was on the lookout for this,” Porter said. “And Lydia surprised me a little bit later with this one. She burned the image of the giraffe—my favorite animal—and her initials on the bottom of it. It was an example of what a thoughtful and attentive partner she is to me.”

We really end up getting on all these random topics and tangents from, you know, childhood trauma to our psychology research and our – or my patient care sort of situations, and that's always a lot of fun.

Trying to track conversations back is impossible, I think.

Anna Porter: As Lydia had mentioned, I didn't expect it to develop into what it has. I think we just naturally fell into this, like, very deep and loving and caring relationship.

And I think that both of us demonstrate that for each other and make time for each other and really care about each other on that level – that it just works. It seems like it was destined to be that way.

Lydia Bennett: There's not one point you can point to where we went from one thing to another. It was just a really natural, gradual progression – fairly quick, I guess.

Definitely very loving and very close – intimate in both emotions and intellect, which is very rewarding, and it's been a really great time.

I enjoy the time that we can spend together, even when it's limited by both of our rough schedules and emotionally stressful work.

There have been several, you know, week periods where our only date time together is coffee dates, with our laptops out and work, but it makes it so much more rewarding and easier to get through.

Partners Lydia Bennett, left, and Anna Porter, right, hold hands while sitting on Porter’s couch on Tuesday, April 2, 2024, at Porter’s apartment in Columbia. “I think one thing Anna does that works well for me, which is surprising, is a lot of very casual physical touch. And I think that that's been very rewarding and validating as a queer person who is only somewhat in a openly lesbian relationship. And it's, it's a small thing, but … I'm not a fan of PDA when it's with my other partner who looks a lot more masc because it's just, like, feeding into that classic, like, cis-het, even though they're not even cis anymore,” Bennett said. “But it's just the validation and the comfort of getting just very slight physical touches, handholds, things like that. It’s a lot more valuable to me than I think it has been in other relationships.”