Couple Wants to Marry Even Though They’re Legally Father and Son

After 43 years together, one couple is eager to wed now that same-sex marriage is legal across the nation. Unfortunately, they’ve encountered one major roadblock: Legally, they are father and son.

When Nino Esposito (pictured, left), 78, and Drew Bosee, 68, updated their wills in 2012, the longtime couple sought a way to gain the same legal rights afforded to straight couples — such as hospital visitation rights in case of an emergency. At the time, same-sex marriage was still illegal in their home state. “We never thought it was going to come to Pennsylvania in our lifetime,” Bosee told the New York Daily News. So the couple decided to pursue adoption, a tactic some gay couples have used to legally solidify their relationship before the Supreme Court outlawed state gay marriage bans in June of this year. “It was mainly about the legitimacy of being a true family that we had been in effect for 43 years,” Bosee said.

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So Esposito adopted Bosee, legally becoming his partner’s father. “[These kind of adoptions] reflect people’s deep need to protect each other as family, and the attempt to use law that obviously isn’t a perfect fit to their situation to protect each other,” Hayley Gorenberg, deputy legal director at Lambda Legal, told Yahoo Parenting about another such case earlier this year. “While we’ve had a patchwork nation and people have been desperate to take care of each other in some basic way legally, people have sometimes gotten creative to do what they need to do to protect each other as a family. It’s entirely understandable.”

But now that same-sex marriage is legal nationwide, Bosee and Esposito want to be married. “We realized we could have a complete union, which is what we want,” Esposito told CNN. To do so, the couple needs to get their adoption vacated — a ruling they didn’t think would be a problem.

Unfortunately, they were wrong. In June, a state trial judge rejected the couple’s request to annul the adoption, saying that such a reversal should be carried out by a higher court. In his decision, Allegheny County Judge Lawrence O’Toole said that he was “sensitive to the situation [in which] Mr. Esposito and Mr. Bosee found themselves,” and added that he “welcomes direction from our appellate courts in handling parallel cases.”

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“It’s sort of ironic that by doing the adoption, we thought we were getting ahead of the game,” Bosee told the Daily News. “But instead of being a help, it’s become a roadblock, a hindrance, to what we should be allowed to do now.”

In similar cases, judges have vacated adoptions when marriage was the more fitting option. In May, before the Supreme Court ruling, but after Pennsylvania’s laws prohibiting same-sex marriage were ruled unconstitutional, another couple successfully reversed their father-son relationship and became a married couple after 50 years together. “When we went to court my knees were knocking, but at the end of the hearing [our lawyer] said, ‘We’re hoping you will sign the order to vacate the adoption from the bench,’ and the judge said ‘I will happily do that,’” Norman MacArthur, 74, who was adopted by his partner, Bill Novak, 76, told Yahoo Parenting at the time. “We had 30 friends in court to show that this case was out of the ordinary — though the judge knew that — and when the judge signed the order our friends burst into applause and I burst into tears.”

Bosee and Esposito expected the same outcome. “We had our $80 in cash and we were ready to go across the street to get our license,” Esposito told CNN. “Judge O'Toole had other ideas.”

Gorenberg says it is only natural that a same-sex couple would want to secure a marriage over an adoption. “As marriage equality [has become available], it makes sense that people would pursue the legal option that more closely explains who they are to each other,” Gorenberg said. “Marriage is the better fit, and if it was available without discrimination, it is what they would have chosen originally.”

Bosee and Esposito have filed an appeal to the state Superior Court, and on Monday, Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey wrote a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking the Justice Department to intervene. “LGBT couples should have the right to obtain a marriage license, no matter the state or jurisdiction in which they reside,“ Casey wrote, according to CNN. "In adoption cases such as these, the law has changed dramatically since the adoptions were first carried out.” A Justice Department spokeswoman told CNN that the department is reviewing Casey’s request.

Arguments in Bosee and Esposito’s appeal are set to begin in December, and the couple is hoping their long road will help other couples in similar predicaments. “We hope this will help other people after we’re gone. This has to stop,” Esposito told the Daily News. “We thought we wouldn’t live to see what the Supreme Court did this year with same sex marriage throughout the country. Now, we’re concerned we’re not going to live to see our own marriage happen.”

Photo: Jared Wickerham/New York Daily News

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