“Hang Out and Have Fun!” read the ad placed by Frank Chile in the March 21, 1997 issue of PGN.
Chile, then in his mid-30s, was working as a film publicist in Philadelphia. He was tired of the club scene in the 1990s.
“That’s how you met guys back then,” he told PGN. “I didn’t have a lot of gay friends at the time. I had heard good things about the personal ads in PGN — a friend of mine had met someone through them — so I thought I’d give it a shot.”
He placed his first ad the month before and received several responses. Chile met one guy for dinner, but he said “the chemistry wasn’t there.” His next date, however, was with Jeff Jin, a newly out 20-something graduate student in social work at Penn. They had dinner at Pasta Blitz (now Positano Coast) and saw “Beautiful Thing” at the Ritz, a film that has become a personal favorite of theirs.
“After meeting Jeff, I didn’t want to meet anyone else,” Chile said.
The couple, who lives in Voorhees, has been together for nearly 20 years — all because of that ad.
“Frank seemed very genuine in the ad,” said Jin, who had placed ads in PGN in the past himself. Like Chile, Jin was not keen on the bar scene; he too was looking for a steady relationship.
“Guys in bars were after one thing, and that was not what I was looking for,” Jin explained. “I had been seeing someone on and off that I had met the year before, but we had broken up. After a couple of months, I saw Frank’s ad, so I figured, why not?”
On their first date, the two men were very comfortable with one another. Jin recalled, “It was as if I had known him a while. I was relaxed and he was relaxed. And he paid for dinner and the movie — I was a starving student at the time!”
Chile concurred, “I really liked him. We had a lot in common and had a good conversation. We had the same taste in movies and liked the same food. We just clicked.”
Two years after they met, they moved in together, into Chile’s condo in Voorhees. Two years after that, in 2001, they bought a condo together, and in 2004, became domestic partners, which was then legal in the state of New Jersey.
“It was something, which was better than nothing,” Chile observed about the domestic-partner arrangement. “It felt good to have some financial protection; we co-owned the condo.”
“We were looking for something permanent. It was the first legal verification of our relationship that we could get,” Jin added. “We went to Haddonfield to get it done. It wasn’t a wedding. It was a legal status. There was no ring. The witness was a woman who worked in the town hall. It took 15 minutes to do it, and then we both went off to work.”
Jin never thought he would get married because the concept of same-sex marriage being legalized didn’t seem to be a possibility when he met Chile in 1997. After they moved in together, their relationship was a “permanent thing,” and felt “like a marriage.”
In 2007, the couple had a civil union.
“We didn’t want to wait that long, but we had to because they didn’t pass the law until then,” Chile recounted.
“We viewed it as the next step in our relationship,” Jin said. “We were so well bonded. In retrospect, civil unions are ‘marriage light,’ and that’s what it was. But we wanted the most current and highest form of legal recognition that we could have at the time.”
They had a ceremony in the Voorhees town hall officiated by the deputy mayor.
“He was honored to do it because his brother is gay, and he saw this as a step forward, “ Jin said.
In 2013, Chile and Jin were married, but in Delaware.
“We weren’t in a rush to go out of state to do this, but when the federal government issued a statement that all marriages would be recognized on a legal level, no matter what state they were performed in, that prompted us to get married,” Jin explained.
Ironically, in the time between applying for the license and having the ceremony, New Jersey legalized marriage equality, but on Sept. 25, with a dozen friends and family in Wilmington City Hall, they officially tied the knot.
“It was funny. For the first time, I was a little nervous. Maybe because it was marriage. When I was in my 20s, a decade before I met Jeff, I never thought we’d have marriage equality. I got very emotional during the ceremony. It hit me all at once,” Chile recalled.
The couple, however, continues to celebrate their anniversary on April 17, the day of their first date, the date they had all because of an ad Chile placed in PGN.