ABC News Nightline reporter James Longman recently posted a video of his engagement to his boyfriend Alex Brannan. Longman popped the question while the two were in Burford, a small medieval English town about 70 miles northwest of London.
Brannan’s mother recorded Longman proposing in an outdoor garden. Shortly afterward, the women in Brannan’s family excitedly clapped, cheered, and one declared, “So we’ve got a wedding!”
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“We’re engaged,” Longman wrote on Instagram. “I asked Alex in the garden while his mum filmed, trying to stop his nephew from running over to us. And then the rest of the family came over. There was quite a lot of crying.”
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Instagram users have already viewed the video of their engagement over 47,000 times.
In his own Instagram post about the proposal, Brannan wrote, “Any man who is able to keep a secret like this from me is surely a man I want to marry… so I guess I will do that.”
Since working at ABC, the 33-year-old journalist has covered terror attacks and other breaking news around Europe and the Middle East. He has also reported stories for ABC’s Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and Nightline.
In October 2019, Longman came out to General Apti Alaudinov, head of the Chechnya Police Force, on television while reporting a story about the semi-autonomous Russian region’s long, ongoing campaign of kidnapping, detaining, torturing and killing queer men and women.
“I’ve definitely had some awkward coming out moments in my life,” Longman wrote about the experience. “But I don’t think any can compare to telling a man who is the head of a police force accused of torturing hundreds of LGBTQ people that I’m gay.”
Longman said the 50 other Chechen officers in the room whispered to one another while Alaudinov tried to appear unfazed.
