Pandemic pushes Lexington couple of 35 years to get married on neighbor’s front lawn
Michael and Stephen Trask decided to get married just two weeks ago.
Michael, a 52-year-old UK English professor, and Stephen, a 53-year-old Tony-winning musician, writer, and composer, have been a family for almost 35 years.
As the global coronavirus pandemic swept through the Bluegrass in recent weeks, worries over what may happen if one of them died prematurely made them suddenly change course.
Marriage in Kentucky was not an option for gay couples until just a few years ago. After the Supreme Court ruled it legal nationally, “there were no good reasons not to be married,” Michael said. They’d made a few plans to get married in recent years, but they all fell through.
“We were just sort of being lazy and letting stuff play out,” Michael said. “But then this world-changing event occurs within a space of a month or two, and suddenly priorities start to rise to the surface.”
After looking up how to get married online, Stephen passed by his neighbor, Kathy Stein, a Fayette circuit judge, and remembered that she could marry them. Stein agreed to it, and neighbors Stefan and Jennifer Bird-Pollan agreed to be witnesses.
“It just doesn’t feel safe to not be married,” Stephen said. “I didn’t want it so that Michael couldn’t inherit the house, my half of the house. It felt cruel.”
An end-of-life situation could be made more complicated if the two weren’t married, Michael said.
“There are all these intangible things like visitation rights or do-not-resuscitate orders,” Michael said. “It sounds really morbid. It wasn’t a fear of death that made us get married. We just didn’t want this relationship which was so real in so many ways — and has been to so many people — to suddenly be faced with some nameless, faceless bureaucracy.”
On Thursday, the pair got their marriage license in a downtown parking garage — part of the Fayette County clerk’s limited office hours for obtaining licenses — and that night, they had a rehearsal dinner via Zoom. On Friday afternoon, they were married on Stein’s front yard, a wedding scene that was unimaginable more than a month ago.
“What a lovely day for a wedding,” Stein said, adorned in her black judge’s robes, on her front porch.
The emotional and teary-eyed, married couple-to-be walked arm-in-arm through the windy spring afternoon, halting — more than six-feet away — on the walkway on Stein’s front yard. The wedding’s witnesses stood even farther back, almost in the street on tree-lined Transylvania Park.
Vows, “I do’s” and kisses were exchanged. The pair crushed a glass beneath their feet while Stein cheered “mazel tov.”
“Did we just witness a wedding?” said one excited wedding crasher who walked out onto her neighboring porch during the short ceremony. “Congratulations,” she said, smiling.
The wedding done for “security” was not short on emotion and love, Stephen said.
“I felt like it was still extremely emotional to have an official ceremony, to hear those words, and we were both kind of crying,” Stephen said.
“It was emotional,” Michael said. “More emotional than I thought it would be. It’s powerful. It’s a powerful thing.”
This story was originally published April 10, 2020 at 5:26 PM.