Jim Nabors

Jim Nabors was an American actor and singer best known for playing the guileless Gomer Pyle on The Andy Griffith Show (1962) and its spinoff Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. (1964). He met firefighter Stan Cadwallader in Honolulu in 1975, and the two remained partners for 38 years, keeping their relationship almost entirely private during an era when an openly gay leading man was professionally unthinkable. In January 2013, weeks after same-sex marriage became legal in Washington state, Nabors and Cadwallader married in a small private ceremony in Seattle; Nabors was 82. Speaking about the marriage publicly for the first time, he said he was no longer ashamed of people knowing about a partnership he had kept quiet for decades -- not out of shame, but out of a deeply private nature. The marriage was widely covered as one of the most significant late-life public acknowledgments of a long-term gay relationship in American entertainment history.