Frederick Marvin and Ernst Schuh Are Married

It's funny when people ask how long Carlos and I have been together, and say 'Wow' when I tell them eleven years. It's like that is almost unheard of these days. And I start to believe them until I read stories like this one.

Ernst Schuh [l] and Frederick Marvin

Frederick Marvin is ninety-one-years-old and for most of those years he's kept a day book, keeping track of every detail of his life, like what music he played--he's a concert pianist--where he traveled, what he ate and who he met.

In one of his books from 1959, when he was 39, written on the date of April 22 hr wrote that he met Ernst Schuh in the Abbey of St. Florian, an Austrian monastery. The two men had each traveled there to see the grave of composer Anton Bruckner. Marvin was performing throughout Europe, while Schuh was an opera critic from Vienna.

That day, that meeting, changed their lives forever, because Frederick Marvin and Ernst Schuh have been a couple ever since then.

And now, 52 years later, Frederick and Ernst are finally able to be married. In fact, the mayor of Syracuse, Stephanie Miner, performed the ceremony. So, one might ask, after 52 years together, why get married now?

The simple answer is because they can. And it really is that simple. But they are also worried about what might happen if one of them gets sick and ends up in the hospital if they don't have at least some of the protections marriage grants to straight couples. Like the rest of us, Frederick and Ernst have heard the horror stories of same-sex partners being denied access to the person they've been with for years.

"That's a terrible, terrible thing," Marvin said, now living his life, with his partner like so many straight couples have done for centuries, and taken for granted.

Frederick and Ernst are old-school, never denying their relationship through the years, but not flaunting it either. They refer to their relationship as a "deep friendship" and Frederick often calls Ernst Schuh, in conversation, at least, "Mr. Schuh."

"At that time, everybody was still hiding in the closet," Schuh said, though now they want the same rights as everyone else.

See, they are just like everyone else, every other couple out there, that meet, fall in love, and want to spend the rest of their lives together.

After that chance meeting in 1959, they lived together in Vienna, as their home base, with Frederick Marvin playing concerts across Europe and the U.S. while Ernst Schuh managed his career. He made the arrangements and he still rattles off the details.

They came to Syracuse in 1968, when Fredrick Marvin began teaching piano at Syracuse University. He and Schuh bought a modest house, and began doing what all couples do; they knocked out the back wall and put in a little stage where Marvin's twin Steinway pianos sit. They raised the roof to improve the sound and put in a little balcony. They have a quilt made of their old ties; they have a life they've shared across decades and continents.

They tell stories of their life together, each one filling in the details the other has forgotten, as couples do as they get older. Schuh does the cooking that's kept the men healthy throughout the years, and they bicker and banter the way all couples do. 

In fact, one of Ernst Schuh's favorite reminders of their life together is a framed collection of dozens of drawings of small birds cut from larger pieces of paper. "It is by a very famous artist," he says.

And it is.Since the beginning of their life together, Frederick Marvin would write notes to Ernst Schuh with bird drawings on them. Marvin didn't know it, but Schuh kept them, and one year, he cut out the drawings and put them in a frame as a gift.

In other words, they're just like everyone else, except in one sense. They haven't been allowed to get married until now, after 52 years together. And, while they may not have been legally wed, and that shows the inequality of the marriage issue, in every other sense of the word they are a happily married couple. 

Now happily legally married. That's a 'Wow'.

via Syracuse.com