Hi, it's Helen here. Happy New Year. Today in focus, we'll be back with new episodes tomorrow. But for now, we are revisiting some of our favourite episodes from last year. I feel strange saying that last year. Today, we wanted to bring you our look back at 10 years of same-sex marriage in England and Wales. Hearing from couples, members of the church and politicians about what that milestone meant to them. We hope you enjoy it.
Hello. Hello. Lovely to meet you. Did you get down okay? I'm in Eastbourne on the south coast to meet Tracy and Lisa. They live in this beautiful arts and crafts flat overlooking the sea with their two cats and a budgie called La La Lulu Susie.
What are your favourite things about each other? I fell in love with Lisa's voice that just drew me to her. Not just an accent, it's just there's something about the tone of your voice, I know it sounds really strange, but I can pick Lisa's voice out in a crowd anywhere. And for me it was just Tracy's laugh really, which you can also hear in my crowd.
We're a real partnership, and I think that's a real strength. If I've got a problem or a difficulty, I think, same for Lisa. You're the first person I would talk to and share it with. Yeah. But we're also not in each other's pockets. I mean, we can disagree. I'm in and quite vehemently. And it doesn't feel like, oh my God, the relationship's under threat. We're just having a heated debate. A heated debate.
Lisa and Tracy never imagined they'd be able to marry. They were actually booked in to have a civil partnership when, in 2014, under David Cameron's coalition government, same-sex marriage was legalised. And they were among the first, on March the 29th that year, to say, I do. We got in the taxi. You were in your full sequence.
outfit. So it was just brilliant sunshine. It was the most beautiful, beautiful day. And the taxi, it was like sitting inside a glitter ball. That was our journey. You said I wasn't gay.
I was really nervous, really nervous. There is something special about declaring your love and your commitment to someone in front of people that you love and who know you. And I think for me as well, some quite elderly relatives who'd
Had completely different opinions around homosexuality when I was younger and coming out that bit where they say all of you have come here and support them in their marriage and everybody did never want so happy. It was very nice, but it's still all the usual stuff. You know, go straight when it comes to table plans. Oh yeah.
Having the right to marry and argue over table plans is something that heterosexual couples have had for centuries. It feels quite bizarre to say that the same right was won by LGBTQ people just a decade ago.
The law change seemed to symbolise a new era for equality. Ten years on, how much has our society really changed? From The Guardian, I'm Hannah Moore. Today in focus, the story of equal marriage.
I'm Lisa and I'm Tracy and how did you guys meet? We met at work and I remember being introduced to you and then I don't know I was busy and I was a bit hyper and I thought oh that wasn't a good impression to make on anybody but for me it absolutely was intrigued at first sight. How did things progress on from there?
Oh, Joanna's birthday. Hmm. Yeah. What happened to Joanna's birthday? It was quite obvious by that point that we liked each other, but we didn't know whether the other person, I didn't know whether you liked me as much as I liked you that I really wanted to be with you. I was trying to be really cool. And to all intents and purposes, you just assumed as everybody did that I was completely straight. Yeah. As did I. Yeah. Until I met you. Yeah. So it's kind of a no-go area, really. You know, I just thought it's not going to happen.
Oh, and then it was a friend's birthday party. It might have been a 40th actually. There was a lot of champagne, a lot of Prosecco and champagne, and we found ourselves washing up at the sink and looked at each other, and that was it. It was quite spontaneous, wasn't it? We kissed, and that was it. It was like, oh. Tracy, how was that for you, realising that you were attracted to a woman?
Awful. No two ways about it. It was not this wonderful revelation. I thought I was some weird midlife crisis and it wasn't going away and it was I had to get over the fact that she was a woman. So totally took you by surprise. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Not easy either. I still don't think of myself as gay. You least are asking me every year. I think. Every anniversary.
And the answer is always the same. I don't know. No. It was very strange and culturally, it just wasn't in my realm. You'd been married before, hadn't you to a man? I'd been married to a man for nearly 20 years, had a daughter, and certainly wasn't any internalised homophobia or anything, but I did finally kind of give myself permission.
in a way i thought i treat everybody else in a certain way how am i not allowed to have that right i love that and especially because you were colleagues right there is that extra jeopardy that you must have had to have had those conversations about are we going to give this a go or well no we gave it a go and then we had the right yeah yeah
In 2004, the Labour government introduced civil partnerships to give same-sex couples rights and recognition under the law. It was a huge step towards legal equality, but for a lot of people it wasn't enough.
