Jon-Paul “J-P” Bingham still remembers what Alan Spector was wearing the night he first made him dinner at his apartment in San Francisco. Alan remembers the amazing dinner J-P made.

“We met on the internet,” Alan, 42, shyly admits, “and immediately had three dates in a row ... Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. On Friday, he invited me over for dinner and made the best Thai salad.”

Although Alan insists J-P, 40, has never made a Thai salad quite as good, it was the start of a ten-year relationship that has withstood not only the test of time, but three moves spanning half the globe, various job changes, getting to know the in-laws ... and grappling with immigration laws.

Nine months after that first dinner, the couple officially committed to each other - although J-P claims that he knew Alan was “the one” after a few weeks - and the legal “marry-go-round” began.

An Australian citizen, J-P was in the U.S. on a post-doctoral fellowship at UCSF. In late 1999, he received word that the program was to end early. J-P either had to find another fellowship or leave the country ... and Alan. J-P secured another post, this time at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

“I had to move sight unseen - and unemployed - in order to stay with J-P,” Alan recalls. The decision to stay and move together caused a major shift in Alan and J-P’s relationship. This type of move “isn’t something you do for a boyfriend. That’s a real commitment. So we got married.”

Married, that is, as far as they could get married in 1999 - a Jewish ceremony performed by Rabbi Jane Litman of Congregation Beth El in Berkeley, California. Alan’s parents even paid for the wedding.

“They are spectacular people,” J-P boasts.

“At they end of the service, they hugged J-P and welcomed him in to the family,” Alan proudly recalls. “Although we still had no rights as a couple, it was a transforming experience. It transformed J-P from a boyfriend into family. That ceremony - before friends, family, and community - was transforming. They all started seeing us as a family.”

The bliss didn’t last for long. Three years later the professor running the lab at Yale moved to another university, meaning once again J-P was close to deportation. Alan, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, had just started a new job. Again, J-P found a new position, this time at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, an eight-hour drive from the life they had just built.

Again they moved. Alan was unemployed for nearly 18 months, but they continued working on getting J-P his green card.

“It really hurt us economically,” Alan says. “If our relationship was legally recognized, I could have easily gotten him permanent residency. Because that option was not available to us, we had to go through a special category based on skills that are not easily found in the general public. It cost us $16,000 to $18,000 just in legal fees to build a case. While most young people are saving for a house, we were saving for our legal right to stay together.”

J-P finally got a green card in 2005 and the couple celebrated on November 21, 2005, by driving to Ontario to marry - a legal option in Canada. A service Alan and J-P describe as “simple” in Cornwall was a stark contrast to the battle they just completed in the United States.

“It was so nice the way we were treated,” Alan excitedly recalls. “Here we are in the U.S. fighting for our rights and 30 minutes away in another country, here was a community that welcomed us.”

Life was good, but a few years later when J-P was encountering issues with his tenure at Clarkson an opportunity at the University of Hawaii was brought to his attention. As a biochemist specializing in tropical marine organisms, “It was the chance of a lifetime,” J-P says. “It would have a big impact on my career, but I was concerned if it would be the right choice for Alan. I had asked him about Hawaii earlier and he said he would 'never move to a Defense of Marriage Act state.’”

Alan eventually agreed, however, and the couple moved to Hawaii in 2007. While in Connecticut, the couple got involved with the advocacy group Love Makes A Family, working toward that state’s eventual passage of same-sex marriage. Here in Hawaii, Alan helped found Hawaii’s Family Equality Coalition, now Equality Hawaii.

“Advocacy has always been a part of our lives,” says Alan. “We want to make sure everyone has to right to experience - or get a taste of - the privilege of marriage. We have to mobilize and get the legislature to hear the hardships we have to go through to have stability and security in our lives. Many people take marriage and job security and citizenship for granted, where we’ve had to fight for every step along the way. We enjoy Hawaii, although there are some frustrations. The only way to change these situations is to fight. We have to start the process to benefit ourselves and everyone else.”

About a month after their marriage, Alan and J-P got a holiday card signed by the City of Cornwall staff. “How different is that?” Alan asks. “ Here in America, they take our rights away, and the Canadians send holiday cards.” •