During his homecoming on Monday, a Navy sailor proposed marriage
to his boyfriend.
Machinist's Mate 2nd Class Jerrel Revels got on bended
knee and proposed marriage to Dylan Kirchner after he stepped off the
USS New Mexico in Connecticut from a six-month deployment.
Revels proposed on the dock of the Naval Submarine Base New London
surrounded by roughly 200 people who had gathered to greet the
submarine's returning crew.
“It kind of tickled my mind every now and then that [he would
propose] but I never expected this,” Kirchner told New London,
Connecticut daily The
Day. “I didn't really care everybody was around. It felt
just like the two of us.”
Revels and Kirchner, who met last September through mutual
friends, said that they had yet to set a date for their wedding.
The proposal comes two years after the military ended its
18-year-old policy prohibiting gay service members from serving
openly and two months after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the
Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). With “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” and
DOMA gone, spouses of gay troops are set to receive equal benefits as
their heterosexual counterparts.