ABOVE: Larry Biddle (L) and David Warner. Photo by Ryan Williams-Jent.
Larry Biddle’s parents were wed at 16, the beginning of a love story lasting over eight decades. He says it showed him how significant long-term relationships and marriage can be.
David Warner was always more skeptical about them. He says his father was a “serial marrier” who wed three additional times after he and his mother divorced.
“He was also married before my mother and that had been annulled,” Warner adds. “I didn’t get a real sense of there being a need or value to being married.”
Even with a marital model in place, Biddle says he “never thought until David that something like that would apply to me, or I to it.” In part, that’s because marriage equality didn’t become a reality for all until 2015, more than two decades after they met.
The Tampa Bay-based husbands celebrated their 30th “meet-a-versary” last year, having first connected during Memorial Day weekend in 1992. They lived in Philadelphia at the time, where Biddle served as development director for ActionAIDS, an HIV/AIDS nonprofit for which Warner volunteered.
Biddle notes that while he certainly had his eye on his future husband, the two didn’t connect in that context. Instead, they wound up at the same bar where Warner was trying to pick up a bartender.
“I was leaning up against a wall trying to look seductive,” he laughs. Meanwhile, Biddle was upstairs at the small establishment, eventually making his way down for a final drink.
That’s when a gentleman hit on Biddle, a rather forward advance he politely declined.
“I finished my drink and didn’t talk any more to him, but I spun around to leave and there was David,” he remembers. “I walked over to him and said, ‘David Warner, I have always wanted to jump your bones.’
“It must have been that the guy next to me had sort of lit my fuse or something,” Biddle says. “I had never said anything like that in my entire life to anyone.”
“Or it was the Gin & Tonic,” Warner muses.
The two eventually began dating, a courtship that led to their civil union in 2003. The marriage equivalent took place in Vermont, which became the first U.S. state to recognize the ceremony three years prior.
The New York Times called Vermont’s civil unions “same-sex marriages in almost everything but the name” in 2000. On Aug. 24, 2003, the outlet celebrated the couple’s union in particular.
That’s because at the time, Biddle was working as the finance director for the 2004 presidential campaign of Howard Dean, Vermont’s former governor. He not only signed the nation’s first civil union legislation into law, he signed Biddle and Warner’s civil union certificate.
“We were very fortunate,” Warner says, both for the Times recognition and widespread support. The ceremony was attended by each of their families.
The couple says if their civil union was harmonious, their marriage was more haphazard. Now living in St. Petersburg, they decided to wed while en route to Warner’s native Massachusetts in 2012. It became the first state to recognize same-sex marriage in 2004.
“We knew we were going to go up to spend some time with friends in Provincetown,” Warner recalls. “We drove up with our dog and on the way thought, ‘everyone’s going to be there, we have a small group of friends, should we get married?’”
So they did. Biddle and Warner commemorate three major anniversaries these days – their first date, their civil union and their wedding –all of which have special meaning. Their marriage just became icing on a cake.
“It felt like we had legitimized our relationship,” Biddle says. “When we had our civil union, all of Vermont’s forms allowed you to check ‘partner to a civil union’ as an option. I began to think about it and being able to say that he was my husband just felt good. Even to this day, I say it on purpose.”
“There was a sense of value in it, a sense of meaning,” Warner adds. “It made it feel more real, more official.”
“More permanent,” Biddle says with a smile.
This feature is one part of Watermark’s 2023 Love, Sex & Marriage coverage. Read it in full here.
