Our Most Popular Love Posts–Add Your Own!

We end each day with a dose of love. Today, it's your turn. Send us your images of people loving--in relationships, in family, in community, in movements. Wherever. Just show us the love!

By Kai Wright Feb 14, 2011

If you’ve got an image that says love, send it to us. Email your original pictures or illustrations to [email protected] and be sure to include your name in the email so we can credit your content. If you’d like to add a short sentence to include as a caption please put it in the body of the email. (Please only send us images you own the rights to… there’s no love in theft.) 

In journalism, you’re the bearer of a lot of bad news. Shining light upon problems so that everyone can get to work on fixing them is an indispensable part of our work. Still, journalists are people too, and we too bemoan the troubles that stretch across newspaper headlines–or these days, fill Twitter feeds and Facebook posts. Last fall, amid a drumbeat of headlines about LGBT youth committing suicide, the Colorlines.com team finally felt like we’d heard all the bad news we could blog. So we decided that we’d end every day with some good news–a daily celebration of love.

Here’s what I wrote at the time: "There may be a long road ahead to justice, but surely it begins with everyone doing their best to love themselves and one another." So we started giving shine to that act. Four months later, we’re still at it, and we want your help. After all, it’s Valentine’s Day. We’ve set up a Flickr feed and we want you to send in images of love. 

We define the love pretty broadly here. Fittingly, the feature began with a simple graphic (above) submitted by my amazing boyfriend’s YieldMedia.org. He just wanted to spread some love. We’ve celebrated a lot of art since then, from murals to archival photo blogs. In part because of the feature’s roots, we’ve often celebrated acceptance and embrace of young people just as they are. But we’ve covered a lot of ground. We’ve celebrated relationships, individual acts of courage, groundbreaking activists–most recently, the people of Egypt as they took control of their future.

Today, we want to celebrate images of people loving–with their communities, with their partners, with their families, with their movements, wherever. Show us the love! If you’ve got an image that says love, send it to us. Email your original pictures or illustrations to [email protected] and be sure to include your name in the email so we can credit your content. If you’d like to add a short sentence to include as a caption please put it in the body of the email. (Please only send us images you own the rights to… there’s no love in theft.) 

We’ll share some selections from the feed for tonight’s Celebrate Love feature, and maybe we’ll keep sharing them all week if you all participate robustly.

For inspiration, below are the top five Celebrate Love posts we’ve done, as measured by clicks. You can check out the full archive on our Celebrate Love page.

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MOST POPULAR DAILY LOVE POSTS

#5 Today’s Love Is for Bernie Sanders and His 4,000+ Twitter Followers (Dec. 10, 2011)

Through his passionate filibuster he created (or revealed?) community around the basic principle of economic justice. So many people tried to watch at one point that the Senate server crashed. He was a top-trending topic on Twitter, where he picked up more than 4,000 new followers in a day. Take that Justin Bieber.

#4 Today’s Love Is for Dolly Parton–and White Folks Who Aren’t Scared (Nov. 29, 2010)

If today’s politics prove anything, it’s the power of fear. Fear of a black man with a name like Barack Obama. Fear of the unalterably changed (and still changing) demographics of American society. Fear of religions and cultures you don’t understand. Demagogues and profiteering media have exploited all of these fears to great success, particularly among southern white folks. But today’s love is for those who choose joy over fear when confronted with people they’ve been told to hate. People like that fierce southern, white icon Dolly Parton.

#3 Today’s Love Is for Stud Magazine Rewriting Gender Norms (Jan. 12, 2011)

Started in 2009, Stud is a Toronto-based quarterly publication that offers a glimpse into the lifestyles and issues that effect non-gender confirming females. It features almost all studs of color, and tackles everything from education and health to the art that’s being produced to challenge mainstream norms of race and gender.

#2 Hey Boo, Here’s the Daily Love (Oct. 18, 2010)

One of the smartest, most compelling public health campaigns around: The "I Love My Boo" series. The idea is as simple as it is revolutionary: Promote loving, healthy relationships rather than preach about disease, and the rest will follow.

#1 "He’s My Little Brother. If He’s Happy, I’m Happy" (Oct. 11, 2010)

A 10 minute segment from a Seattle TV show about a little boy named Dyson who likes to wear sequins and heels and whose lovely mother and father are totally cool about it.