The secret history of LGBTQ+ marriage

Throughout the ages, queer people have found their own ways of celebrating love outside the law. For LGBTQ+ History Month, we take a look at the milestones that got us where we are today.

This July will mark a decade since Parliament passed the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act in 2013 — opening up the possibility of marriage between same-sex couples in England and Wales.

Between 2014 and 2019 (the last time the National Office of Statistics released data on this topic) there were 38,947 recorded same-sex marriages. As a result, at least 77,894 queer people in the UK have exercised their right to celebrate their love in the socially-sanctioned act of marriage. But, this progress wasn’t achieved overnight. Instead, it’s important to be aware of the battle that it took to get to that point.

While this landmark ruling was a major milestone, it wasn’t freely given. In fact, it only came after years of campaigning by groups such as Equal Love, founded by Gay Liberation Front activist Peter Tatchell. These efforts were fiercely opposed by Christian lobby groups like Coalition for Marriage, who gained 650,000 signatures on a petition saying; “I support the legal definition of marriage which is the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others. I oppose any attempt to redefine it.”

Yet this is far from the whole story. For starters, this timeline doesn’t include Scotland (who gained marriage equality in 2014) or Northern Ireland, who weren’t able to pass this measure until 2020. And when we start digging, it becomes clear that the history of same-sex marriage significantly predates the decade it’s been legal in the UK and expands far beyond the realities of our tiny island.

A bigger story

The history of legal queer marriage is only just being written, but the struggle for its institutional recognition was decades in the making.

In terms of legislation, it all dates back to 2000 when Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands signed into law the first-ever legal recognition of same-sex marriage which was followed by Belgium’s King Albert II in 2003. And from there, a domino effect began, which saw Spain and Canada make similar moves in 2005, then South Africa in 2006, Norway in 2008, Sweden and Mexico City in 2009. Throughout the 2010s, the pace began to pick up. In Europe, countries like Ireland, Germany, France, Portugal, Iceland and Denmark all passed bills legalising same-sex marriage – and so did New Zealand, Australia and various Latin American countries like Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.

However, it hasn’t been a case of simple, uncontested progress – there were many complications, too. Such is the case of the United States, where same-sex marriage became a ferociously contested issue. Calls for marriage equality began in the 1990s, with access to civil unions for LGBTQ+ couples but same-sex marriages were rebuffed at a federal level: the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was signed into law in 1996 and legally defined marriage as between a man and a woman. This meant that states could easily strike down moves to progress the same-sex marriage agenda – but progress on a state by state basis began with Massachusetts, which legalised same-sex marriage via a court ruling in 2003.

The lack of federal protection meant that hard-won advancements could be easily lost – as is the case with the state of California. Californian marriage equality was briefly achieved in 2008 – only to be reversed in the same year by Proposition 8. This was a state ballot (a referendum submitted to the electorate for direct vote) and was brought forward by so-called “pro-family” campaigners to stop same-sex marriage and to make sure that marriage was defined as between a man and a woman in the California constitution. It took until 2013 for same-sex marriage to be fully reinstated.

In the US, same-sex marriage effectively became a Culture War topic throughout the 2000s and early 2010s – and was said by detractors to supposedly degrade or corrupt the institution of marriage and the concept of family. As we know, history repeats itself and the legislative back-and-forth that was seen not just in California but across the US calls to mind the current ongoing battle around trans rights, where proposed changes to grant further rights to LGBTQ+ minorities are fiercely contested by opposition pressure groups using sensationalistic media scare tactics. In the build-up to the public vote on Proposition 8, anti-LGBTQ+ scare-mongering (sometimes in the form of tv advertising paid for by pressure groups) included the notion that equal marriage would lead to individuals being sued for their beliefs and churches losing tax exemption – things which, 14 years later have not come to pass.

Overlooked histories

Delving into the history of same-sex marriage is so much more than relaying the facts of what happened – it’s also about becoming aware of the tactics used by anti-LGBTQ+ groups to invalidate appeals for queer equality.

Throughout the legal and public opinion battle over same-sex marriage (and indeed any LGBTQ+ issue) calls were made to protect “traditional” family values. We often accept the story that marriage has always been between a cis, straight man and a cis, straight woman who are in love, monogamous and have two cis, straight children. But while we’ve been socially conditioned to accept this as some kind of social fact, there are many historical instances of queer people who have created unions outside the confines of dominant ideas of marriage and normative legislation.

Rachel Hope Cleeves is a historian whose work focuses on researching queer history and her research paper, “What, Another Female Husband?”: The Prehistory of Same-Sex Marriage in America, published in the Journal of American History, explores a lesser-known history of queer marriages in the US: from instances of male-passing lesbians (it can’t be known whether these people would identify as gay or lesbian or as trans men or non-binary people, were they alive in today’s world) who married women, to examples where lesbians successfully married and attained marriage certificates listing two female names.

While Cleeves’ work focused on the US, we can take greater learnings from the history of same-sex marriage that begins well before the 21st Century. Speaking to her over Zoom, she argues that forms of marriage pre-date the legal definition of marriage that our societies currently hold. That means that it’s not legality that defines marriage, but context. “We know that marriage means more than a set of legal definitions,” she says. “Marriage is a social institution and the legal parameters of that are a subset of the wider social fact of marriage.”

This theory is present in her wider scholarship. Her book Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, looks at an instance where two women in the 1800s fell in love, created a home and openly considered themselves married – not only did individuals in their Vermont town also begin to consider them married, they were important figures in the local community. While they were not married in the legal sense, according to a piece of paper, their relationship functioned as a marriage: they had a home, life-long companionship and commitment, and their relationship was recognised as a marriage by their peers.

Over two centuries after Charity and Sylvia found love in Vermont, DOMA was repealed in 2022 and replaced by the Respect for Marriage Act as a way of providing federal protection of same-sex and biracial marriages. While marriage equality is now finally protected in the US, Cleeves hopes that that scholarship looking at queer history (and queer marriage) will help to remind those who oppose LGBTQ+ rights that the community has always been here.

“Queer history continues to be important for defeating a whole set of reactionary arguments that imagine same-sex sexuality and gender nonconformity as somehow new, somehow aberrant and some sign of social decline that needs to be redressed by stricter laws,” she says. “As I continue to do research and find abundant, plentiful and rich examples of gender and sexual nonconformity throughout the past, I want to bring them to light to say that some people’s gender or sexuality vary from others: they always have and they will always continue to do so.”