Love Is Love boutique offers gifts to cross many divides
In a divided world, Marva “Marvelous Marva” Laws wants us all to find connection.
That’s the idea behind Love Is Love, a new boutique at Belvedere Square that features a range of apparel, gifts and an extraordinary line of greeting cards created by Laws, who prefers to go by “Marvelous.”
She is a black businesswoman and a member of the LGBTQ+ community. But she is convinced that universal connections are far more important than the particularities of identity.
Her target market includes pet lovers and the “friends, family and allies” of LGBTQ+ persons, “which includes just about everybody, including Dick Cheney,” she laughs. Cheney is the former Republican vice president, a hard-right conservative whose younger daughter, Mary, has been in a same-sex marriage since 2012.
Marvelous knows from painful personal experience that making connections can be hard at times of crisis, whether it’s coming out to a parent, supporting a friend through a career setback or losing a pet.
Her cards are “written and possess a real voice and heartbeat,” she says, and can help initiate “what can sometimes be awkward conversations.”
She writes messages to help people get through those difficult moments with love, and maybe even get to the other side with a smile on their face.
“When nothing goes right, go left,” says one. On the inside it reads: “I’ll be there. We’ll figure it out together.” This card is part of her Love & Care Collection.
A section of Love Is Love is called the Rainbow Bridge Collection and features cards to help pet lovers deal with the loss of a beloved, four-footed friend. It was inspired by Laws’ own experience.
“I fell in love with a Yorkie named Madison,” she recalls. “I held him when he was euthanized. I could not believe the profound impact that had on me.”
Knowing that Madison had passed on to the Rainbow Bridge, where he can spend eternity playing with other animal friends, helped Laws get through her mourning and also inspired a much larger line of animal-based greeting cards. Madison’s Pet Collection now includes cards with messages such as Happy Birthday, Get Well and Thank You.
“This collection actually has the fur baby’s voice on the front of the cards, in a clever way as if the fur baby is speaking,” Marvelous says. “Sometimes it’s necessary to have a tissue box nearby.”
In conversation Marvelous can switch from smiling warmth to acid wit (and back). As she talks, a core message comes across: There are some hard conversations that need to be had and there are tools that can at least get them started.
These include cards to express sympathy for someone who has contracted a virus or for a parent, male or female, who has suffered a miscarriage. She also has cards for people in all kinds of relationships, and an upcoming line will deal with suicide.
“I cover topics that are difficult and awkward,” she says. “But people need and want to talk about them, and they should be able to. So my cards initiate those conversations.”
But her cards are not all serious. A best-seller is a holiday card for LGBTQ persons that reads, “Happy Holidays and Happy New Queer!”
“People buy that by the 10-box,” Marvelous says. “ I’m also writing a profanity collection that I have a waiting list for.”
One thing she avoids is politics. “I stay away from political stuff,” she says. “This is not a red store or blue store, just a green store. You just want to be inclusive.”
Laws was born in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City and ended up in Baltimore when a high-school prank got out of hand and she felt the need to move out of New York to escape retribution. She was also leaving a household headed by her domineering and sometimes intimidating father, a city police officer.
The experience of overcoming her father’s extreme prejudice against gay people, and others, taught her how important it is to maintain, and sometimes repair, connections. “I went through that with my father, and you have to allow them to go through their process, so forth and so on.”
Her mother was the inspiration for the Gone But Not Forgotten Collection, cards that acknowledge the situation when a parent passes away. “Cards like that just don’t exist,” Marvelous says.
“My mother was like my biggest fan. She was just very intelligent, smart, classy, and it’s where I got being a businesswoman from. I was just impressed with her completely.”
But after she died, Marvelous realized that her friends were reluctant to say anything because they didn’t want to cause any more upset. Her cards provide a way to provide comfort on Mother’s Day by calling to mind a remarkable person who has passed. One says: “Your Mom had to be beautiful because she made you.”
“These cards have a real voice and a real heartbeat,” Laws says.
In addition to greeting cards, customers can find hoodies, T-shirts, shorts and sweatpants. Accessory items include wine glasses, flasks and a leather cross-body bag. They all carry the Love Is Love logo, a colorful curving abstraction. “These are two bodies, embracing each other,” Laws says. The space between them is shaped like a heart.
“These could be a man and his wife, a man and his husband, or me and my wife (if I had one), whichever way you want to cut it,” she says. “Because love is love. Love is all inclusive.”
Love Is Love is open Fridays and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.