NBC News he will always remember the happiness they brought to him and his brother.His mother gave him and his brother, Joey, up when they were just infants.
Noel says he never knew who his birth father was. “Our mother and dad were heroin addicts, and they couldn't really care for us,” he told NBC News.
In 1988, Noel and Joey were taken in by a couple from Manhattan, Louis Arce and Steven Koceja. They’d spend their weekdays in the couple’s Manhattan apartment before going to the couple’s house in Rosendale, N.Y.
for the weekends.“It felt very normal, my childhood,” Noel said. “Like the world operated with moms and dads, and two dads and two moms.”Noel said that he was free to be himself as a child — a feminine boy who played with Barbies.