Photos: Gene Dugan and Jay Brause Alaska Gay Rights Pioneers

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Jay Brause and Gene Dugan who were recently married in Alaska talk about their long road to marriage on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2015. The couple, who now live in England, first tried to get married in Alaska 21 years ago.

It only took them 21 years, four previous attempts and one Alaska constitutional amendment being implemented and overturned, but last week, Jay Brause and Gene Dugan finally married in Alaska.

"It feels like a completion," Dugan said in an interview with the couple Tuesday in a home on the Anchorage Hillside. The two were in Alaska for the past month, sorting through the last of their belongings, donating 16 boxes of professional paperwork to the University of Alaska Anchorage and visiting friends before returning to their home in England. They left Wednesday.

The wedding on Sept. 19 brought the couple's attempts to legally wed in the state full circle. Dugan and Brause, co-founders of Out North art house and LGBT activists, first tried to marry in Alaska in 1994. The results of that action led to a legal maelstrom that ended with a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in 1998. That provision was struck down by a federal judge last October and reaffirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in June.

Over 100 people attended the wedding of Dugan, 63, and Brause, 62. The Quaker ceremony at the Pioneer School House in Anchorage meant the two declared their vows to each other without a pastor, a Quaker tradition. They wore "Alaskan tuxedos" -- matching gray fleece vests and jeans -- and shared a sheet cake with a two-grooms cake topper from their first legal marriage in Portland, Oregon, in 2004.

Read more: Two decades after their first try, LGBT activists Gene Dugan and Jay Brause wed in Alaska