Today’s Video Story was collected on the 50-state Story Tour. Check out the blog where you can read about the adventure we had and some of the stories we collected. If you haven’t submitted a story yet to IFD, or if you want to submit another one, I’d love to read and publish it. Write one up and send it in.
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My name is John Buie and I want to be from Palm Springs, California. I met my husband online, on gay.com thirteen years ago; actually it was Thanksgiving Day, 1997. He was living in Copenhagen, Denmark, and I was living in Maine at the time. This is really my husband’s story more than mine because it was his first night having Internet access at home, oddly enough I was in a test market for Time Warner’s RoadRunner service in 1997—I was rocketing on the Internet. My husband, this was his first night on the Internet, and he was just installing a 56K modem, so he was just learning how to use a chat room and was going down the list of people that were in a chat room that I was sitting in, and selecting names and reading the description of the person. When he got to my name, he accidentally clicked on my name twice, and so in Portland, up popped an empty window with him initiating a chat without sending me anything, so our first communication was me typing to him: “yes?” question mark. We were really just pen pals, didn’t even know what each other looked like for six months, and as pen pals, we lived through his coming out process in Denmark and then we had an opportunity to meet in London because I had a business trip there, which we did. Then for eighteen months we had a fabulous whirlwind romance around the world, we met every sixty days in places like San Francisco, and New York, and Boston, Paris, Copenhagen and London, it was really quite amazing, should be a movie. And then he said yes to me asking him to move to America in 1999 and we’ve been very happy since. Denmark was the first place in the world to recognize gay relationships, so they have what’s called registered partnership that has been in effect since 1989 there, and three years ago (just over three years ago) we became registered partners in Denmark. We had a delightful ceremony in Copenhagen City Hall, it was really quite special. A really beautiful October day, unusual in that time of year in Denmark so we felt like the sun was shining on us. He’s an amazing man, also his family in Denmark has been just beyond belief, how beautiful they have been to both him and me in the establishment and sustaining of our relationship. It’s been really more than life changing for me, it’s been life fulfilling for me.