Proposal & Policy: Same-sex marriage in Scotland, 10 years on

Gay husbands have existed for longer than gay marriage. Lavender marriages, for example, saw celebrity couples in the early twentieth century charade as partners in a marriage of convenience. Meanwhile, many ‘heterosexual’ marriages involved (and continue to involve) gay men who come out to their wives when the project of cultivating a domestic idyll or sticking together for the kids is no longer sustainable.

2024 marks ten years since Scotland passed the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Act, which legalised marriage between two people of the same sex. I married my husband in 2014, tying the knot on a balmy Monday afternoon at a municipal venue with a few close family and friends. After the signing of documents, we travelled across the city to our wedding party in the basement bar at one of our regular drinking spots. Staff had rearranged tables and chairs to construct a dance floor in one corner of the room. The back wall had floor-to-ceiling olive green tiles, artfully decorated with photographs, paper garlands and fairy lights. We were all so young. Talented friends had baked a small but perfectly sized three-tier lemon and poppy seed cake, which sat on a table at the edge of the dance floor. We danced around the cake, my new husband leading a chorus of off-beat whoop, whoops to Rihanna and Calvin Harris’s We Found Love. 

This wasn’t part of the script. Coming out as gay in the early 2000s felt like a closing down of options and abandoning yourself to an abject spectre of living alone, being a peculiar uncle or a neighbour that local children are told to avoid. During these twenty years, my views on marriage have also shuffled back and forth. As two cisgender men keen to imagine themselves on the political left, there is the nagging question of whether we took the easy option to use marriage to access a simpler, heteronormative world. Possessing a marriage certificate has – without doubt – eased our encounters with tricky immigration issues, organising a mortgage, purchasing a flat and planning for what happens when one of us dies. But marriage also feels like it has done something to us that transcends the administrative.

One of the most obvious changes is how we make sense to others. Marriage granted us quick access to a more legible life. But what was lost in the process of translating who we are to match the common vocabulary? And what did we give up in the process?

The weddings of other people are where the politics of our marriage become most pronounced. Weddings are an ‘event space’ – a duo of words that signal this is a location where things happen. But spaces and events are not one thing or another by default; they need to be made straight or, in the words of geographer Jon Binnie, “actively produced and heterosexualised”. Queer presence can therefore jam things and unsettle the natural flow of an event space as heterosexuality unfurls itself across the floor, up the walls and into the corners of the room. My presence – my very existence – can become a political act. 

Admittedly, I tend to emphasise this difference at weddings by abandoning the expected male attire (a navy blue two-piece suit from Next – no thank you) in place of Cuban heels, bright flares and paisley shirts. By consciously presenting myself as ‘different’ I unwillingly agree to play a representational role for others in the room. Sexuality is not an ‘invisible characteristic’ akin to a political position or some mental health conditions. There is something in the way I walk across the room, the way I arrange words in my sentences, the way I breathe in and out that gives an impression of ‘difference’. But this somatic visibility works in multiple directions.

For many gay men, there is the moment of realisation that you are being read in a certain way. Two men at a wedding together. We are not hand holders or huggers. We delight in flying solo at social events before magnetically returning to each other to retell tales about who we met and what they said. Yet, in this event space – with heterosexuality dripping from the light fittings – the strangers around us know something is up. You can see the realisation in the eyes of strangers when the visual cues fall into place and they click: "Those two men are a couple."

People want to talk to us. Tell us about children or grandchildren who also happen to be gay or bi or trans. Congratulate us on being ourselves. People look and stare. Everyone is warm-spirited, handshakes and hugs are the brackets for disclosures that grow increasingly slurred as the night progresses. Most people mean well but it can feel like tokenism. By wanting to present our lives as different, do we automatically turn ourselves into animals at a zoo? Between drinks, I leave the dance floor and slip out the fire escape for fresh air, pondering: "Were wedding guests pleased to meet us because it made them feel good about their liberal values or did it ignite an odd longing for a life beyond their own?" A mother told me her son is gay but that they still love them: "Love is love, y’know." I felt lost as to my response – leaning close to her and saying, "Thank you." Unsure who I am thanking and why.

People in the UK overwhelmingly support same-sex marriage, with a record-high of 78 per cent support recorded by YouGov in 2023. But we are also witnessing the re-emergence of some ugly tropes directed at LGBTQ communities. For example, protestors at Drag Queen Story Hour events across Scotland make little effort to mask their insinuation that gay men are a threat to children, with placards that include ‘Groom Dogs Not Kids’. This ‘Think of the Children’ brand of anti-LGBTQ messaging is also bleeding into political debates about the Scottish Government's proposal to ban LGBTQI+ conversion practices. While this shift in mood remains a relatively fringe position, it has narrowed possibilities for more radical change. For example, the Scottish Government’s Working Group on Non-Binary Equality published recommendations in 2022 but, with the current energy spent on debunking LGBTQ-related conspiracies, implementing actions that diverge from the status quo seems more remote now than when the group was formed in 2020.

We’re living through a period of retrenchment – the settling of scores after the passing of the 2014 Marriage and Civil Partnership Act – which exposes a tension between the state and private lives. As guarantor and protector of private lives, the state is a key player in determining ‘who counts’ – how society understands queer people and, in turn, how queer people come to understand themselves. The introduction of same-sex marriage has blurred the line between public and private, where our marriage is (rightly) understood as being about more than gay sex. But speaking about LGBTQ lives in ways where our existence is not relegated to a private matter creates flashpoints, particularly in locations like schools where society seems unwilling to shake off an assumption that all children are naturally heterosexual and cisgender.

Marriage is not for everyone. I did not think it was to my liking right up until the moment it happened. By writing in defence of marriage it is not my intention to counter critiques that focus on the inflated importance of marriage in society (marriage is granted too much status) or its patriarchal history (marriage remains deeply patriarchal). My target is the lazy assumption that a ‘queer identity’ without complementary action is a radical position and that marriage – declawed of any subversive potential – signals an abandonment of queer political potential. It might seem like I’m writing in self-defence but these claims ignore the nuances of the world around us: the ability of a same-sex marriage to get in the cracks of existing institutions, from wedding parties to school curriculums. While maintaining a healthy dose of cynicism – against a backdrop of increased anti-LGBTQ rhetoric – marriage and its disruptive potential are even more important now than when introduced ten years ago.

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Kevin Guyan is a researcher and writer whose work explores the intersection of data and identity. He is the author of Queer Data (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022) and is currently writing his second book, which explores queer encounters with different classification systems in the UK, from hate crime reporting to dating apps