HAPPILY EVER AFTER

Most Adorable Gay Couple Ever Celebrating 54 Years of Love And Five Years of Marriage

adorable-old-gay-coupleShow us one thing better than an old gay couple that’s been together for half a century.

We effing dare you.

Case in point: cutest couple in the world, John Darby and Jack Bird, who will celebrate 54 years of love and life together in July and their five-year wedding anniversary two months later.

The AFP profiled John and Jack and it’s basically the best thing ever:

“I will always remember putting this on his finger,” Darby said, touching the wedding ring on Bird’s hand. “It was a marvelous day.”

“It is so important to realize that gay life is so much more than just sex; it is love,” he continued as Bird nodded.

“It would be lovely if we could die together, just go to sleep holding hands and let relatives get rid of everything for us.”

John and Jack met in 1959 at a friend’s apartment in San Francisco during a Fourth of July party. John had just gotten back from trips to Cuba and Mexico and was living with a “roommate” at the time, but that didn’t stop Jack from running away with his heart that night:

“I was younger, a lot younger and taller,” Darby recalled. And then he spied the blue-eyed Bird. “I fell in love,” Darby said.

Darby went to use the bathroom only to find a queue, with Bird among those waiting in the hallway.

“He looked at me and I looked down and kissed him,” said Darby, who stands taller than 5-foot, 4-inch Bird.

From there, things moved quickly as the two men got “engaged” — or as engaged as two men could get 50 years ago — found an apartment together and opened up a joint checking account. Later they found out their next door neighbors were a lesbian couple.

Though their family was not accepting of their relationship, John and Jack  bought a house together and lived their lives in private — never holding hands or kissing in public, confiding only in their gay friends. Then in September 2008, they wed in San Francisco during the brief window ultimately closed by Prop 8.

By then they had moved into the San Francisco Towers retirement community. In 1998, when they initially moved in there, they were told that two men could not share a one-bedroom apartment, but today their photo appears in the Towers’ promotional materials. After they got married, a group of their fellow residents had a party to congratulate them. Some people never spoke to John and Jack again, while some people managed to completely surprise them.

“What was really amazing,” Darby said, “was two days later there was a bag hanging on our door with a bottle of champagne and a card from an elderly widow who I thought didn’t even know what the word ‘gay’ meant.”

In the case of Jack and John, it simply means love. Now excuse us, there’s a box of tissues that needs to be brutally assaulted by our tears.

Photo: AFP/File, Josh Edelson

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