Surprise, surprise, surprise! Actor Jim Nabors married his longtime male partner, Stan Cadwallader, in a private ceremony on Jan. 15, People magazine reported Wednesday (Jan. 30). The couple have been together for 38 years.
Nabors is best known to fans for his starring role on Gomer Pyle, USMC, which ran from 1964 until 1969. He also pursued a singing career, but has been mostly retired and living away from the spotlight in Hawaii in recent years.
The couple met in 1975, when Cadwallader was a firefighter in Honolulu. They married in a simple ceremony in their room at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in Seattle, just weeks after Washington State's newly-voted approval of same-sex marriage went into effect.
Nabors' sexuality has been the subject of speculation over the years, but he had never confirmed it in public previously. "I'm 82 and he's in his 60s, and so we've been together for 38 years and I'm not ashamed of people knowing," Nabors says. "It's just that it was such a personal thing, I didn't tell anybody."
The actor adds that although he's now married, he doesn't particularly want to become involved in the national debate about same-sex marriage. "I'm not a debater," he states. "And everybody has their own opinion about this, and actually I'm not an activist, so I've never gotten involved in any of this."
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