When Bill Novak and Norman MacArthur moved to the Philadelphia suburbs nearly 20 years ago, they were dismayed to learn that Pennsylvania would not recognize their domestic partnership from New York. 
 
 Bill Novak, left, and partner Norman MacArthur pose for a photograph near the couple's home, Friday, May 22, 2015, in Erwinna, Pa. The couple who were legally recognized as father and son has gotten a... (Associated Press) 
 
 Bill Novak, right, and partner Norman MacArthur pose for a photograph near the couple's home, Friday, May 22, 2015, in Erwinna, Pa. The couple who were legally recognized as father and son has gotten... (Associated Press) 
 
 Bill Novak, right, and partner Norman MacArthur pose for a photograph near the couple's home, Friday, May 22, 2015, in Erwinna, Pa. The couple who were legally recognized as father and son has gotten... (Associated Press) 
 
 Bill Novak, left, and partner Norman MacArthur walk down their driveway to pose for a photograph near the couple's home, Friday, May 22, 2015, in Erwinna, Pa. The couple who were legally recognized as... (Associated Press) 
 
 Bill Novak, right, and partner Norman MacArthur pose for a photograph at the couple's home, Friday, May 22, 2015, in Erwinna, Pa. The couple who were legally recognized as father and son has gotten a... (Associated Press) 
 
 Norman MacArthur, left, helps his partner Bill Novak down a set of steps after they posed for a photograph at the couple's home, Friday, May 22, 2015, in Erwinna, Pa. The couple who were legally recognized... (Associated Press) 
 
 Bill Novak, left, and partner Norman MacArthur pose for a photograph near the couple's home, Friday, May 22, 2015, in Erwinna, Pa. The couple who were legally recognized as father and son has gotten a... (Associated Press) 
 
 So, in 2000, Novak adopted MacArthur — two years his junior — as his son. The move reduced their inheritance tax liability and gave them hospital visitation and other legal rights then unavailable to same-sex couples. 
 
 "We were told when we started to look into this that hell would freeze over before Pennsylvania allowed same-sex marriage," said MacArthur, now 76. "So doing the adoption was literally the only thing we could do to give legal underpinning to our relationship." 
 
 After a federal judge lifted Pennsylvania's same-sex marriage ban last year, the couple, who have been together more than 50 years, wanted to tie the knot. But their legal status as father and son stood in the way. 
 
 No longer. 
 
 Judge Gary B. Gilman of Bucks County Orphans' Court vacated the adoption decree last week. It's the first time a same-sex couple in Pennsylvania petitioned to have their adoption dissolved so they could marry, according to the couple's attorney, Terry Clemons. 
 
 "It removes the hurdle for other people who may be in the same position as Bill and Norm," Clemons said. 
 
 There are no statistics on the number of gay couples who have used adoption as a means to obtain legal recognition of their relationships. But the practice had been controversial within the gay community, said Angela Giampolo, a Philadelphia attorney specializing in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender law. 
 
 Giampolo said she was approached years ago by a gay couple who wanted her to help them navigate the adoption process, but she turned them down. 
 
 "What a lot of advocates back then were saying was this was delegitimizing" of same-sex relationships, said Giampolo, who blogs as Philly Gay Lawyer. 
 
 Also, unlike a marriage, the adoption could not be undone, she said she told the couple. 
 
 MacArthur said his status as Novak's legal son did not change the dynamics of their relationship in any way. Friends and family greeted it with a shrug, he said. 
 
 About 30 of the couple's friends were in the courtroom last week when the judge, noting rapid acceptance of same-sex marriage nationally, agreed to vacate the adoption. 
 
 "The courtroom burst into applause. I burst into tears," MacArthur recalled. "They were certainly happy tears. After months of investigating ways that we could do this and finally having the decision coming down in our favor, I'm still walking 3 feet above the ground." 
 
 He said he knows of several gay couples who went through the adoption process, and Clemons is representing one other couple who is petitioning to vacate the adoption so they can marry. 
 
 Novak, 78, and MacArthur have already gotten a marriage license and plan to wed soon. 
 
 The Doylestown Patch news site first reported on the couple. ||||| Norman MacArthur, left, and Bill Novak were married on Sunday after spending more than a decade as father and son. (Photo: Matt slocum/AP Photo) 
 
 A couple who were legally father and son for the last fifteen years had their adoption vacated and were married this week after 52 years together. 
 
 Norman MacArthur, 74, and Bill Novak, 76, were married in Pennsylvania on Sunday. The couple, who has been together since their 20s, registered as domestic partners in New York City in 1994, but in 2000 they moved to Erwinna, Penn., where domestic partnerships are not legally recognized. “When we moved to Pennsylvania, we had both retired and we were of the age where one begins to do estate planning,” MacArthur tells Yahoo Parenting. “We went to a lawyer who told us Pennsylvania was never going to allow same-sex marriage, so the only legal avenue we had in order to be afforded any rights was adoption.” 
 
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 MacArthur says he thought the suggestion was strange at first. “It struck me as fairly unusual, but we looked into it and discovered that other couples had done it. [Without the adoption] we would be legally strangers.” An adoption would grant the couple certain legal rights they felt compelled to secure. “Most importantly, it would allow us visitation rights in a hospital, and gaining of knowledge if one of us was in the hospital,” he says. “With new HIPAA privacy laws, hospitals are very constrained in what they can say to other people. If we were legally related, I would be allowed into the ER and entitled to know what Bill’s condition was if anything should happen.” 
 
