In March, same-sex couples will finally be allowed to marry. Here, actor Sophie Ward, who has had to endure tabloid attention over her 18-year relationship with Rena Brennan, explains why it means so much to her
"Married, single, divorced or widowed?" The woman behind the counter looked up from her computer screen and smiled at me.
I stared at her. The crowd behind me was growing impatient. We had shared this journey for a while, the queue and I. And now, just when it seemed the hours of waiting were about to yield results, I was the one letting us all down.
"Are those the only choices? Married, single, divorced or widowed?" My face flushed. The microclimate at the desk seemed to have warmed. I am used to being asked whether I am married in every kind of situation, from the back of a taxi to the bar at a pub. For nearly 20 years I have come out as a lesbian several times a day. I am accustomed to the myriad reactions my answer might produce, from "good for you" and "shame on you" to "you could never tell" and "can I watch?" But I had spent most of the afternoon trying to buy a new phone and now I was concerned I was going to be rejected on a technicality.
"I'm civil partnered," I replied.
A man at the back of the shop gave up his place with a deep sigh.
The assistant looked sympathetic. "We don't have that option, I'm afraid." She pointed at the screen. "Which one would you like?"
Technically, three of the four options could have applied to me, but I hadn't faced my family, friends, strangers, the press, immigration services and various government offices with my nuptial ambitions only to be rebuffed by Carphone Warehouse.
"Married," I said loudly enough for the crowd to hear. I detected several nods of approval, though this may have been more in anticipation of their progress in the queue than any political statement. Emboldened nonetheless, I tapped the computer. "You might suggest they update the system," I said. "We have had civil partnerships for seven years."
"I know," the patient assistant replied, "my uni friends are always complaining about it." She shrugged her shoulders as if to acknowledge the futility of people going to university or being gay or possibly both.
In March of this year, my civil partnership will be eligible for a change in status. After 18 years together, my partner Rena and I will be able to get married. Had the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act already passed, I could have chosen the correct designation at the phone shop that day without coming out or lying.
Many of the difficulties are directly related to the lack of recognition for civil partnerships as opposed to marriages. But it is not because it will save companies the bother of rewriting their software that the new legislation is preferable; civil partnerships will continue to exist and will undoubtedly be offered to opposite sex couples. Computer systems and attitudes will be updated when heterosexual couples choose civil partnership instead of marriage.
In the meantime, homosexual couples in England and Wales will be allowed to choose marriage instead of civil partnerships. It remains to be seen whether other computer systems and attitudes around the world will be updated accordingly. The international recognition of marriage, as opposed to civil partnerships, is based on the longstanding tradition of marriage as the absolute standard for a legal, cultural and emotional commitment between two people. When issues of immigration are involved, the difference between marriage and civil partnership can change your life.
My partner, Rena, is American. For four years, she was not allowed to work in the UK or stay in the country for longer than six months, but we kept careful documentation and observed all the relevant immigration laws in the hope that one day our relationship would be recognised by our governments. We would leave England together and arrive back together and every time we approached passport control, in our separate lines, I would wait at the back of the hall, knuckles white with anxiety that Rena would be turned away.
In 2000 the government, under Tony Blair, changed the law to allow couples who had been together for four years to apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain. We were told that the process was slower in the UK, but that the British embassies in the United States could process the application in one day. We flew to New York with all the paperwork and evidence of our four-year relationship.
We waited all morning at the embassy and were granted an interview for the afternoon. We thought we might be taken to separate rooms to answer questions about the colour of each other's toothbrushes, but in the end the rather grim collection of newspaper cuttings showing our respective parents being door-stepped by British tabloids in London and Springfield, Illinois, seemed persuasive.
Rena and I had come out as a couple rather publicly in 1996. It had not been our intention. We had thought we would give a small interview to a newspaper on a busy news day and so avoid a fuss. Rena, fresh to our shores, had asked me what I meant by a fuss, and I tried to explain. But the tabloids arranged a personal demonstration when they got hold of the story and told us they were printing it.
Would we care to comment? "You can die slowly or you can die in a car crash," we were advised. We chose the car crash.
A fuss was duly had. By the end of it, Richard Madeley was cheerfully informing my father on This Morning that if I were cast as a heterosexual, "I'd believe it." Not everyone was as generous.
Four years later at the British Embassy in New York, the pile of stories concerning the many different ways that you might, with enough determination, hang a gay couple out to dry, could have seemed a little sordid. But, on this occasion they did the trick. We were sent to the cash machine so we could pay the fees.
The passport that was returned to us included Rena's Temporary Leave to Remain. It contained, not the perfect little Green Card of my imagination, but a somewhat smudged stamp with the handwritten advice: 'ACCOMPANY PARTNER SOPHIE WARD'. This was the longed-for visa. The Disneyland pass to Small World was more elaborate.
We hastened down the street before they could change their minds and on the corner of 5th Avenue and E57th Street, I proposed. We could not have a legal ceremony – it would be seven years before even civil partnerships would be a possibility – but that day, we felt triumphant.
Six months later, we held a wedding of our own devising. After all the difficulties, the doubts and the uncertainties, it seemed important to celebrate our relationship, and to ask all those who had supported us to celebrate, too.
Of the many meanings that marriage holds, the one we understand from our earliest years is that of the expression of romantic love between two people. From nursery rhymes and skipping games to fairy tales, poetry, music and Shakespeare we learn that the search for our "other half" is a life quest that ends with marriage.
