The First Two Same Sex Couples Married In Canada Celebrate Their Ten Year Anniversary

A report from the Toronto Star on Joe Varnell and his husband Kevin Bourassa, and Anne and Elaine Vautour, the first same sex couples to marry in Toronto at the city’s Riverdale Metropolitan Community Church on January 14, 2001, the two couples alongside 50 others, will renew their vows Friday, celebrating their 10 year anniversary. Neither marriage was officially recognized by the Ontario government until the courts ruled the union legal in 2003, but the 2001 ceremony represents a critical step in the walk towards full equality. According to Bourassa, the ceremony was combination of fear and joy, taking place as it did under a heavy police presence, the openly gay Reverend Brent Hawkes performing the service while wearing a bulletproof vest. According to the 52 year old Bourassa, the day before the service, the two men said farewell to family and friends, fearing for the lives. “We said goodbye to people, we told them we loved them,” he said. We were told we were under threat. The last words police officers said to us as we went down the aisle was, ‘If you hear a shot don’t move, somebody will move you, just stand still.’ We were told if a shot was going to come it would most likely be when we signed the papers because they’d try to stop us from signing.” Reverend Hawkes remembers being driven to the church by bodyguards who took a different route, but says that the day and the events surrounding it were worth it. “Marriage is the ultimate right,” he says. “With marriage comes everything else – the right to work, to adopt children, to visit people in the hospital. This really has changed things and it has shifted the conversation away from just who you can have with to who you can love. The public responds to that.” That their lives changed would be an understatement: the two men becoming de facto human rights leaders, with a cost: to date, the couple cannot fly into the United States because Homeland Security will not let them enter the country because the two men declare themselves a family. Two other heroes, whose names often go unmentioned, need mentioning: Toronto-based attorneys Douglas Elliot and Martha McCarthy, who drafted the idea for legal marriage rights for same sex couples, and Queen’s University professor Kathleen Lahey, who told Elliot she believed that same sex marriage could take place through a banns ceremony, an ancient practice. The two couples fought in court to have the ceremonies legally acknowledged, which would not arrive till the Court of Appeals for Ontario would rule in 2003 that the two were considered legally married, and the Prime Minister at the time, Liberal Jean Chrétien, said he would not challenge the decision. The Federal Attorney General took advantage of the court ruling and said he would extend same sex marriage rights across the country, although it would not be until 2005 that Canada completely legalized same sex marriage. Today, of the struggle, says Elaine Vautour, “It feels fantastic. We helped changed the world.”