"When I hug him, touch him, hear his voice, it feels like your favorite blanket when you were little. I'm a big worrier. He always calms me down."

Their legal victory has granted them a certain profile, although not everyone in the gay community feels warm and fuzzy about being represented by convicted drug-dealers in what could be a precedent-setting case.

"I don't think they'll be embraced by the gay community as a whole," said Malcolm Lazin, executive director of Equality Forum, a national gay-civil-rights organization based in Philadelphia. Regardless, Lazin emphasized the importance of their case. "In principle, people should be treated equally," he said.

Mangini concedes that their criminal background could put people off. They are happy for acceptance on a smaller scale.

"It's the people that matter most to us whose opinions we care about," he said. "I regret what I did, but I'm not embarrassed by what I did. It all started with a disease, no different from cancer or AIDS," he added, referring to drug addiction. "That led to some bad choices and criminal activity."

For Cooper, the ACLU's staff attorney, the issue is not how the men are perceived but the legal victory they now represent. "An important principle needed to be addressed," she said.

In retrospect, both men said their arrest was the best thing that could have happened, because it forced them to get clean. "I would have died in Florida, or wherever we ran," Mangini said.

He has good and bad days, and he tires easily. "This might be as well as I get, but I'm alive," he said. "I'm here. I can breathe, I can see. I'll be around to haunt Steven for a while."

Mangini remains estranged from much of his family. Two of his four brothers do not speak to him, he said, and he is unable to see his nieces, nephews, and godchild. His mother died in 1994; his father remarried and lives in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

There are no such familial fissures on Roberts's side. He and Mangini plan to attend the first Roberts family reunion, on Aug. 25 at his brother's home in Spring City. Thus far, there are 73 confirmed attendees.

"It's not a fairy-tale ending, but true love prevailed," Mangini said.