13 Queer Fictional Couples Who Will Melt Your Heart

This story originally appeared on Them.

It’s hard to overstate the sheer sapphic power of a same-sex Dancing With the Stars casting announcement photo. I mean, just look at this newly released image of openly bisexual reality star Sarah Jane Nader with her dancer partner Hailey Bills. The sequins, the hair, the pose? I’m not typically a DWTS viewer, but I’m also a simple woman: If you show me gay people dancing together on broadcast television, I will tune in.

As the Hollywood Reporter noted, Nader — a model and star on Hulu’s reality show Love Thy Nader — is now half of the show’s second all-female pairing and only the third same-sex celeb-pro duo to have ever been featured. This comes after JoJo Siwa and Jenna Johnson’s precedent-setting pairing in 2021, which was followed by Shangela and Gleb Savchenko in 2022.

Nader, whose casting was rumored last month in a report from TMZ, made it official on Instagram after Wednesday’s casting announcement, writing, “Let’s Dance!! 🪩” in the caption. Nader came out during the first season of Love Thy Nader, which follows a group of New York City-based sisters from Louisiana, with the show delving into her bisexuality after she invited a woman named Eliana home for Easter.

“It was a huge moment for me because we’ve never talked about my sexuality,” she told Variety of the plotline in an August 2025 interview. “I’m very close to my extended family, and I love them, but it has always been sort of something that I felt like was just ignored and even danced around. No one would want to know about my dating life because they would be scared that it would come up. When I had a girlfriend that I loved very much before Eliana, I was too scared to bring her home. I didn’t want to put her under the pressure of experiencing homophobia.”

In interviews promoting the new season, Nader expressed excitement for furthering LGBTQ+ representation on the long-running reality staple. “I grew up watching this show, and I obviously never saw a same-sex pairing, and so it’s really cool to imagine young me watching me and feeling seen,” she told E! News. “And I hope that this happens from this experience.”

Nader’s season, the show’s 35th (!), will premiere on Disney+ and ABC on September 15.

Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s newsletters.