After Soul Searching, the City of Angels and a New Mate

Eric Kugler likes to say he met Judge Dean Hansell by Ed Sullivan and Ingrid Bergman. What truly introduced them collectively in February 2011, although, was GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

Now on the Superior Court of California, Judge Hansell, 70, had helped to begin the alliance’s Los Angeles chapter in 1986. When he met Mr. Kugler, Judge Hansell was a accomplice at Hogan Lovells, a global regulation agency, and internet hosting a GLAAD fund-raiser at his dwelling in Los Angeles’s Hancock Park neighborhood.

Mr. Kugler, new to L.A. and to GLAAD, got here with a buddy. After seeing a framed {photograph} of Mr. Sullivan on a wall, he wished to know extra. “I tapped Dean on the shoulder and introduced myself,” he mentioned. Then Mr. Kugler requested, “What’s the deal with Ed Sullivan?” Judge Hansell’s grandparents, he advised Mr. Kugler, had been pals with the TV host.

A couple of minutes later, after spying what he thought was a {photograph} of Ms. Bergman, Mr. Kugler approached Judge Hansell once more. It turned out the image was of Judge Hansell’s mom, a look-alike. But the mix-up helped transfer their dialog previous Hollywood icons. Mr. Kugler left the get together with Judge Hansell’s enterprise card. Within months, they had been a couple.

Though their relationship took off pretty shortly, the lead as much as it was many years in the making for Mr. Kugler, now 64, who had lived as a straight man for a lot of his life.

In 1995, he was a 37-year-old mortgage dealer in Houston with a spouse and two sons when a shopper who utilized for a mortgage got here onto him. Mr. Kugler didn’t flip down his advances. “Truthfully, I thought I was acting on it just to confirm to myself I wasn’t gay,” he mentioned. As it turned out, “I was wrong.” Not solely did that encounter result in a sexual awakening, but additionally a tryst that might rupture his household.

He advised his spouse, Jeanne Kugler, instantly. But they saved it a secret from their sons Joshua and Matthew, then 12 and 8, for eight years. Not as a result of of disgrace, however out of a sense of parental accountability, mentioned Mr. Kugler, who began attending a homosexual fathers’ help group at a native Methodist church quickly after his tryst with the shopper.

The group helped him understand that “I’m a father first,” he added. “I don’t define myself by my sexuality.”

The Kuglers divorced in 2002, telling their kids that they had grown aside. A 12 months later, in 2003, Mr. Kugler got here out to Joshua, their elder son, to protect his integrity. “He point-blank asked me, and I had always said I would never lie,” Mr. Kugler mentioned.

Following recommendation from a therapist he was seeing, Mr. Kugler was going to attend a couple extra years to inform Matthew. But inside a couple of months of Mr. Kugler popping out to Joshua, Matthew overheard a dialog between his older brother and their mom about their father, and put all of it collectively.

The realization upset him at first. “I was supposed to go to dinner with Matthew, and he said, ‘I don’t want to go to dinner with you,’” mentioned Mr. Kugler, who acquired in the automobile to choose his son up anyway. “It was one of the scariest drives I’ve ever had, not knowing what I was going to say to him.”

When Matthew acquired into the automobile, Mr. Kugler requested him, “‘Do you notice anything different about me?’” He replied that he didn’t, and Mr. Kugler defined that this was as a result of nothing had modified. “I’m still your father,” he mentioned. “The same father who took you to the orthodontist yesterday and to the prom on Saturday.”

Reflecting on that interval, Matthew, now 34 and a author and govt producer at the podcast manufacturing firm Treefort Media in Los Angeles, mentioned, “certainly we went through some weird times.”

“But it says so much about our family that we got through it,” he added.

When Ms. Kugler married her second husband, in 2005, Mr. Kugler walked her down the aisle. The following 12 months, in 2006, their son Joshua died of cystic fibrosis at age 23. After his loss of life, Matthew mentioned, “I think my parents felt they were living on borrowed time.” He added that the loss of their elder son helped them transfer “into this second phase of their lives, where they could be best friends.”

In 2011, Mr. Kugler moved to Los Angeles after promoting the firm he co-owned, RMC Vanguard Mortgage Corporation in Houston. He selected L.A. as a result of Matthew, then a pupil at the University of Kansas, had not too long ago began an internship there, at “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.”

The GLAAD fund-raiser at Judge Hansell’s home was amongst Mr. Kugler’s first social outings in the metropolis. Getting a date out of the occasion wasn’t half of his agenda, however when he emailed Judge Hansell a few days later to speak about how he may get extra concerned with GLAAD, they scheduled a get-together.

