Daniel Okrent

He wasn't a gay composer.

He was a composer.

And his private life was something completely separate.

Well, his attitude begins to change when he falls in love with a 21-year-old, and sometimes at this point in his early 60s, an incipient or aspiring songwriter named Peter Jones.

Um, he meets this young man and it's head over heels.

That's when he wrote passion.

That's when he wrote his only unironic play.

That's when he wrote his only, uh, unironic musical.

Um, that's the time that he wrote a show that was about exposing one's love.

He had never done that before.

Now the characters in passion are heterosexual.

It's a man and a woman.

Um,

But there's no question this came out of this changed experience of finding someone to fall in love with.

He had had serial relationships with many, many men over the years, but this was the one that clicked.

And then after that ran its course, although they remained friends, in the early 2000s, he met Jeff Romley, whom he fell deeply in love with, as Romley did with him.

Romley moved into his house.

And they spent the last 17 years of Stephen Sondheim's life together.

They got married four years before Sondheim died.

And there was no effort of hiding that relationship.