Eric Kugler likes to say that he met Judge Dean Hansell through Ed Sullivan and Ingrid Bergman. However, what brought them together in February 2011 was GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
Judge Hansell, 70, had now helped the California Superior Court start the Los Angeles Chapter of the alliance in 1986. When he met Mr. Kugler, Judge Hansell was a partner at Hogan Lovells, an international law firm, and hosted a GLAAD fundraiser at his home in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Mr. Kugler, new to LA and GLAAD, came with a friend. After seeing a framed photo of Mr. Sullivan on a wall, he wanted to know more. “I tapped Dean on the shoulder and introduced myself,” he said. Then Mr. Kugler asked, “What’s the matter with Ed Sullivan?” Judge Hansell’s grandparents, he told Mr. Kugler, were friends with the TV host.
A few minutes later, after spying on what he thought was a photograph of Mrs. Bergman, Mr. Kugler approached Judge Hansell again. It turned out that the photo was of Judge Hansell’s mother, a doppelganger. But the confusion helped take their conversation past Hollywood icons. Mr. Kugler left the party with Judge Hansell’s business card. Within months they were a couple.
Although their relationship took off quite quickly, the build-up to it was decades in the making for Mr. Kugler, now 64, who had lived much of his life as a straight man.
In 1995, he was a 37-year-old mortgage broker in Houston with a wife and two sons when a client applying for a loan approached him. Mr Kugler did not reject his advances. “Honestly, I thought I was acting to confirm to myself I wasn’t gay,” he said. As it turned out, “I was wrong.” That encounter led not only to a sexual awakening, but also to a rendezvous that would tear his family apart.
He immediately told his wife, Jeanne Kugler. But they kept it a secret from their sons Joshua and Matthew for eight years, then 12 and 8. Not out of shame, but out of a sense of parental responsibility, Mr. Kugler, who attended a gay father support group at a local Methodist church shortly after his tryst with the client.
The group helped him realize that “first and foremost I am a father,” he added. “I don’t define myself by my sexuality.”
The Kuglers divorced in 2002, telling their children that they had grown apart. A year later, in 2003, Mr. Kugler came to their eldest son Joshua to maintain his integrity. “He asked me bluntly, and I always said I would never lie,” said Mr. Kugler.
On the advice of a therapist he saw, Mr. Kugler would wait a few more years to tell Matthew. But within a few months of Mr. Kugler coming to Joshua, Matthew overheard a conversation between his older brother and their mother about their father, and put it all together.
The realization upset him at first. “I was going to have dinner with Matthew and he said, ‘I don’t want to go out to dinner with you,'” Mr. Kugler said, getting into the car anyway to pick up his son. “It was one of the scariest rides I’ve ever had, not knowing what to say to him.”
When Matthew got into the car, Mr. Kugler asked him, “‘Do you find anything different about me?'” He replied that he didn’t, and Mr. Kugler explained that this was because nothing had changed. “I’m still your father,” he said. “The same dad who took you to the orthodontist yesterday and to the ball on Saturday.”
Reflecting on that period, Matthew, now 34 and a writer and executive producer at Los Angeles podcast production company Treefort Media, said, “We’ve certainly been through some weird times.”
“But it says so much about our family that we got through it,” he added.
When Mrs. Kugler married her second husband in 2005, Mr. Kugler walked her down the aisle. The following year, in 2006, their son Joshua died of cystic fibrosis at age 23. After his death, Matthew said, “I think my parents felt they were living on borrowed time.” He added that the loss of their eldest son helped them “get into this second phase of their lives where they could be best friends”.
In 2011, Mr. Kugler moved to Los Angeles after the sale of the company he co-owned, RMC Vanguard Mortgage Corporation of Houston. He chose LA because Matthew, then a student at the University of Kansas, had recently started an internship there on “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.”
The GLAAD fundraiser at Judge Hansell’s home was one of Mr. Kugler’s first social outings in the city. Taking a date out of the event wasn’t on his agenda, but when he emailed Judge Hansell a few days later to talk about how he could get more involved with GLAAD, they scheduled a meeting.