So deep is this message, that whether or not we personally reject its siren call, we will spend our official lives in the position of being "married, single, divorced or widowed". Without the language to describe the relationship, without the weight of the context supplied by the language, it could be said that the relationship itself does not formally exist. Nowhere was this more evident than in our life as a family.
When my children were at school, my partner and I would attend parents' evenings together. We had always been open with the schools they attended, had approached the head teacher at their primary school before our relationship became public knowledge, and we wanted to make the conversation with the faculty as comfortable as possible.
As an unmarried same-sex couple with no legal, and little social, recognition it was difficult for the teachers to know how to place us. There was no familiar language to use. Rena was our boys' "mother's girlfriend". They were unrelated to her in vocabulary and in the eyes of the law, yet she was of primary importance in their lives.
At one parent–teacher meeting, Rena and I sat in front of a teacher who clearly wished to be sympathetic to some of the issues our family might encounter. "I know it's difficult," she said, "I meet lots of single parents like yourself."
Even though our legal status was unchanged after our wedding ceremony in 2000, we felt we had made a statement of our commitment to one another and to our family. The interests of our children were part of that decision. Rena and I had "married" and from then on Rena was known as the boys' stepmother.
Of course, her relationship with the boys was defined by her actions as a mother; we cared for the boys together and they loved her in her own right. But the dignity of her role in our family was undoubtedly enhanced by a signifier that is recognised the world over. The boys knew they had their own relationship with Rena – they were her stepchildren. And for all those who needed to be introduced to Rena, as the children's guardian, as my partner, the language gave a context in which they could understand the importance of Rena's role in our family.
Some months after our wedding, Rena gained her Indefinite Leave to Remain, but the original visa is still in her passport and this passport, though since expired, is the one she must carry with her. At every international border Rena crosses, she is asked, "Where is Sophie Ward?"
Fortunately, we often travel together and I can wave at the customs officials from my place at the back of the hall. My knuckles are a little less white these days though some countries seem to enjoy the lesbian solidarity more than others. We don't tend to travel to the countries where we might be executed or imprisoned. With a passport like Rena's we wouldn't make it as far as the baggage collection hall.
Rena is studying for her British citizenship, but had we been married when she applied for her visa, she would have caused less international consternation. Marriage has what Leslie Green refers to as "portability". This was emphasised in July 2013, when the United States announced that the government would in future recognise the marriages of same-sex couples, even though many of its own states have not passed equal marriage laws. The implications for all those who work for the federal government (including the armed forces) and those applying for partnership visas are vast, and those rights extend to every visiting married same-sex couple.
In the meantime, homosexual couples in England and Wales will be allowed to choose marriage instead of civil partnerships. We are adults and we require the life choices of adults. Being forbidden to marry is to be labelled a perpetual child, dismissed to the nursery while the adults decide your democratic rights. There is no dignity in being told you may not aspire to that which your society places among the highest forms of human expression.
The change in law will affect gay and lesbian couples, their families and friends in every aspect of their lives from the relatively small indignities of commercial transactions to getting mortgages, visas and work permits along with their marriage licenses. These are some of the practical realities where the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act will have significant benefits. Most of all, equal marriage offers same-sex couples the right of cultural and social recognition to all those who choose to be included as well as those who don't.
And there will be many gay couples who will opt out of the perceived homogenisation of queer culture… many lesbian feminists who will shudder at the thought of embracing the patriarchal systems they fought so hard to vanquish. Their fears are understandable. All of human history supports them. For myself, I have never felt that the argument should be framed by the failure of our species to celebrate, liberate and respect women or gay people. We can define our own relationships. When we have equal rights under the laws of our land, then we have the choice to act according to our conscience.
Around the world, LGBT people are fighting for their civil rights. There are not fewer gay people born in countries where the punishment for their existence is death or imprisonment, there is just more misery. And there are no more gay people born in countries that legislate for equal marriage, but there might possibly be more happiness.
If we are to accept gay people as equals, with the same rights and obligations as heterosexual people, we cannot stop short of offering them the same fundamental liberties. Not "gay" marriage, any more than "gay" food, or "gay" houses. And not only a civil partnership, a neat legal solution and a significant step forward but still, a version of marriage often known as "marriage". Civil partnerships may meet the legal requirements, but they arrive without the poetry of our heritage. Just as opposite-sex couples do not refer to their unions as marriage-under-the-Marriage-Act-of-1949, we do not expect our marriages to be known as Marriage (Same Sex Couples). We ask for that which has been established in Article 16 of the Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations: marriage.
In March 2014, Rena and I will apply for our marriage licence. We will be equal before the law with all other married couples. Fourteen years ago, we had held our own ceremony, unrecognised by the law and much of society. But for Rena and I, it had been the end of some of the doubts and fears we had lived with for our first years. We had won immigration status for Rena, we had outlasted the controversy and our family was flourishing. In our hearts, it was the beginning of our married life. We hoped for the day when it would be legal for gay people to marry the person they loved. We didn't dream it would happen in our lifetimes.
A Marriage Proposal: The Importance of Equal Marriage and What it Means for All of Us by Sophie Ward is out now as a Guardian Shorts Originals ebook (£1.99). Visit guardianshorts.com to find out more
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