As Huston told San Diego LGBT Weekly, “This is a huge step for me,” acknowledging that the eyes of history—as well as thousands of LGBT servicemen and –women—were upon him and Guerrero (a name which, in Spanish, translates as “warrior”). Upon Guerrero’s appearance and following several minutes of reunion, Huston asked for Guerrero’s hand in marriage, producing an engagement ring and asking “Will you marry me?” as reported by LGBT Weekly. After Guerrero accepted with a simple “Yes,” he admitted that he was “blown away.” “I was shocked that after all we’d been through, he would honestly want to spend the rest of his life with someone like me,” Guerrero said.

Guerrero told CNN that he thought at first that Huston was breaking up with him because he had first asked the Marine to remove his “promise ring.” “Once he got down on one knee, I literally started thinking, like, ‘Is he serious? Is he really going to ask me to marry him after everything we’ve been through?’”

Huston—who was discharged from the Navy in 2006 under DADT—said their engagement sends a positive message to LGBT troops. “It’s important to us ’cause we got engaged,” he explained, “but it’s also important because there’s young gay people coming out of boot camp who, even though it’s okay to be gay in the military, there’s still a stigma and I want them to be like, ‘Okay, well other people have done it, so I don’t have to be ashamed of who I am.’” He added, “I spent too many years being ashamed of who I was and trying to be someone I wasn’t.”

LGBT advocates say that the proposal represents the most recent in a series of turning points for gay servicemembers and their partners. In December, Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta was photographed—in what came to be called the “kiss heard ’round the world”—in a loving embrace with her partner, Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell after Gaeta’s ship returned its Virginia Beach base. The image was compared with the iconic picture by photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt depicting nurse Edith Shain locked in a kiss with an unknown sailor at the close of the Second World War. Gaeta had won in a charity raffle the honor of the service’s traditional “first kiss.” Also groundbreaking was the picture taken in February of a gay Marine sharing a kiss with his boyfriend at Marine Corps Base Hawaii with his boyfriend, also went viral.