Why couldn't LGBTQ couples have the same rights and marriage? Almost a decade later, the answer came. Lynn Featherstone, your former Liberal Democrat MP, and it was under your tenure as a qualities minister in 2011, that the coalition government said it was looking at how to legalize same-sex marriage. Why did you want to change the law?
Civil partnerships were an amazing step forward by labour. I could never have done what I did if labour hadn't done civil partnerships, but it wasn't equality. It always struck me that gay people were allowed to have civil partnerships, but they couldn't get married, and that is not equality. To me, if two people love each other and want to get married, then they should be able to, and people who don't want to get married,
both straight and gay should be able to have civil partnerships so they have legal rights without the sort of paraphernalia that goes around marriage and weddings and all that kind of stuff.
You were a liberal Democrat in a coalition with conservatives, and we know that that party did not have a good track record on supporting LGBTQ rights. To get a vote on same-sex marriage, you'd need the backing of Theresa May, who this was before she became prime minister, of course, was at that time minister for women and equalities.
She voted against gay adoption, she voted against lowering the age of consent for men having sex with men, and she voted against repealing section 28. So how did you go about convincing her to support same-sex marriage?
Well, when I was calculating what I was going to do and how I was going to get it through, I was watching question time. That's about a week or two after the accursion started. Theresa May was on there and she was asked about having voted against gay adoption. And she said, I realize now that it's much more important for a child to have two loving parents than what gender they are.
If they have the opportunity of being in a stable family environment, be that a heterosexual couple or a gay couple, then I think it's more important that that child is in that stable and loving environment. And I have genuinely changed my mind on that. I'm looking at her, I thought, okay, I remember the chance. And although she voted against the three things that you've raised, she had voted for civil partnerships.
So I think she was already on that journey of change. You got pushed back from some of the conservatives in the cabinet, didn't you? Yes, and David Cameron overruled them. He saw which way the wind was blowing, without which, obviously, if it had fallen at that level, it would never have got off the ground at all.
but they were very stridently against it. On what grounds? That the world might end. I'm entirely sure. I think it's because conservatives are very conservative. They don't like change and they see it as a breakdown of some sort.
There is a real sense of anger among many people who are married that the government thinks that it has the ability, any government thinks that it has the ability to change the definition of an institution like marriage. And that is why the people who are opposed to this feel so very, very strongly about it.
Because this was going to be such a big change if it was to pass. You had to put it out to public consultation. And as part of that, that meant consulting with religious leaders. Yes, so I literally met all the leaders of everywhere and everyone I met in the organised religions, in the small religions. I remember one meeting in particular.
And the Catholics in the Church of England were saying, no, no, this is a terrible thing. You know, civil partnerships were a big step forward for us and quite enough. And then the evangelical guy said, those homosexuals will be sorry they started this. We'll see them back in the trenches, which, you know, it's just, I couldn't believe anyone was actually saying something like that. But it's so horrified the other three that they suddenly got much more moderate. But particularly the Catholics and the Church of England,
mounted massive campaigns in the country. The Catholic diocese, they raped to every single church in the country and had letters read out on a Sunday.
People said such stupid and such hideous things about what I was doing to this sanctified state of marriage. Not only was I undermining it that people would marry multiples of people, they would marry table legs, they would get diseases, I had terrible, terrible death threats, all sorts.
The same sex marriage act was for civil marriages, and it said that religious institutions don't have to conduct weddings. But some, like the Methodist Church, have since chosen to. The Church of England has refused. It will perform blessings for people. So when LGBT plus people are part of the church, we trouble the waters of acceptability and the normative kind of understanding of what it means to be a human being and to be a Christian.
Father Jarrell Robinson Brown is a priest with the Church of Wales. He's just moved to a new diocese and when we speak over video call, he's surrounded by boxes and piles of books, trying to get everything sorted before the rush of Easter services. This is the neatest part of the house. The whole of the house, the rest of it is an absolute nightmare and chaos. Father Robinson Brown was born into a religious family from Jamaica.
So I was raised by my grandparents and my nan kind of embodied the best part of Christianity. And for me, I just found that really attractive and I thought, gosh, it worked. And she was an orphan herself from Jamaica. And I always remember thinking, gosh, you know, if she could believe in God with all the suffering and struggling that she had experienced, then maybe there's something in it.
