A couple of weeks ago a story broke that got the heterosexual community in a frenzy—Norman MacArthur and Bill Novak of Bucks County petitioned a court to dissolve their legal adoption so they could get married. MacArthur and Novak were father and son in the eyes of the law for 15 years and together as partners in life for more than 50 years. Because of historical opposition to gay marriage, long-term, same-sex couples have historically adopted one another for legal protection; we couldn’t sit around and wait for marriage equality to show up, so we creatively circumvented the negative outcomes that default laws imposed on the LGBT community who were considered “legal strangers” to one another.

Novak and MacArthur are in excellent company. Bayard Rustin, the civil rights organizer who imparted nonviolence credos to Martin Luther King Jr., adopted his partner, Walter Naegle, for inheritance tax purposes. The process required Naegle’s mother to legally disown him, a request that understandably confused her and was extremely painful for Naegle to request. With that said, despite being “out” as partners during the course of their 10-year relationship, Naegle was cited as Rustin’s son in Rustin’s 1987 New York Times obituary. While Naegle was denied his true status as Rustin’s life partner in print, the legal maneuvering granted him the role of being the executor of Rustin’s estate.

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