Shane Bitney Crone and Rayvon Owen are a couple!

I’m so happy to be writing this post because I think the world of Shane Bitney Crone who I’ve interviewed several times in the past as his documentary, Bridegroom, became a sensation.

So American Idol alum Rayvon Owen, seen kissing a man in the new video Can’t Fight It, came out publicly this weekend.

What I had not realized, because I had not seen the video, was that the man Rayvon is kissing is Shane who in Facebook post today confirms that the two are a couple.

The two met in December 2015 at a World AIDS Day Detroit event where Rayvon was performing and Shane was volunteering.

‘I walked out the large revolving door of my hotel and bumped into a tall, attractive man with a big, bright smile. He said hello, I said hello, and we went our separate ways,’ Shane writes in a Facebook post. ‘After a few paces I looked back to catch another glimpse of him and saw that he was doing the same. A curious feeling, one I hadn’t felt in over a decade, came over me.’

Rayvon later introduced himself at the rehearsal and Shane says that ‘at the end of the night, we were completely infatuated with one another.

‘This was how love was supposed to happen. No lies. No games. Just two people who could be themselves with each other.’

Shane’s acclaimed 2013 documentary film Bridegroom tells his epic love story with Tom Bridegroom and what happened after Tom died in an accidental fall at the age of 29.

Shane’s grief was compounded when Tom’s family banned him from the funeral and tried to erase all evidence of their happy six years together.

On the one year anniversary of Tom’s death, a grieving Shane poured his feelings into a YouTube video called It Could Happen to You and it changed his life. The 10-minute video quickly went viral and among those who saw the video was Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the writer and producer best known for the classic TV series Designing Women.

Bloodworth-Thomason collaborated with Shane on the documentary which took the film festival circuit by storm. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival where it was introduced by former President Bill Clinton and won the Audience Award and eventually aired on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN)..

‘With Rayvon, I didn’t hesitate to tell him about Tom, and he encouraged me to continue keeping Tom’s memory alive – which only made me fall further in love with him,’ Shane writes.

Rayvon, 24, was a season 14 finalist on American Idol and ended up placing fourth in the competition and the exposure helped lead to a recording career.

The director’s original idea for the Can’t Fight It video was that Raybon would leave a nightclub with a beautiful girl. The singer decided he did not want to be dishonest and made the decision, only a few days before meeting Shane, that his love interest in the video would be a man.

‘I was proud of and inspired by him for using this significant moment of his career to do something that could empower young people,’ Shane writes. ‘I also knew that it would be an incredible opportunity to share my new love with the people who had supported me throughout the past few years.

‘I was scared to announce that I was moving on but I knew, once again, that this was about so much more than me. Too often people deny who they are and whom they love because they’re worried about what other people think, but as Rayvon’s song says, you “Can’t Fight It.”’