Married now for seven years, writer/director Don Roos and actor Dan Bucatinsky are humbled to be honored with Pacific Pride’s first-ever Advocacy Award, which they will receive this Saturday, but they aren’t exactly sure why they’re getting it. “We’ve never done any work up here in Santa Barbara, though we are very aware of Pacific Pride and all the good it has done,” said Bucatinsky, who won an Emmy as James Novak in Scandal. “But we’ve also done a lot of advocacy work in Los Angeles. This is a wonderful surprise.”
They do have serious Santa Barbara ties, though, splitting their time between here and Los Angeles. “We’ve been coming to Santa Barbara almost as long as we’ve been together,” said Bucatinsky, who was set up on a date 23 years ago with Roos, best known for his work on The Opposite of Sex. “Don brought me to the San Ysidro Ranch on, like, our third date,” said Bucatinsky, “and that weekend, we went out looking for a place here to live.” Added Roos, “It took us two years, but we did it.”
They married officially in the brief, tricky window of availability in 2008, just before Proposition 8’s short-lived same-sex ban kicked in, mainly thinking of their kids. “We wanted them to have the most legal protection possible,” said Roos.