Colman Domingo Found His Husband Through Craigslist’s Missed Connections
Updated Jan. 23 2024, 4:08 p.m. ET
Like many other people, famous or otherwise, Oscar-nominated Rustin actor Colman Domingo found his now-husband through an app.
But the actor and his partner didn’t connect on Tinder or Grindr or any other online-dating platform. Instead, he and hubby Raúl have Craiglist to thank for their romance.
And Colman — who’s now a star of the TV shows Euphoria and Fear the Walking Dead and the new biopic film Rustin — knows how lucky he and Raúl were to find each other.
“This is a good story,” he told GQ for a February 2021 feature.
Read on for the details!
Colman Domingo and husband Raúl first laid eyes on each other in a Walgreens.
As Colman told GQ, he and Raúl first crossed paths at a Walgreens drug store in Berkeley, Calif., in 2005.
Colman, who was a struggling actor at the time, was shopping for a Queen Helene mud mask and talking to a friend on his Motorola Razr when he saw Raúl, his long hair, his lip piercing, and “those eyes.”
But Raúl’s friend was rushing him out of the store at the time. They were running late to a party after getting lost, and they had only stopped at the Walgreens to get a chocolate bar as an apology gift.
Both men were shook by the encounter, to say the least. Raúl, his mind still on Colman, guzzled Chardonnay at the party. Colman, equally dazzled, wandered around a local Blockbuster, still thinking about the stranger he saw. “I just felt something,” the actor told GQ.
A Missed Connections post brought the two men together.
The following day, Raúl posted a Missed Connections message on Craiglist, writing, “I saw you outside of Walgreens in Berkeley…”
And just by happenstance, Colman saw Raúl’s message a couple of days later as he searched Craigslist for a used iPod Touch. “I literally jumped out of my chair when I saw the post,” he said.
So Colman wrote back: “To the sweet angel with the most arresting eyes…”
Colman and Raúl went on a date in San Francisco and spent the night together, and when Colman thought his new beau was asleep, he leaned over and whispered, “I think I love you.”
Nine years after that, the couple invited 25 people to what the guests thought was a house party. But instead, Colman and Raúl greeted each attendee with the same four words: “Welcome to our wedding.”
Now they’re collaborators on screen, too.
Colman and Raúl co-wrote the 2022 short film New Moon. Described as “an imaginative surrealist journey of young Jay Jay and his mother Edie as their inner-city dreams are illuminated by the new moon in a backyard in West Philadelphia,” the short is adapted from Colman’s one-man play A Boy and His Soul.
Raúl also joined Colman in executive-producing the 2022 documentary When My Sleeping Dragon Woke and his husband’s 2023 AMC docuseries You Are Here. Plus, Raúl exec-produced the 2023 drama film Sing Sing, in which Colman stars. And the two Domingos are producers of the 2024 comedy-horror film It’s What’s Inside, which features Colman’s Fear the Walking Dead costar Alycia Debnam-Carey.
