Love Stories: Neal King and Peter Morrison

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.”