​27-Year Age Gap Is No Match for Love Say Chris Stanley & Bret LaBelle

Spend ten minutes with 23-year-old Chris Stanley and 49-year-old Bret LaBelle, and it becomes evident that the two are in love. Despite (or perhaps because of) their 27-year age gap, the couple’s relationship is going strong, and they’re opening up about being a couple after having their relationship go public.

During the Coronavirus crisis, Stanley slipped into LaBelle’s Instagram direct messages and asked for a date. After watching reality television on demand, Stanley had become charmed with Labelle.

Because both of them are public figures — Stanley, a successful TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube influencer under the name Stanchris with more than one million followers, and LaBelle, a former contestant on the CBS juggernauts Survivor and The Amazing Race, who came out very publicly on the castaway competition show in 2016 — their relationship gets a lot of attention.

Sometimes, that attention breeds misconceptions.

“Sometimes people think he’s actually my dad,” Stanley told The Advocate with a chuckle. “Other people think I’m just with him for money.”

He smirked, adding, “They think he’s my sugar daddy, which obviously isn’t true.”

Both LaBelle and Stanley have the support of their respective families.

Others don’t understand their relationship at all, he said. “Sometimes people make the outrageous claim that I was ‘groomed’ or something, which not only isn’t the case. In reality, I am the one who pursued him,” Stanley remarked. “They think we’re both weird.”

“If I were a millionaire, I might understand them calling me a sugar daddy,” LaBelle interjected. “But I have a working-class job. Plus, Chris does very well for himself.”

As a full-time producer of funny videos, Stanley mainly emphasizes the idiosyncrasies of gay life. In addition to comedic clips and the occasional thirst trap, he posts glimpses into his two-year relationship with LaBelle (the two document their travel adventures together).

“I was not familiar with what people on social media could make, but he’s one of the successful people,” LaBelle explained.

“I always feel like I don’t even look that young, but sometimes people just think I’m so young,” Stanley said. “A few weeks ago, this guy thought I wasn’t even 18 when I was like trying to buy a lottery ticket at the gas station.”

He added: “I can’t really grow a beard, but if I could, I feel like people wouldn’t have as much to say about it.”

“He looks young,” LaBelle agreed, “but he does not look 15. So I do get why he gets annoyed with it.”

LaBelle added, “He just has this great way about him. He’s got a great personality, and he’s just really easygoing, and the best way I can put it is that he’s an old soul. I think that’s why we get along so well.”

Stanley admits that he’s actually usually quiet unless he gets to know somebody, and says his on-screen persona and confidence come from growing up as a queer kid.

“I learned, when I was in school, to live the double life of being gay but not wanting to be found out to be gay, so that was good practice,” he said. “Now, when I film a bit, often I’ll be recognized and that will make me nervous because of the expectation someone might have of how they think I am.” 

LaBelle chuckled and with his signature Boston accent, “I’m a total extrovert and I like to talk a lot. You can’t get me to shut up, but Chris is so quiet. But when he’s filming his work he puts himself out there.”

According to LaBelle, he is comfortable in his own skin and doesn’t care what people think of him, but he takes a lot of offense when online critics and trolls go after Stanley, something the younger of the two said he taught the older to ignore.

LaBelle explained that while he would look at comments under some of Stanley’s videos and pick out the few negative ones, Stanley pointed out that there were 50 positive ones above them.

“I’ve learned to go through and like the nice comments and appreciate them,” LaBelle said. “I don’t even notice the bad ones anymore.

“I’ve been judged a lot over the last 10 years, whether it’s from reality television or what I do for work,” LaBelle said. “So I knew when we decided to announce that we’re together, there would be some backlash, but I have to say beyond that, there was so much outpouring of love.”

Stanley said that while it’s a constant learning struggle, he thinks he stopped caring about what others thought after he had come out his sophomore year and lost most of his friends.

“After I came out in high school, my close best friend group all like ditched me, so I was kind of alone, and I just had one friend left,” he said. “So that was the moment where I had to grow up.”

LaBelle lived in a familiar dichotomy for a while when in 2016, he came out to a fellow contestant on Survivor: Millenials vs. Gen X. He was praised for the vulnerability and courage it took to come out to the world on national television, while homophobes criticized the move.

