A Funnelweb World

Yesterday, one of my good friends in the US sent me a link to the blog of a mutual friend. I had only met him a couple of times and had lost touch with what he had been up to.

It was wonderful to see that he had become married to his partner - but very sad to see that he had to move countries and make some personal sacrifices in order to do it. It made me realise how lucky I am to live in the UK, where same sex marriage was legalised around 3 years ago.

But is “lucky” the right word? Surely, we shouldn’t feel the need to be thankful to our governments for recognising civil partnerships. Surely, as a social group, we should have expected legal recognition to have been granted world-wide as a matter of course several decades ago.

Ironically, being able to get married wasn’t such a big deal for me personally as I have been openly gay for as long as I can remember and have always talked about it in the same terms as I speak about being an Aussie. The fact I am now married hasn’t changed the way I live my life at all - though it leads to more arguments with call centre operators who ask for my “marital status”. (Note to various companies: don’t try and sell me anything if you can’t correctly record my status.)

Being gay is simply a part of who I am. My entire family and circle of friends have always known I was gay and have always welcomed my partners and friends into their homes, right from when I was a youngster. They accepted it as being me. They didn’t and don’t need any laws to make them do that.

And I’ve never had to hide my gayness or felt the need to apologise for it - and I never will. So laws haven’t changed that either.

But I know that I am one of the fortunate few in the world - and that until same sex marriages are recognised worldwide, as a worldwide community we will still have to fight for true equality and to end homophobia and discrimination.

Not that legal recognition of same sex marriages will put an end to homophobia - as I can sadly attest from recent experience. But it will eventually make homophobia and sexuality-based discrimination appear to be even more outdated, childish and irrelevant in our society.

And we can then all get on with living our different lives, with our different family groups, in our different ways - working together to address the REAL problems of our world such as the environment, global hunger and poverty.