 Bill Novak, left, adopted Norman MacArthur in 2000 in order to secure legal rights. Today, the two are married. (Photo: Matt slocum/AP Photo) 
 
 
 
 So in 2000, the two went through with a legal adoption. Since both men’s parents were dead, the adoption proceeding was fairly easy. “It wasn’t as though I was replacing one parent with another,” MacArthur says. “I was the son and Bill was the father. Bill is two years older than I am, so that was the only reason.” 
 
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 Hayley Gorenberg, deputy legal director at Lambda Legal, says that while adoptions like these aren’t common, they aren’t unheard of, either. “It reflects 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,” she tells Yahoo Parenting. “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 when Pennsylvania’s marriage laws, which prohibited same-sex marriage, were declared unconstitutional last year, MacArthur and Novak wanted to marry. “As marriage equality, which we’ve fought so hard for, is becoming more available, it makes sense that people would pursue the legal option that more closely explains who they are to each other,” Gorenberg says. “Marriage is the better fit, and if it was available without discrimination, it is what they would have chosen originally.” 
 
 The couple’s original lawyer told them that no court would dissolve an adoption unless another person adopted MacArthur. “I said, ‘that makes no sense to me,’ so we began to look around for other options,” he says. Terry Clemons, a lawyer MacArthur knew through volunteer work on the township’s land preservation movement, suggested that the courts might look favorably on a petition to vacate an adoption if it was made clear that the only reason for the original adoption was to give a legal underpinning to the relationship. 
 
 Read More ||||| This week, Bill Novak and Norman MacArthur will go from being father and son to a married couple. 
 
 Before you jump to conclusions, consider this: Novak and MacArthur are not father and son biologically. Rather, their relationship through adoption was solely a technicality to enable the rights they desperately wanted but were not legally able to attain as a married couple. 
 
 The same-sex couple, who have been together for more than 50 years, registered as domestic partners in New York City in 1994. After moving to Bucks County, they learned that Pennsylvania law does not recognize domestic partners and prohibits same sex marriages. 
 
 “The time came about to do estate planning,” MacArthur said. “We were told at that time ‘hell would freeze over before Pennsylvania approves same sex marriage’.” 
 
 They were advised by a lawyer that the only avenue to becoming legally related was through adoption. “It was the only legal method we could use in Pennsylvania to give underpinning to our relationship,” MacArthur said. 
 
 So in 2000, Novak adopted MacArthur. Both sets of their parents were already deceased, preventing another legal hurdle. 
 
 But still they dreamed of being married. 
 
 That dream was on the cusp of becoming a reality 15 years later, when the United States District Court declared unconstitutional Pennsylvania’s Marriage Laws prohibiting same-sex marriage. 
 
 But Novak and MacArthur, now in their 70s, faced another challenge: they were, in the eyes of Pennsylvania, father and son. 
 
 The pair’s Petition to Vacate Adoption Decree was granted on May 14, allowing them to marry. This is the first case in Pennsylvania history seeking to vacate an adoption to allow a same sex couple to marry, their lawyer Terry Clemons said. 
 
 Clemons said the approach of using adoption to gain rights was not uncommon around the turn of the century as same-sex couples were navigating estate planning and access to medical care. 
 
 Clemons, a founding partner of Doylestown-based Clemons, Richter & Reiss, P.C., successfully petitioned the Orphans Court of Bucks County on behalf of the couple. He said when the order was signed from the bench, the couple’s friends and family erupted in applause. 
 
 After years of having to hide behind a phony title in order to gain rights, Novak and MacArthur say they are overjoyed to be able to marry. 
 
 “We are ecstatic beyond belief. I feel an enormous sense of not only relief but freedom that we can finally do something in Pennsylvania that I’ve been dreaming of for years.” 
 
 And they’re wasting no time: the day after the Petition to Vacate Adoption Decree was approved, they applied for a marriage license, which MacArthur said was granted in 15 minutes. 
 
 As of Wednesday, MacArthur said the exact date the couple will make it official hasn’t been set but it will be soon. He said they’ll be married at the courthouse but will celebrate with family and friends at a reception later this summer. 
 
 The judge’s order will not only change MacArthur and Novak’s life, but will have an impact on many other same-sex couples in Pennsylvania, according to Clemons. 
 
 “Not only does it pave the way for this couple to obtain a marriage license, it is an important precedent for others who may be in the same position,” Clemons, Richter & Reiss said in a statement. 
 
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– Roland Bosee Jr., 68, and Nino Esposito, 78, have been inseparable since they first met in 1970. "You meet someone and it just clicks," Esposito told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last month. So with the SCOTUS decision over the summer to legalize gay marriage, the men looked forward to finally tying the knot. But one issue is holding them back: Esposito is technically Bosee's father, because he adopted him in 2012. "We thought never in our lifetime—or in 20 lifetimes—...same-sex marriage [would] happen," Bosee said, adding to CNN that the adoption "gave us the most legitimate thing available to us" at the time. Even though they petitioned to have the adoption annulled, Allegheny County Judge Lawrence O'Toole —known for being progressive on LGBT issues—rejected that plea, noting that adoptions are typically only dissolved when fraud is involved and that nixing theirs "would place in jeopardy and imperil adoption decrees generally." Adoptions of this sort are often sought to cement legal status for financial and other reasons, as well as to strengthen emotional ties. The men said it was both: Esposito told the Post-Gazette "we felt we lacked a family of our own," but they also discovered that any money they inherited from each other would be subject to a much greater inheritance tax if they weren't considered relatives. One person on the couple's side: Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, who tells the Post-Gazette, "I wasn't aware that LGBT couples were turning to this method. I can't even imagine having to get an adoption petition approved … to visit a loved one in the hospital." Casey has written a letter of support to AG Loretta Lynch, asking her office to "consider issuing guidance" in cases like this; her office is reviewing it, a rep tells CNN. (The gay marriage decision held up a heterosexual couple's divorce.)