“I don’t want to say that you stop caring, but what people think doesn’t bother you anymore. So I think, when I opened up, I just realized, ‘You know what, I’m 40-something years old, and I don’t care what anyone thinks anymore.’ I’m done being in the closet.”

As LaBelle is out doing law enforcement work Monday through Friday, Stanley keeps a full-time schedule developing, producing, shooting, and editing content. The Boston Police lieutenant thinks he might be the only gay SWAT commander in the country.

“I’ll usually wake up when he goes to work, and then I’ll go back to sleep for like an hour,” Stanley explained.

Following breakfast and a mile or two of running or gym time, he begins working on his computer.

“I always have stuff to edit,” he joked. “So I could pretty much edit for the rest of my life.”

To prevent long sessions at the computer, he likes to split up his editing time unless he has a deadline.

“My schedule is pretty flexible. I can do whatever I want,” he said. “The only constant is that I can always edit.”

While not editing, he scrolls through social media, getting motivation and bookmarking ideas.

“If I see something that gives me an idea or inspires me, I’ll save it for later,” he said. “Then I can, after lunch, maybe film a few TikToks and then get back to editing for like an hour or two and then maybe take a short break, play video games for like 30 minutes because I like to feel like I’m relaxing.”

He added, “Today I went skateboarding.”

“I’ll be home making dinner,” LaBelle interjected, “And he’ll be running around coming up with ideas and listing things he wants to film. It’s nonstop.”

On December 15 of last year, something Stanley hadn’t expected happened.

He had put together several edited clips as an example of how, if LaBelle were ever to be okay with it, he would reveal him as the theretofore faceless and voice-changed boyfriend.

To his surprise, LaBelle was all in.

He said that previously he was careful about when and what he filmed because he could separate his public life from reality TV and his personal life.

Stanely wanted to include LaBelle in videos sooner, but he resisted.

“I was very careful what I filmed, where I filmed all that, and like with Chris, it’s a different animal, what he does,” LaBelle said. “So it took me a little while to get used to that. I would say that early on in our relationship, there was probably more friction about that. But I’m so used to it now.”

Stanley interjected to needle LaBelle about the lengths to which the TikToker went to get to post a video of the couple.

“You always said you were down to being in a video, but sometimes I would ask you, and you’d be like,’ No, we can do it another time,’ or ‘Yeah, let’s just think about it. Or, we’d film it, and then I would save it, and then you’d be like, don’t post that,” Stanley said with a smirk.

“He’s smarter than you think,” LaBelle said. “So, he posts a video about me on YouTube, about his boyfriend, a mysterious person with a voice changer.”

A smile spread across Stanley’s face as his boyfriend spoke.

“Look at him!” LaBelle quipped. “Look at him smiling because he knows what he was doing!”

Stanley’s mystery boyfriend was getting so many responses that LaBelle began toying with the idea of revealing him.

Stanley showed LaBell a video collage while they were on vacation in Florida.

“And he’s like, I want to post this,” LaBelle said. “And I was like, let me see it, and I looked, and it was really good.”

With a bright smile, LaBelle added, “So, I said, ‘You know’ — and then at that point, I knew this is the person I want to spend some time with — ‘I want to make him happy too.’ So I agreed to go for it, and the rest is history.”

Now the two have a joint couple Instagram account where the pair’s content gets a lot of attention.

It’s that “just go for it” attitude that LaBelle wishes he had developed years earlier. Now, being in love, in a healthy relationship, and living fully, he said he would tell his younger self to embrace who he was earlier.

“Everyone’s different, and this is just my story,” he said. “But I would tell myself to come out sooner. That was such a weight lift off of my back that nobody realizes how your personality changes. Everything changes when you’re in the closet, and when you come out, it’s so uplifting, and you can be yourself, and your interactions with other people are better. The way you respect yourself is better, and how you feel is better. And that helps you to be open to finding someone. It changes your whole personality when you’re not hiding from something anymore. So that’s what I would tell myself.”

He added, ”I would tell myself to come out 10 years earlier.”

Stanley added, “I’d say to my younger self, ‘You know, you’re going through it now, but it’s going to shape who you become, and it’ll be great.”

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The first video Stanley posted of the couple together.