Yeah, yeah, yeah. What is it like when they’re both here with other people?  The apartment was only just furnished this past week; that hasn’t come up yet, the men say. But they don’t see it as a problem. “We have been in that situation before,” says Mr. Gold, who tends to do more of the talking. “I think we’ve gone away on vacations and I’ve been with somebody and he’s been with somebody; it’s just a part of life. I genuinely want him to be happy, and I believe he feels the same way about me.”  They seem to get along wonderfully. Can they say why they broke up?  They throw up a joking cover.  “Personal stuff,” Mr. Gold says. “Bob’s a jerk.”  “Mitchell’s a moron,” Mr. Williams says.  Mr. Williams, who is 45 and was once a graphic artist at Seventeen magazine, and Mr. Gold, who is 56 and worked as a buyer at Bloomingdale’s, started their business together in 1989 with a stake of $60,000. Today, they say, their company bills $100 million annually. The company headquarters and manufacturing site in North Carolina has an on-site day care center; the men contribute to a number of liberal causes. A year and a half ago they put up $100,000 to start Faith in America, an organization to fight religion-based bigotry. But when it comes to investments, Mr. Gold says more than once, they insist on “good value.”  Mr. Gold had originally planned to buy an apartment in Manhattan on his own. “Then I realize that if he’ll go in with me, we’ll have twice as much,” he says.  “I’m also thinking real estate in New York goes up and up and up,” Mr. Williams says.  The men searched for 18 months, looking at over 40 apartments. They had one requirement that made finding the right place particularly difficult: they wanted two master bedrooms, each with its own bath. Eventually, they decided on two apartments: a one-bedroom and a two-bedroom in a luxury co-op a few blocks from the Hudson River, on 42nd Street. (The men will not say what the apartments and subsequent renovation cost.) Then Mr. Gold interviewed architects, finally deciding on Jim Bartholomew, who designed the New York nightspots G Lounge and Therapy.  “Four of them were what I called stainless modern,” Mr. Gold says. “Hard edges, lots of stainless. He was the one who did a soft feeling.”  Mr. Gold created two large bedrooms, separated by a large, long living-and-dining room. A black granite bar separates the open kitchen from the dining area. The men did indeed seem to be insisting on good value. Instead of doing a custom closet in his walk-in space, Mr. Gold put in an armoire; a custom closet costs thousands of dollars, he says, and when you leave the building, you can’t take it with you. Mr. Williams, who of course acted as decorator, was also practical: He put a day-bed lounge in Mr. Gold’s office. When Mr. Gold protested that he wasn’t going to sleep there, Mr. Williams explained that if he had put a wooden desk there, he would have to worry about it getting scratched. For his bathroom, Mr. Gold devised an ingenious way of adjusting the water temperature before getting in: there is a fist-size circle in the glass shower door near the faucets that one can reach through to test the water. He got the idea from his parents’ condo in Florida, where the shower head and the faucet are mounted at opposite ends of the space.  The photos on the walls — which are now also part of the Gold-Williams line — are the work of their friend Tipper Gore. On a corner table is a small collection of bulldogs, most of them flea market finds.  Mr. Gold, the more political of the two, talks about Faith in America, and his belief that when politicians attack an issue like gay marriage on religious grounds they are not challenged. This spring, the group began an ad campaign for gay rights.  “People are using these religious beliefs to deny other people full and equal rights, and those people happen to be the president of the United States, the legislators,” Mr. Gold says. “We live around a lot of these religious folks that believe this way, and they are nice, good people, but they do not realize the harm they are causing.”  Both Mr. Williams, who grew up in Texas and whose father was an Air Force pilot, and Mr. Gold, who was raised as a reform Jew in Trenton, N.J., say the prevalence of negative images of gay men when they were young made it difficult for them to accept their sexuality. Mr. Gold has said that when he was 14, he decided that if he couldn’t “cure” himself by the time he turned 21 he would kill himself. By the time he was in college, he was so depressed that his father, unaware of the reason for his depression, sent him to a psychiatrist.  “I uttered the words, ‘I think I’m gay and I want to be cured,’ ” Mr. Gold says. “I remember him saying, ‘I can’t cure you of that, but I can work with you about how to live with it.’ He taught me this was the way it was and it was O.K. Of all the lucky things in the world that happened to me, I feel lucky that I got to go to a psychiatrist who told me it was O.K. Because in those days, the early ’70s, I could just as easily have hit a psychiatrist who said it was not O.K. If you grow up in Taylorsville or Hickory, N.C., they’re going to send you to some quack doctor who’s not really a doctor, to try cure your homosexuality.”  Being able to tell his parents that he was gay was still difficult for Mr. Gold. At 24, he blurted it out to his mother on the phone when he called one Sunday morning. Still half asleep, he told her he was going to St. Thomas for a week with his friend Michael.  “She said, ‘I don’t understand why you do everything with Michael — why can’t you get a girlfriend?’ ” Mr. Gold says. “I said, ‘My idea of a girlfriend is Michael.’ ”  There were tears and an argument, but these days Mr. Gold’s parents, both 86, are very accepting. When he called to tell them that he and Mr. Williams had decided not to be a couple anymore, his mother demanded to know if they would still be able to see Bob. Which is exactly the way Mr. Gold felt it should be.
Despite breaking up, Mitchell Gold and Bob Williams continue to run the furniture company that bears their names.