Growing up with that faith as a child and then as a teenager, as you started to realise that you were gay, how did that feel?
I had to come up to myself. I wasn't one of those people who knew and had a sense of it. So I had this best friend in high school really, really close. And I remember the day when I was like, what I feel for you is not friendship thing. There's something else is happening here. And I remember being completely shocked by these feelings. I'm thinking, you know, what do I do about this? And simply I had to work it out. So I was really lucky that I had this
what felt like a very personal relationship and still feels like a personal relationship with God. And I was always able to kind of keep the church and God separate in my mind. I just didn't believe that God couldn't love me. So I've always struggled with the institution.
The Church of England opposed civil partnerships and then it opposed same-sex marriages. How do you understand what their position is? I don't really. If we're thinking logically and sensibly and I look at the arguments that are made, it doesn't actually make any sense. But one of the ways in which I try to rationalise it or make sense of it is by thinking the push back from the church is really fundamentally in fear.
It's a fear of the other. It's a fear of a loss of power. It's a fear of, I think, honesty. One of the things that LGBT plus people do is that we bring a level of honesty to very heteronormative, very polite, very tidy communities that they are not comfortable with. We have to find a way, I think, of being true and being at home in our own skin. And that upsets people. And I think that's why they're such a pushback.
The Church of England obviously would say, well, it's been written, it's in scripture. The marriage must only be between a man and a woman. Yeah. And then when I say where?
The things people put out to me are questionable. So people say things like Adam and Eve, and I think that's really not a good example or they turn and say, you know, but Abraham and the patriarchs are like, well, Abraham is a rapist and an abuser who owned a slate. Like this is not, these are not good examples of marriage. They might mention things that Jesus said. And I said, well, Jesus is a really awful example of what now life looks like because he wasn't married. So like when people talk about the biblical view of marriage,
I'm like, yeah, we shouldn't want to keep that if there is such a thing because you just don't find the kind of thing the church is talking about at all.
How do you cope with that? How do you cope with being part of an institution that on this fundamental level is saying we don't fully embrace who you are? But I don't let the church move in, of course, I'm in the church and wills. That feels much better because all of the bishops and Wales have basically said that they're on the direction of travel towards equal marriage, which is a really healthy thing. And I'm now in a church where
I know that my bishop believes that I'm a full human being, you know, and can say that without any difficulty or awkward. And it's such a basic thing, but it really matters, I think. Why do you think the Church of England is so much more conservative? I think its relationship to the state is a huge thing. So, you know, in terms of class, you have a church that has a lot of power and a lot of privilege and influence. And that, if it's honest, does not want to let that go at all. But I think that's why. Yeah, the link to the state.
60 seconds ago Westminster and a dramatic result in the vote on gay marriage. The eyes to the right, 400. The nose to the left, 175. So the eyes have it, the eyes have it. An overwhelming vote in favour of gay marriage.
How did he propose? It was a summer's day. I'd been spending a lot of time up in Scotland. My father was very ill and I had just arrived back and David or the kids took me through to the back garden. It was early evening, lovely and warm and sunny and the place looked fantastic because all these roses and the champagne and stuff like that. I don't really want to talk about it.
Oh, he really is a romantic. Oh, I think we both are romantic in different ways. He was certainly very romantic that day. It was very sweet. Peter McGrath and his partner, David Cabraza, were the first same-sex couple in the UK to get married, just after midnight on March 29. What do you custom? I, Peter, take you, David. David, to be my lawyer.
My day to take you Peter, to be my Lord Paul, what he has done. I David, to take you Peter, to be my Lord Paul, what a question. I am now very happy to announce that you are now legally successful. News crews from around the world descended on Islington Town Hall in North London to capture the historic moment they walked out of married cupboards.
94 other same-sex couples married that day. In the next year, 15,000 others would join them. This was a right people were embracing. Peter and David decided to use the attention they were getting to raise awareness for LGBTQ rights here and across the world. To say, legalizing same-sex marriage isn't the end. Our work is far from done.
wanted the news to be about the change in legislation and where we were at globally with LGBT rights. I didn't want the story being about how we were dressed or any fantastical visuals or ceremonials, so we did interviews about politics. Although this marks progress in the United Kingdom,
There's an awful long way to go for gay men and lesbians around the world and I want to show some solidarity and give a message of hope to all of those people who are still living under repressive regimes. I took film crews to demonstrations and invited them to a lecture. I gave Middlesex University a week before we married about the politics of marriage.
