Being gay in America: a 50-year love story

[xchrom]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/08/being-gay-in-america-a-50-year-love-story/




The love between John Darby and Jack Bird has been on solid ground for more than half a century. It is the social landscape around the gay couple that has shifted.

After they got together in 1959, they kept their relationship a secret, save for an inner circle of gay friends. Today, Darby and Bird walk hand-in-hand, occasionally sharing kisses or sweet words like many other married couples.

“It was the society we lived in,” Bird, 84, said in an interview with AFP in the couple’s home in a retirement community in the heart of San Francisco. “I learned I was gay, but I hid it.”

Darby, 86, and Bird will celebrate their 54th anniversary as a couple in July and their fifth wedding anniversary two months later.

[Call Me Wesley]

1. Heartwarming,

and so unnecessarily that this had ever to be hidden.