Their first date—neither can remember whether it was February or March—was dinner at Mr. Kugler’s condominium. He served grapes, and only grapes. “I told him, ‘I’m not the best cook – watch what you say, or I’ll never cook again,'” Mr. Kugler said. Judge Hansell was charmed: “As you can see, he has a great sense of humor.”
By the summer of 2011, neither of them wanted to date anyone else. The fact that Mr Kugler had previously married a woman was not a red flag for Judge Hansell, who had never been married. “Actually, that’s all been positive for me,” he said. “Because he was married, I knew he was capable of a long-term relationship.”
Five summers later, in 2016, Mr. Kugler engaged in moving into Judge Hansell’s Hancock Park home when he was appointed to the Superior Court bench. “He loved being a judge,” Mr. Kugler said. “Every morning he got out of bed bubbly and cheerful. It was nauseating.” But also inspiring.
Since the sale of the Houston mortgage business, Mr. Kugler will continue to work remotely for the company in Los Angeles, under the terms of the sale. When he finally retired in 2017, he decided to try his luck as an actor and stand-up comedian. “I turned 60,” he said. “I thought, I want to do something that I could have that kind of love for too.”
His first audition as an actor, for a Depends TV commercial, didn’t land him a job. “I couldn’t even get a job with a diaper on,” he said. But his first few open mic nights at Flappers, a Burbank comedy club, were the opposite of humiliating. Since then, he regularly books comedy shows and credits his personal life for providing a goldmine of material.
Judge Hansell and Mr. Kugler got engaged in October 2020 over a German chocolate cake breakfast at the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, California. “We’ve been talking about marriage for a while,” Judge Hansell said. Ready to make a proposal, he organized a trip up the central California coast to make the occasion more romantic, and asked the question using one of Mr. Kugler’s favorite forms of communication: post-its.
“Eric is a master at communicating through post-its,” Judge Hansell said. One morning, before waking up Mr. Kugler with cake and coffee, he spelled, “Will you marry me?” letter by letter on individual Post-its and each pasted on a mirror. “I didn’t see that coming,” said Mr. Kugler.
The proposal may have been unexpected, but the timing was not. Mr. Kugler’s son, Matthew and his wife, Laura Potesta Kugler, were set to marry in 2020. Although their wedding was postponed to June 2021 due to the pandemic, Mr Kugler wanted his union with Judge Hansell to be official by the time they become grandfathers. (It hasn’t happened yet.)
“I just felt like this was something we had to do,” said Mr. Kugler. “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 married in the backyard of their home in Hancock Park, where both men were escorted down a grassy aisle strewn with white rose petals. Judge Hansell, in a black tuxedo and skullcap, walked arm in arm with his niece, Kara Aron, and nephew, Grant Hansell. Mr. Kugler, also in a black tuxedo and skullcap, walked with Matthew and Mrs. Potesta Kugler.
Waiting by a huppah draped in flowing white fabric was their officiant, Lisa Edwards, rabbi emerita at Beth Chayim Chadashim Synagogue in Los Angeles. Near the end of a Jewish ceremony that concluded with the pounding of a glass and the scratching of “Mazel tov!”, Rabbi Edwards reminded the couple’s 130 fully vaccinated guests that love has a path or arrives on its own schedule.
“You two demonstrate it tonight and every day: dreams don’t have to have an expiration date,” she said. “Sometimes we don’t even know we had dreams until they come true.”
On this day
When March 26, 2022
True The backyard of the groom’s house in Hancock Park, Los Angeles.
Very, very extraordinary Judge Hansell and Mr. Kugler kicked off a post-wedding reception in their backyard with a performance worthy of “The Ed Sullivan Show”: For their first dance, to Nat King Cole’s song “LOVE,” they wore top hats and held up umbrellas. . When it was over, Mr. Kugler asked Ms. Kugler to dance to Lionel Richie’s “Three Times a Lady,” their wedding song from decades earlier. Both were in tears as they hit the dance floor.
Do not forget In an emotional speech, Matthew thought of his brother. Joshua is said to have loved Judge Hansell, saying, “He would 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 more.”
No problem Since joining the court, Judge Hansell has led about a dozen weddings — some, including Matthew’s, in the same backyard. “For me, it’s one of the most special things about being a judge,” he said.