Peter Morrison
entered his first Internet chat room when he was 27 years
old -- but he wasn’t hunting for sex. “I was
looking for other gay people, someone who was out and
comfortable,” he remembers.
Photography
by Christopher Dibble
Married: August
31, 2008
Together: 11 years
Peter Morrison
entered his first Internet chat room when he was 27 years
old -- but he wasn’t hunting for sex. “I was
looking for other gay people, someone who was out and
comfortable,” he remembers. Morrison had
enlisted in the Navy right out of high school. After a
four-year stint, he moved back home to Connecticut but
felt he couldn’t explore his sexuality there.
So he set out for Northern California and enrolled at
California State University in Hayward. “I
wasn’t dating,” he says, thinking back
to March 1997, when he finally logged on to AOL. “I
was looking for some guidance: Can you really live
this way publicly?”
What he found was
an all-sex, no-substance chat room. But just as he was
about to log off, a message popped up that said,
“Hey, how you doing, you want to meet for
coffee?” Morrison says it was “very
different” from the kinds of things everyone
else was saying. “And I was like, Maybe my
instincts were right. Maybe this is possible.”
The man on the
other end of the Web was Neal King, who says he’s
“never been much of a bar or club person, and
in the gay community that complicates meeting people.
Peter just came across as a real human being with a
life and interests.” A 49-year-old psychologist then
practicing in Berkeley, Calif., King had the patience
and understanding Morrison needed. Not to mention, he
deadpans, “I was definitely out.”
Months into their
relationship, King was offered a job in Phoenix, and
Morrison decided to go with him. They’ve been
together ever since. “I didn’t want to
keep looking,” Morrison says. “I was happy
with what I saw right there.”
Morrison, a Web
designer, and King, now president of Antioch University
Los Angeles, exchanged commitment rings on a trip to Ireland
in 1999. After nearly a decade of commitment, their
legal wedding in California on August 31 seemed a
political act at first. But King now says politics was
the least of it. “There’s something magical,
substantive, thrilling about marriage,” he
says. “The act of marriage clearly has a meaning in
the dominant culture that maybe I never plugged into
because I never felt like it pertained to me.”
King, who is one
of a small group of openly gay university heads,
announced his wedding to the Antioch faculty in a brief
e-mail. He says he was touched by the congratulations
from some and understands the silence from others;
like most institutions, Antioch houses conservatives
as well as progressives. However, days after the e-mail,
King was in a meeting when there was a knock on his
office door. “I open the door,” he says,
“and there are probably 50 or 60 faculty, staff, and
students just beaming and delighted that they caught
me by surprise.” Even more astonishing?
“Some of those people I would not have expected were
there with champagne glasses in their hands and huge
smiles on their faces.”
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