We're Equal And We're Here

Feature, By debs, 12th August, 2008

As one of the rare few who has had a gay civil union on Australian soil due to her UK heritage, Deborah Singerman asks on behalf of the rest of the country, “Why can’t we be married and miserable? Why must we be happy and gay?”

Almost 20 years ago, when I gained permanent residency on the basis of my relationship with an Australian woman, HIV/AIDS dominated media references to gays and lesbians. Immigration was fraught. There was no specific form or procedure to follow but rather an arrangement on compassionate and humanitarian grounds with the Minister making the final decision.

Under this arrangement gay and lesbian couples had to be together for four years and proof included wills, joint bank accounts, bills in both names, letters of support from friends and family (if you were lucky) and copies of ongoing communication between the partners to show that even when apart, mainly due to visa restrictions, they were constantly on each other’s minds. Although immigration generally requires applicants to produce evidence, such were the stacks that we had to amass, we became known as the “romance junkies”.

A tightening of immigration regulations in the late 1980s meant that same-sex couples had to be incorporated into the formal immigration process, or excluded altogether. A politically acceptable name for a new visa category was negotiated, less confronting than same-sex, homosexual or gay and lesbian, and also more open to debate. The resulting term – and broad application – was ‘interdependent’.

The interdependent visa nowadays is grouped within the partner visa, which includes spouses, prospective and de facto applications. Calling same-sex couples ‘interdependent’ has become a way to placate the Coalition right. It’s also used to describe close friends or siblings, who “live together, so long as one or each of them provides the other with financial and domestic support and personal care”. It mischaracterises same-sex couples as companions.

Earlier this year the Coalition used its majority in the Senate to push for an enquiry into the same-sex relationships superannuation bill. Dr Brendan Nelson was unhappy with the category ‘couple relationships’, a term which would have covered married couples as well as heterosexual and same-sex de facto couples. Instead he wants the bill to include ‘interdependent’ couples as well. The Rudd Government, however, doesn’t. It’s a sticking point which may be hard to resolve, and it’s unsure which way it will go. Meanwhile, the bill is delayed and we await equality.

A Bill Leak cartoon of a long-standing gay couple, reading the newspaper in bed, for me brilliantly encapsulates the debate. “Why can’t we be married and miserable?” sighs one. “Why must we be happy and gay?” laments the other. Marriage does not solve all life’s social, family or individual problems, nor is the gay diary simply a totting up of parties. Stereotypes are meant to be shattered.

Around the world, especially in Europe, the permutations of marriage, civil partnership, registered partnership, and registered or unregistered cohabitation, are growing. Since the UK’s Civil Partnerships Act came into force in 2005, every British diplomatic post can register partnerships as long as the overseer is a British diplomat. No other country’s offices that I contacted can perform such ceremonies here, for same or different sex.

When my father was dying in England and the hospital would not give me information about him because I was phoning and could not be there in person, my partner and I gulped and decided to take out whatever form of legal recognition we could, for next-of-kin rights in UK hospitals if nothing else. While we knew that we had de facto status in Australia, we hadn’t realised that we had no rights in the UK unless we were civil partners.

And so civil partners we became in February 2007 on the hallowed carpet at Level 16, the Gateway at Circular Quay. We had already gone through the immigration process that had allowed us to stay together. We also used the matter-of-fact pre-registration wording: “I declare that I know of no legal reason why we may not register as each other’s civil partner. I understand that on signing this document we will be forming a civil partnership with each other.”

Yet, when we became one of a handful of such couples in Australia, it was more emotional than we had anticipated. Consular staff bubbled over with enthusiasm and our small group of witnesses and friends took masses of pictures (before that we had very few of us as a couple). It was altogether a joyous event, which gives the British kudos – a picture in front of the British crest is de rigueur.

Compared with the thousands of couples who have become civil partners in the UK, there are few of us here. As of June, the British Consulate-General reported 236 couples in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Perth, predominantly male, with the Sydney office conducting the most civil partnerships of any British overseas diplomatic posts.

I was astonished – and humbled – when our friends said they had told workmates and other friends that they were going to a civil partnership/lesbian wedding/or whatever they wanted to call it. We had hardly told anyone.

Talking to another couple, Chris Brett-Renes and Sebastian Renes (Chris took his partner’s name two years before any ceremony), we realised that we were not alone in being circumspect. Brett-Renes is designer/production manager for lesbian magazine LOTL and weekly gay newspaper Sydney Star Observer. I expected a very out couple but they live with Brett-Renes’ parents in Sutherland Shire.

They too had a modest ceremony. One of their main memories is of a guard in the Consulate-General lift, a member of the Australian Federal Police, congratulating them and saying that he hoped our government “will do this (type of ceremony) soon”.

As Renes says: “We felt that just in case there’s any bad reaction, we won’t tell anyone and then we’ll be safe.” We all agreed that as civil partners, even if not legally recognised here, we feel more stable, more confident in our relationship and in our ability to tell a wider range of people that we are partners (Brett-Renes says “husband”) and not just friends. The mood even affected my mother who, admittedly in her nursing home with most residents fast asleep, for the first time introduced us as “my daughter and her partner”.

It is this clarity of naming and recognition that shows, yet again, that same-sex couples are not the same as friends or siblings. “With any gay couple who makes a public affirming of their commitment, it is partly political. It has to be,” says Brett-Renes. “We’re equal and we’re here.”

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