Books The secret history of same-sex marriage Same-sex marriage is making the headlines, with Stephen Fry’s wedding and the US supreme court soon to decide on its legality. It seems like a quintessentially 21st-century issue. In fact such formal unions have a long and fascinating history Same-sex marriage Illustration: Sarah Tanat-Jones at Handsome Frank -- * Share on WhatsApp What do you think of Stephen Fry getting married to Elliott Spencer? Did you see the pictures of Elton John and David Furnish’s wedding? Can you remember the name of Mary Cheney’s bride, or Jodie Foster’s? Just a few years ago, such questions would have been nonsensical. For same sex marriage seems a quintessentially 21st‑century phenomenon. As the US supreme court justice Samuel Alito exclaimed in 2013, before voting against it, it was surely “newer than cellphones or the internet”. He has a point. Even in the western world, most people have still never met a married homosexual couple. Its opponents decry the recent spread of gay marriage as political correctness gone mad. Its supporters, on the other hand, celebrate it as a sign of progress. Same-sex marriage was a very recent but welcome innovation, the American Historical Association has advised the supreme court. Equal marriage is unprecedented, the UK government agrees, but its introduction will make “our society fairer and more inclusive”. (Or, as Spencer’s elderly former neighbour put it when doorstepped by the Daily Mail: “Life is different now, you have to get with the times.”) So, everyone presumes that gay marriage is a novelty. Its explicit legalisation is, of course, new. During the 1970s and 80s, some gay activists in the US sued for the right to marry, and a few same-sex couples even managed to obtain valid licences and to wed. But it was not until the 1990s that the modern movement towards marital equality began to make headway anywhere, and only in 2000 did the Netherlands become the first jurisdiction in the world to sanction same-sex weddings. -- Stephen Fry and Elliott Spencer. Photograph: Rex It’s remarkable how quickly the tide is turning. The Irish government has decided that a national referendum to amend the constitution and permit same-sex marriage will take place in May. And last week, in a surprisingly rapid turnaround, the US supreme court announced that it, too, will revisit the issue. It is possible that, by June, same‑sex marriage will have become enshrined as a constitutional right. Even so, for now, it remains illegal in Northern Ireland, in several states in the US and across most of the world. The centuries-long stigmatisation and criminalisation of same-sex relations is far from over. Yet this does not mean we cannot speak of homosexual marriages before the 21st century. Marriage is not just a legal creation. Despite the perennial efforts of rulers and priests to control and define matrimony, countless couples in the past simply married themselves, without formalities. As early as the 12th century, the Christian church codified the principle that the only thing required for an unbreakable wedlock was that a man and woman exchanged vows. There was no need for any priest, witnesses or ceremony. It was the couple themselves who made the marriage. -- In the US, informal marriage was even more widespread and generally accepted. Throughout the 19th and into the 20th century, most states upheld their citizens’ rights to nuptial freedom and privacy. If a man and woman lived together as husband and wife, that was enough – it was presumed that they were married. So what about same-sex couples? When did they start thinking of themselves as married? And how were such unions viewed by the people around them? It turns out that same-sex marriage has a rather longer history than is usually thought. *** -- This was easier to do in Renaissance Italy, where it was much more socially acceptable (though still illegal) for same-sex love to extend to sodomy. In 1497, the 22-year-old apothecary Carlo di Berardo d’Antonio was fined and banished from Florence for living with the dyer Michele di Bruno da Prulli (also fined), who had “for many, many years kept him as his wife and in place of a wife”, and had made him swear in church, on the Bible, “to remain faithful to Michele in this sodomitical vice”, using essentially the same ritual as a heterosexual wedding. Almost 100 years later, in Rome in 1578, a group of Portuguese men were burned at the stake for likewise “marrying each other and being joined together as husband and wife” openly in church. More generally, though, and certainly in the English-speaking world, men did not tend to live together as conjugal couples. Passionate friendship and love between men took lots of different forms. But from James I to Oscar Wilde, and beyond, a man who loved other men was also quite likely to wed a woman and have children with her. If we conceive of marriage as the long-term, exclusive cohabitation and sexual union of two people, then, in the Christian west at least, few male couples would qualify before the dawn of the 20th century. In fact, for the last 400 years, the practice of same-sex marriage has been largely the preserve of women. *** -- Nineteenth-century female couples often used the language of “husband” and “wife”. But the mother-daughter metaphor was even more popular, and there were many others. Women drew on a great variety of familial, religious, scientific and literary models to describe their unions. Because it was a personal creation rather than an official status, same-sex marriage was always more tenuous but also more flexible than its heterosexual counterpart. It is striking how often same-sex couples eulogised their relationship as “better” or “more” or “closer” than ordinary marriage. The ability to see same-sex marriage in earlier centuries should not blind us to all the ways in which it was different from the heterosexual variety. *** -- To Mill it was evident that Mormonism was, like all religion, “the product of palpable imposture”, and marriage in general was obviously unjust to women, so that, in fact, he himself abhorred polygamy. But that was irrelevant; it should be allowed. After all: as it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so it is that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when anyone thinks fit to try them. Human happiness and social progress depended on such freedom. It’s not a bad parallel for our modern debates on same-sex marriage. And let’s see how long it takes before polygamy is back on the agenda. • Faramerz Dabhoiwala’s The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution is out in paperback from Penguin.