Veteran Who Came Out at 90 Celebrates First Wedding Anniversary with Husband: 'I'm Very Happy' (Exclusive)

• Kenneth Felts, 94, is celebrating a year of marriage to Johnny Hau, 35
• "It was just a wonderful feeling, and especially to know that Johnny was going to be mine forever," Felts tells PEOPLE about the wedding
• He has written a memoir, My Handful of Stars: Coming Out at Age 90, which chronicles his journey

A Colorado couple who found each other after one of the groom's coming out stories went viral is celebrating their first wedding anniversary.

"After meeting Johnny, everything has just bloomed," Kenneth Felts, who announced he was gay in 2020, when he was 90 years old, tells PEOPLE. "The freedom I have to speak out, go around, things like that — I'm a new person. I'm a different person."

For their anniversary on Monday, July 8, the couple had a "wonderful" time attending a local drag show at Hamburger Mary's, according to Felts (who said he also got a lap dance from his husband onstage).

The previous day, they also celebrated with his daughter, Rebecca Mayes, and her family at their usual Sunday lunch.

"We gave them a gift card to go out to dinner together and got them an ice cream cake that we all had a slice of," says Mayes.

For Felts, saying yes to spending the rest of his life with Johnny Hau, 35, was a journey that took decades.

In 2019, the retiree and Korean War veteran was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He underwent chemotherapy and by 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he was forced to endure his sickness while isolated at his Arvada home. 

Felts tells PEOPLE that during this time, a friend convinced him to write a memoir. He started and got to a point where he mentioned his first love, Phillip Jones.

During a visit one day, his daughter, who came out to her father as a lesbian after she graduated college, asked why he was crying. He replied, "Because I should never have left Phillip."

"I outed myself to my daughter," he recalls now. "[I] had never intended to out myself to anybody, but I outed it to her ... She took it very well. So I decided to put it on the net, on my Facebook, and instead of doing it to my friends, I did it to [the] public unknowingly."

Soon, his story was being told across the globe, and one of the people who first heard about it was Hau.

"It took a lot of courage for him to come out, and I wasn't really fully out also," Hau, who works in I.T., tells PEOPLE. "I just felt like I wanted to talk to someone about this."

So Hau reached out and the pair set up a blind date.

"We met on a Friday evening, and we had our masks on, of course, because of COVID," Felts says. "We went up to the salad course, and then we were able to unmask. We talked, and I liked what I saw and I liked what I heard."

Despite the decades-wide age difference, Hau says he felt "connected" to Felts.

He tells PEOPLE that it was a "real battle to be at peace" with his affinity for older partners, but the moment he met Felts, he found the two had a lot in common.

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One of those commonalities was their faith.

"I was raised Catholic and a lot of this idea of how to not commit sin and stuff like that and that was really bothering me," Hau says. "I saw that similarity with his story about him finding guilt when he was trying to be happy with Phillip, and that really connected with me."

The two would stay up talking the night they met and ultimately, as their relationship grew, Hau began to visit each weekend and on Tuesdays.

Then on July 8, 2023, the two shared a small backyard wedding. "It was a real close family affair there, and it was just a wonderful feeling, and especially to know that Johnny was going to be mine forever," Felts says.

Now in remission, Felts tells PEOPLE that, outside of his first marriage and Mayes's birth, the last four years have probably been the best in his life.

Born in Kansas in 1930, Felts says that he was raised in a "rather fundamental Christian family." He completed two years of college and joined the Navy, serving in the Korean War from 1950 to 1954. He then graduated from college and started work as an insurance investigator in California.

Although he identified as straight at the time, he remembers that "one of the guys in the group came over to my desk" to help him with his forms. That man was Phillip, and the pair started "meeting for coffee" and then it "wasn't long before we were dating."

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The two kept their relationship a secret but grew closer, eventually living together. "Sitting in church one day, he was in the choir singing, and I was in the pews, and I was bombarded with guilt," Felts says. "This basic Christian indoctrination that I'd had all my life really kicked in."

He acknowledges that he ended things with Phillip by "ghosting," and he left California and moved back to Dodge City, in Kansas. Hiding his true identity, Felts got married in 1962 and become a father 10 years later. But he and his wife divorced in 1980. 

"I started looking for Phillip again," he says. He used the phone book and called every Phillip Jones he could find, but was never able to track him down. 

When Felts came out to his daughter — who lives a mile away from him — Mayes, a married mother of two, felt overwhelmed with "compassion," she tells PEOPLE.

Mayes has always had a close relationship with Felts, who raised her from about the age of 11, and admits she wasn't totally surprised by his admission.

Finally living his life freely, Felts published his memoir, My Handful of Stars: Coming Out at Age 90, in 2022 and enjoys creating art using organic and recycled materials — some of which has been on display at the Denver Art Museum

Meanwhile, Mayes says that the family has lunch together at least once a week with her son, who is in college, and often joins them. 

Felts says he's living his life as if age "did not matter."

"I just enjoy every day now knowing that Johnny is here and my family is here, and we get together," he says. "I'm an old man, but I'm very happy to be an old man with all my support around me."