Gary Fan and Wayne Lodge are a Canberra love story.
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Mr Lodge grew up in country NSW and moved to Canberra to go to university, while Mr Fan, who is from Canada, moved halfway cross the world to escape the cold.
The federal public servants met playing tennis in Barton in November 1997 and have been together ever since.
And as a same-sex couple, they are far from alone, with Australian Bureau of Statistics data issued on Thursday showing a higher proportion of Canberra couples were gay or lesbian than in any other state or territory in Australia.
Of all the couples in the ACT in 2011, 0.5per cent were made up of two men and 0.6per cent were two women. Mr Fan said he was unsurprised by the statistics, because it was often said that Canberra was ''different'' to the rest of Australia.
''Canberra being a very public service town and the various universities that are here, I would expect that the higher degree of either education and or socio-economic status would be more liberal thinking and more accepting of gays and lesbians,'' he said.
Mr Lodge said as an employer the public service could not discriminate against gay and lesbian people and as a cosmopolitan environment, people in Canberra were generally fairly accepting of minorities.
''People come to Canberra for whatever reason, work or education, and they are removed from a lot of the biases and the discrimination that might actually be holding them back in their family environment, particularly when they're young,'' he said.
Southside couple Jo Lowry and Jenna Crowe met when they were both working at a Canberra hotel and have been together nearly two years.
Ms Lowry said she found Canberra to be far more accepting of her same sex relationships than neighbouring regional centres.
''Canberra's still a fairly new city, so the behaviours and everything haven't been established a longer amount of time,'' she said.
''Canberra's 100 this year, [but] smaller towns that have been more established, they're more closed communities.''