Because obviously, as you would imagine, there were plenty of people asking, can we film you, oh god, whatever, choosing cakes or getting shaved or clinking champagne glasses? Like, I absolutely ruled any of that stuff out.
Because it was a very important moment and the pictures would be gone globally and I wanted there to be a sense of solidarity coming from this for those people reading it in countries where their rights are not recognised at all. Why was it important to you that the law was changed?
Right, so although I'm not a fan of marriage, the legal institution of marriage, I wasn't campaigning for it. However, I do remember back to the 80s. And there was legal and financial social privileges that went with marriage and a status that just seems ridiculous. And
We always missed out on those chances of bringing our foreign partners into the UK due to there being no marriage law, for example, during the worst of the HIV crisis. Gay men were dying and partners were sometimes kept away from their hospital beds or chucked out their houses because they had no legal status in the biological family became the thing.
So all these things are still recent history and they all matter to me and if marriage were offered to everybody regardless of who they wanted to marry all over the world, I think it then becomes a lever for working for what I think are more fundamental, sexual rights if you like. So an equal age of consent all over the world and the right to be able to
lead your sex life, your romantic life as you choose? A lot of heterosexual people grow up with the expectation and in some cases the intense pressure to get married because that has for so many years been a part of heterosexual society. Do you think that's going to now be the same for LGBTQ people?
Well, that was part of the subject of the lecture that I gave at Middlesex University the week before our marriage. I was concerned that en masse young gay men and lesbians would just feel like that's the done thing.
And I interviewed a young Irish guy who said that he had uncles who just wouldn't speak to him about his life in London at all until the marriage legislation was in place. Then they were instantly keen to know who he was going out with and how soon he was going to be getting married.
like, Oh my God, is this this? I mean, it's exactly exactly what I was expecting. And I value the way I came to sexual maturity and had lots of different relationships as well. I think that was really, really useful.
Another interesting thing, just to take you back, sometimes people of my age were really having problems around the time of the implementation of the marriage legislation. Couples were actually splitting up because they were now having to deal with this question, do you want to marry or not? So it's been such a period of change. And of course you've got children. How has being married made you think about the idea of a nuclear family?
I think the idea of family is already too neatly drawn in people's minds. An elderly friend of mine just died. He was gay. He, like my children, had been in the care system, as you could call any kind of care when he was a kid. It was horrendous. And although he was 30 years older than me,
He kind of came to see me like an adoptive parent because he really wished he'd had what my kids had. But even still, he was craving until the day he died a biological family. And he had some, but he didn't have that experience of family that he'd always longed for.
to the extent that he couldn't or didn't necessarily recognize himself, what an amazing family of friends he did have around him. And he loved his friends, but he still felt like there's something I'm missing out on here because he'd been told family comes in that shape and he'd been deprived of a family of that shape.
The idea of the family has such power that we fail to actually recognise what real families are like in all their glorious diversity.
Marriage doesn't make our society. Families still fall apart and couples still split up. In 2021, the last time the census was taken, more than 1,500 same-sex married couples got divorced. Fundamentally, marriage offers the same joys and difficulties for same-sex couples as it does for heterosexual ones. It's just normal. Father Robinson Brown thinks the Church of England should see it as such.
What difference did it make to you when the law changed in 2014 and equal marriage became legal?
In my context, within my family, it made me not the focus point. I wasn't the anomaly whose love is shaped in this way or whose desire is shaped in this way. Suddenly, this was like a nationwide thing, a worldwide thing that countries were coming to vessel with. It felt like a protective blanket, I think, as well, that the government was saying, we recognize that these people exist. And we're going to affirm that, which is powerful.
