UPFRONT:WOULD YOU LOOK at the time? It's six weeks to the wedding. Yes, I know, I only just got engaged, but I thought the point of doing that was just to organise the hoolie. Besides, I've always been an instant gratification girl, and would be hard pushed to hang around too long between the askin' and the dancin', so to speak.
Granted, I haven’t got an outfit yet. And some minor details such as food and drink have still to be ironed out. But the main thing is that, for someone who can’t choose an appetiser without suffering buyer’s remorse, I’m uncharacteristically certain about the groom. And despite being a fully-paid-up, run-for-the-door commitment-phobe for most of my adult life, I’m down with the death-do-us-part bit, even though my great-grandmother lived to 103.
So why am I still feeling chilly below the ankle? Well, here’s the thing: I’m not the most traditional of brides, and have some quibbles with yon ancient institution of marriage as it has been interpreted through the ages. But the Beyoncé and I are agreed on what we think the whole matrimony thing is about, which is me and the B being wed (an event which will necessitate a whole new nickname, alas: suggestions welcome). For the first time in my life – and no offence to all my charming blood relatives – I’m getting to choose my family. The M word for me involves making my best friend, lover and biggest champion my next of kin. It’s a no-brainer.
Except it’s not. Because though he and I are free to do so, a lot of our friends are prohibited from doing the same. Not for any rational reason, you understand, but because they fancy the wrong people. In short, I get to wed because I’m a woman who fancies men, (and have thankfully found one who fancies me back) and my gay friends who share the same predilection do not.
In case our fuzzy love-haze had somehow kept it from the front of our minds, one trip to the registry office was enough to remind us that a basic civil right is still denied to our gay fellow men and women. The forms we filled in sought repeated verification that I am in fact a woman and he is in fact a man, and that we’re not trying to pull some same-sex stunt. No siree, because if that was what we were at, the whole kit and kaboodle would be rendered null and void, the official document duly reminded us. Offensive? Tick. Shameful? Utterly.
Instead of bouncing out of the register office giddy with the momentousness of our decision, our step was slowed by the knowledge that we’d let down the side. There we were, two straightsters effectively raising our un-ringed fingers to all our gay friends by signing up and therefore supporting something from which they are excluded. By law.
Is this the equivalent of applying for membership of a whites-only golf club and having to explain to our black friends that while we regret the fact that they’re not allowed to join, we’re waltzing in the front door anyway? Does this make us two more well-intentioned liberals unwilling to walk the walk? Signing those documents felt like slamming the door in the faces of all our gay friends, and showed up all our mutterings about equality to be mere lip service. One glimpse of the upper deck, and we were gone.
So why did we do it? Visa issues (only messing!). Maybe we began this process because we don’t believe that bowing out will change anything for those who want in; maybe because we lack the courage of our convictions. But underneath it all is a desire to make a commitment and become a family, recognised as such by the State. And we want to celebrate the fact with 150-odd of our closest personal friends. So tell me again, why can’t that apply to our gay brethren, too?
I know that now everyone’s supposed to be pacified by the Civil Partnership Bill, because hey ho, now gay people don’t have to sign up to an institution that has locked them out for so long it has become a byword for bigotry. Except it seems to me that this is still somehow missing the point. We’ve still got a State-recognised institution that doesn’t allow one-tenth of the adult population in, for reasons that are wholly, inarguably discriminatory, unfair and utterly embarrassing. In my humble, pre-marital opinion.
Last week, as I doodled wedding invitations and googled love songs, thousands of people, gay and straight, took to the streets to express their dissatisfaction with the Civil Partnership Bill in the Dublin Pride Parade. As I tripped home, I passed a man bearing a sign that read: “Look me in the eye and tell me I’m not equal.” Course he’s equal, we all agree: just not in the eyes of the State. Our State.
But I’m still getting married, signing up to a secular institution has been much distorted by centuries of misogyny, and a social and religious landscape that bears little resemblance to what I believe. So we, the Beyoncé and me, are claiming it back for our time, in our way. There’s just no reason that gay people shouldn’t have that option as well. Now that would be a helluva party.