For Better or Worse
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Writer and activist Peter McGraith married his long-term partner David in March 2014, the first gay wedding registered in the UK.
Two years on he meets gay and lesbian couples and speaks with them about their relationships - why did they decide to get married? Or stay in a civil partnership? And why, for some, will marriage never be an option?
Peter explores what kind of effect marriage is having on gay and lesbian couples... and how it might be affecting us as a society, for better or worse.
And what does the marriage, for so long a cherished goal of equality campaigners, look like from the inside? Does it look and feel like heterosexual unions or is it, as some academics believe, re-building the institution from the ground up?
Radio 4 hears personal accounts of queer marriage in post equality Britain, meeting couples, co-parents, friends and lovers along the way.
Producer: Caitlin Smith
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, thanks for joining us. It's good to have you here. I'm Testament and this is the |
| 0:11.4 | Seriously Podcast. |
| 0:13.0 | In this edition, we joined Peter McGrath, |
| 0:15.0 | as he hears personal accounts of queer relationships |
| 0:18.0 | and learns what marriage equality has brought to Britain. |
| 0:21.0 | We had decided to be in Switzerland for my big fortier. Had this lovely dinner, had |
| 0:26.0 | this lovely cake, lovely fiss and everything was spot on. It was like a fairy tale room with |
| 0:31.5 | great views of the mountains and within moments I saw flowers and petals arriving on the table a beautiful gleaming ring |
| 0:42.0 | Shazin Andri are utterly smitten. |
| 0:45.0 | And even before I could get my head around it, he was on his knee. |
| 0:49.0 | And Shaz was crying again. |
| 0:52.0 | And I just started crying because you read about these things in books and stories and fairy tales not of a man and a man but about fairy tale proposals. |
| 1:00.0 | It was spot on. He got it absolutely spot on. My partner David and I married on the 29th of March 2014 on the stroke of midnight, |
| 1:19.0 | the first gay couple to marry in the UK. |
| 1:28.0 | Speaking outside Islington Town Hall that night, I remember saying that if every country were to offer its gay and lesbian citizens |
| 1:32.0 | equal access to marriage, |
| 1:34.0 | this would represent a real advance in civil liberties, especially since homosexual acts are still outlawed in vast swaths of the world. |
| 1:42.0 | Within the first 15 months of equal marriage in Britain, |
| 1:45.0 | more than 15,000 gay and lesbian couples |
| 1:48.0 | had converted their civil partnerships |
| 1:50.0 | or entered into new marriages. |
| 1:52.0 | Shaz, Rashid, and Andre Kamello will soon be joining us. |
... |
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