How much progress do you see being made? I mean, if we were to have this conversation 10 years on from now, how much do you think things will have changed for the church in its position towards equal marriage? If I'm honest, I don't think it will have changed much actually. It doesn't realise just how utterly irrelevant it sounds at the top.
at a local parish level. I think things are going well in the sense that you have good parish priests who are connected to their communities and extremely loving and inclusive. But the hierarchy are driving us everyone into the ground. In England and Wales, the BBC has found that gay weddings can be held in just 3% of all religious buildings that are used to marry couples. And we're talking about a stance that saves lives, actually. This isn't abstract. They were LGBTQ plus children in England.
who hear what the tragedy woman says and whose lives depend on it. Is that serious? Yeah, because if you think at a core level that you are wrong, exactly, what do you have to live for? Yep. And that God by the creator of the universe might actually hate you. It's huge. It's such a big thing. And I think I'm not enough Bishop Marsh, we should realize that. And that's the message that people are hearing that they are inherently wrong or bad. And that breaks my heart.
coming up. How much has life changed for LGBTQ couples after 10 years of marriage?
Lynn, bringing in same-sex marriage was one victory, a big victory. But it's clear that our society is still far from fully embracing LGBTQ people. If you just look at the number of hate crimes against people on the basis of their sexual orientation, that's gone up by more than 100% in the past five years. It's a huge problem that the government needs to be addressing.
The way that politics has gone is...
more than depressing, hate is peddled as a way of getting votes. And I don't know if it started with Brexit or before. Hate Muslims, hate Jews, hate trans hate this, hate that. Let's scare you enough to make sure we'll get rid of immigrants. You know, it's just the most disgusting political environment in my lifetime at the moment. And therefore, that level of hate and the sort of freedom it's giving for people to be horrible to each other and far more publicly than they were.
in the era when I was able to get this in. And I do think that the media has a lot to answer, particularly the print media. Do you think that if same-sex marriage was proposed to the government today, they would pass it into law?
Not a hope in hell. No, I don't. Because everything has been weaponized to make people hate and this is one of those vulnerable things. But now it is in law. I don't think they're going to try and ever do anything about it because it really didn't really affect anyone who wasn't being got married. So it really hasn't hurt anyone.
Can I just say that I stand on the shoulders of giants and all of this is because of the LGBT community who fought and died for this?
getting married, has it changed things? I suppose it's made it feel more concrete for me. That was my mum and dad's biggest fear when I finally came out to them. Because they thought the only real security in life for a woman was to get married, was to have her husband, you know, who will look after them and a marriage gave them long-term security and stability. And I wasn't going to have that. So I was never going to be happy.
It wasn't just about me being gay, it was that the rest of my life was kind of shot. I'd never have a, I had that. Never have a reservation. Yeah, a reservation that, you know, well, if it's what you want, you know, when you met me, yeah, but, you know, people won't accept you in the same way. And it was almost like, but you'll have to get used to that, not that society needs to change.
I'd always wanted a long-term, committed, monogamous relationship. You know, I got to a point in my life where I didn't think I'd ever find it, but there you go. And then I did. And then to be able to actually cement that by getting married was just phenomenal on so many levels, kind of very, very personally, but also kind of politically with a small pitch, an unbelievable journey for gay rights. There are plenty of heterosexuals who don't want to get married. There are probably plenty of gay people that don't want to get married.
It's just about that we were quite rightly afforded the choice. Would you think it's changed our relationship or? I don't think. No, because the six years leading up was almost as bad. What do you think it's changed about our society? The same sex marriage has been legal for 10 years.
massively normalised being gay. Although I'd still say, because I was a heterosexual person for such a long time, I am aware of the things that people say that they wouldn't necessarily say if there was somebody gay in the room. I'm always very conscious of that. I think it's very easy to think, oh, everything's changed and everything's quite well. But it does feel different as a society.
gay marriage, kind of was a big thing and it also kind of wasn't at the same time because why wouldn't gay people get married, why wouldn't they want to have that option, have that choice. I think society was way ready for it a long time before it actually happened. Well I think I said recently actually, some colleagues about us being married for 10 years and when we turned around he went
Is it really? Is it only 10 years? That's all it is that you've been able to get married. It does seem a bit dark. It is dark. It's like when you talk about women's rights and you think, my God, how far have we come in? 50 years, 100 years. No, it definitely was a political milestone. It really was.
Thank you to Lisa and Tracy, to Peter, to Father Jarrell Robinson Brown and to Lynn Featherstone for talking to us. If you want to know more about how the law on same-sex marriage came to pass, Lynn's written a book about it. It's called Equal Ever After.
That's it from us. I'm Hannah Moore. This episode was produced by Courtney Youssef and sound designed by Solomon King. The executive producer was Hummer Helele. This is The Guardian.