Their first date — neither can bear in mind if it was that February or March — was dinner at Mr. Kugler’s condominium. He served grapes, and grapes solely. “I told him, ‘I’m not the best cook — watch what you say or I’ll never cook again,’” Mr. Kugler mentioned. Judge Hansell was charmed: “As you can tell, he has a great sense of humor.”

By the summer season of 2011, neither wished up to now anybody else. The proven fact that Mr. Kugler had beforehand been married to a girl was not a pink flag for Judge Hansell, who had by no means been married. “Actually, that’s all been a positive to me,” he mentioned. “Because he was married, I knew he was capable of having a long-term relationship.”

Five summers later, in 2016, Mr. Kugler was in the course of of transferring into Judge Hansell’s Hancock Park home when he was appointed to the Superior Court bench. “He loved being a judge so much,” Mr. Kugler mentioned. “Every morning he would get out of bed bubbly and gleeful. It was nauseating.” But additionally inspiring.

Since promoting the mortgage firm in Houston, Mr. Kugler had continued to work remotely for it in Los Angeles per the phrases of the sale. When he lastly retired in 2017, he determined to strive his luck as an actor and standup comedian. “I was turning 60,” he mentioned. “I thought, I want to do something that I could have such a love for, too.”

His first audition as an actor, for a Depends tv industrial, didn’t land him a job. “I couldn’t even get a job wearing a diaper,” he mentioned. But his first few open mic nights at Flappers, a Burbank comedy membership, had been the reverse of humiliating. He’s been reserving comedy exhibits steadily ever since, and credit his private life for offering a gold mine of materials.

Judge Hansell and Mr. Kugler turned engaged in October 2020 over a breakfast of German chocolate cake at the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, Calif. “We had been talking about marriage for a while,” Judge Hansell mentioned. Ready to suggest, he orchestrated a journey up the central coast of California to make the event extra romantic, and popped the query utilizing one of Mr. Kugler’s favourite types of communication: Post-its.

“Eric is a master of communicating through Post-its,” Judge Hansell mentioned. One morning, earlier than he roused Mr. Kugler with cake and espresso, he spelled out “Will you marry me?” letter by letter on particular person Post-its and caught every to a mirror. “I did not see that coming,” Mr. Kugler mentioned.

The proposal might have been surprising, however the timing of it was not. Mr. Kugler’s son Matthew and his spouse, Laura Potesta Kugler, had been imagined to be married in 2020. Though their wedding ceremony acquired pushed to June 2021 as a result of of the pandemic, Mr. Kugler wished his union with Judge Hansell to be official by the time they turn into grandfathers. (It hasn’t occurred but.)

“I just felt like it was something we should do,” Mr. Kugler mentioned. “When people ask, Why did you decide to get married after 11 years? We say it’s because we wanted to have grandchildren together.”

On March 26, the couple wed in the again yard of their Hancock Park dwelling, the place each males had been escorted down a grassy aisle scattered with white rose petals. Judge Hansell, in a black tuxedo and skullcap, walked arm in arm together with his niece, Kara Aron, and nephew, Grant Hansell. Mr. Kugler, additionally in a black tuxedo and skullcap, walked with Matthew and Ms. Potesta Kugler.

Waiting at a huppah draped with flowing white material was their officiant, Lisa Edwards, rabbi emerita at the Beth Chayim Chadashim synagogue in Los Angeles. Toward the finish of a Jewish ceremony capped by the stomping of a glass and hoots of “Mazel tov!,” Rabbi Edwards reminded the couple’s 130 totally vaccinated company that love has a manner or arriving by itself schedule.

“You two demonstrate it tonight and every day: Dreams need have no expiration dates,” she mentioned. “Sometimes we don’t even know we had dreams until they come true.”

On This Day

When March 26, 2022

Where The again yard of the grooms’ dwelling in Hancock Park, Los Angeles.

Very, Very Extraordinary Judge Hansell and Mr. Kugler kicked off a post-wedding reception of their again yard with a efficiency worthy of “The Ed Sullivan Show”: for his or her first dance, to the track “L.O.V.E.” by Nat King Cole, they wore high hats and held parasols. When it ended, Mr. Kugler requested Ms. Kugler for a dance to Lionel Richie’s “Three Times a Lady,” their wedding ceremony track from many years earlier. Both had been in tears as they took to the dance ground.

Not Forgotten In an emotional speech, Matthew remembered his brother. Joshua would have cherished Judge Hansell, he mentioned: “He’d be thrilled to finally have an intellectual conversation in the family.” But “more than that, to see someone who would accept, support and love who you were, are and will be, Dad. No child could hope for anything more.”

No Objections Since becoming a member of the courtroom, Judge Hansell has officiated about a dozen weddings — some, together with Matthew’s, in the identical again yard. “To me, it’s one of the most special things about being a judge,” he mentioned.