North leads way on gay rights with first civil partnership
Other customers wished them luck for a ceremony that will herald a new era of sexual empowerment in Britain. Then the two women stood up in Belfast City Hall at 10am yesterday morning to the strains of Dolly Parton’s Touch Your Woman, and made legal history as the first gay couple to have a full civil partnership ceremony in a register office.
As they stepped from their car, they had to dodge a protest by born-again Christians.
For Belfast, this was more than a momentous day in gay rights history. Some hope against hope that it might help bring liberality to a city that has been afflicted by murderous narrow-mindedness and prejudice.
Northern Ireland was the last place in Britain to decriminalise homosexuality in 1982 and the Reverend Ian Paisley, began his Save Ulster from Sodomy campaign from the spot where the couple’s guests arrived. Last month one of his party’s councillors said Hurricane Katrina had been sent by God to punish the New Orleans gay community for holding a gay pride festival.
But both Sickels, a playwright from New York, and Close, a community worker, know about prejudice first-hand. Close (32), grew up a Catholic in the village of Ahoghill at the heart of Mr Paisley’s Antrim constituency, the buckle in Northern Ireland’s Bible belt. By 17 she had left for Dublin.
Sickels, who is half Chinese, also knows the strength of feeling they are facing in Northern Ireland having written a play about the difficulties suffered by the Chinese community there.
The couple met four years ago in New York but could not set up a permanent home together in the gay-friendly city because Close had no immigration rights as part of a lesbian couple. After a “heartbreaking” attempt at a long-distance relationship, Sickels (27), moved to Belfast on a student visa to study creative writing. As the months passed, they started to worry about what they would do when her course finished.
They see the civil partnership as a chance for legal protection.
“We feel more comfortable walking hand in hand in New York city and kissing on the corner, yet only here can we be legally registered as next of kin,” said Sickels.
70 friends and relatives were at the 20-minute ceremony yesterday, where, in front of two witnesses, they signed a legal document conferring property, employment and next of kin rights. Their seven-year-old nephew was the bearer of platinum diamond rings they designed themselves.
When the couple arrived at Debenhams to arrange their wedding list, their names had to be entered on the computer as ‘bride and groom’. Less than a week later, the company proudly declared it had changed its system to allow for ‘bride and bride’.
Belfast is the first city to host a full civil partnership ceremony in a registry office, but an exception was made for a gay couple to register their civil partnership in a Worthing hospice earlier this month because one partner was terminally ill. He died the day after the ceremony. In England, on Wednesday alone, 687 partnerships will be registered.
Nearly 700 gay couples in England and Wales will follow Shannon Sickels and Gráinne Close on Wednesday.
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