By their own admission, Anne and Elaine Vautour have lived ordinary lives over the past 25 years.
Elaine is retired. Anne works as a nanny. And they have learned the lessons every successful married couple has — of communicating with each other, being committed to making it work and being willing to ask for help when needed. It hasn’t always been easy, but it has been worth it.
What makes their marriage remarkable is how it started: with a security detail, 80 media outlets and a reverend wearing a bulletproof vest.
Anne and Elaine, alongside two other Torontonians, Kevin Bourassa and Joe Varnell, were married in a groundbreaking ceremony 25 years ago this week and are among the first married same-sex couples in Canada. They briefly became the centre of international intrigue, their images printed in newspapers around the world. The two couples can now say they are some of, if not the longest legally married same-sex couples in the world.
This week, both couples still happily married, they celebrated their silver anniversaries.
“We didn’t really have any idea what we were saying yes to at the time,” Varnell said on the phone from London, England, where he and Bourassa are celebrating the milestone. “We didn’t really understand we were starting an international conversation on marriage.”
Much has changed since Jan. 14, 2001. Same-sex marriages, once banned, have been legalized in nearly 40 countries globally. But there is also much that hasn’t changed — and in some cases, the world is moving backwards, Varnell said.
“We should have accepted that people are people and everybody has rights under the law,” Varnell said. “We are not asking anybody for special treatment. We are asking to be treated on an equal playing field.”
What Varnell and Bourassa and the Vautours did on Jan. 14, 2001 helped move the world in that direction. It took a clever legal backdoor to make it happen.
Same-sex marriages weren’t recognized by Ontario at the time and marriage licenses from city hall were only for heterosexual couples. But marriage by banns, the process of announcing publicly the intent to marry, did not include the same provision against same-sex couples — and it was a legally recognized way to marry under Ontario law.
Lawyer and advocate Douglas Elliott asked Brent Hawkes, pastor at the Metropolitan Community Church, if he would test this loophole, and after consulting with the church’s board, Hawkes said yes.
Two other couples were ruled out because both included a divorcee, which is not allowed for the banns process. Then Elaine and Bourassa got calls from Hawkes, asking if they wanted to be married first. They both then called their partners.
Varnell didn’t pick up, so Bourassa proposed to his voicemail. “That was very romantic,” Varnell said.
Anne’s answer? “I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ and hung up. We had no clue what it was going to turn into.”
It became a media circus and security nightmare. Opposition to the wedding was strong.
The Vautours were picked up by bodyguards and welcomed at the church by a line of police officers. One protester disrupted the 11 a.m. church service. Bourassa’s parents had an RCMP detail protecting them. Before Bourassa walked down the aisle, police told him: If you hear shots, don’t move. Somebody will move you.
Elaine told the woman who stood up for her to get Anne down and stay on top of her if anything happened. Hawkes wore a bulletproof vest. Anne and Elaine weren’t told until after the ceremony.
“I guess they didn’t want to freak us out,” Elaine said. “I don’t blame them.”
Media from around the world, including Reuters, the Associated Press, Time, Newsweek, Mother Jones and even a Japanese television crew covered the ceremony, so many reporters and photographers that the church removed several rows of pews to make extra space. CNN was told they couldn’t broadcast the ceremony live, Varnell remembers, because parking their truck near the church would be a bomb threat.
When the ceremony ended — with Hawkes declaring both couples “lawfully married” and reading his final amen, amid the flash of photojournalist camera bulbs — a cheer erupted. After the wedding, like after a big hockey game, they scrummed with the media. The next day’s Star front page read: “Two gay couples make history.”
In the days and weeks that followed, people recognized Anne and Elaine on the street and would say “hi” on the subway. Bourassa and Varnell spent years advocating nationally and internationally for gay rights. But the couples still weren’t married in the eyes of the Ontario government until 2003, when the Ontario Court of Appeals ruled denying same-sex couples the right to marry was unconstitutional and retroactively recognized the marriages.
Two other Torontonians, Michael Leshner and Michael Stark, were married immediately after the 2003 ruling. According to Valerie Korinek, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan in Canadian cultural and gender history, both that wedding and the January 2001 ceremony can be considered Canada’s first for a same-sex couple, just in different ways.
“Our lives have been pretty ordinary once all the fuss was over,” Anne said. “And that’s what we wanted — we just wanted to be able to live with the one we loved, which so many people before us couldn’t do.”
About five years after the wedding, Bourassa and Varnell took a step back from their advocacy work, reclaiming some of their personal lives and now rarely give interviews. After all, they didn’t get married to make a political statement, Varnell said. They got married because they loved each other.
They travelled to London for a week to celebrate their anniversary, revisiting some of the sites they saw in 1999 while on a trip to celebrate their holy union — similar to a marriage, but not legally binding.
Like any married couple, they go through good times and bad. They fight about who’s going to clean the cat’s litter box. “I lose that one,” Varnell said.
Same-sex marriage was legalized federally in 2005, and the United States followed in 2015. Some things have gotten better. Some haven’t, according to Korinek.
“Marriage did not prove to be the final goal of social inclusion for queer people,” Korinek said. “It hasn’t meant the end of homophobic discrimination or sexism or transphobia. It hasn’t done any of those things.”
Varnell worries Canada and the U.S. are moving backwards on trans rights, and is particularly troubled by Alberta’s use of the notwithstanding clause to protect three laws that affect trans and gender-diverse youth from legal challenges.
But there has been progress. Marriage in Canada is now an institution for everyone, not just heterosexuals, Korinek said. And in Anne and Elaine’s extended family, their nieces and nephews don’t even think twice.
“We’re not the gay aunts,” Elaine said. “To them, we’re just the aunts, you know?”
