Ah, in the good old days,
they were called mariages blancs,
arranged between gay men (such as the poet Auden)
and Jewish or other endangered women,
or between my Canadian-dancer friend Dennis
to Sally Potter, the film-maker, both queer.
I, as an Irish/EU citizen, was queer-peer-pressured
into marrying a Polish woman who turned out
to be a deeply unpleasant,
ambitious, grasping, homophobic Catholic -
only a few years before Poland joined the EU.
She paid only for my bargain Belfast-London
airline fare - four times (for Home Office
interviews) so I had free trips from my rural isolation.
I would have much preferred
an Angolan woman, an Albanian or Iraqi Kurd.
3 comments:
How did this happen in the early 2000s to you? Pressured? Forced?
This sounds like an anachronism. Was it due to financial pressures?
Sorry to hear that, auban.
I was Peer-pressured by fellow-queers...around 1984. It was OK really, because I got free trips to London to visit friends and cruise! But it would have been nice to help someone deserving and/or desperate, and, if European, Albanian.
Moreover, the Polish woman (whose name I cannot even remember) had plenty of money. I would have preferred someone poor who could get benefit. I think she was a friend of a friend of a friend, hence the queer-peer pressure. By the time I realised that she was not all sweetness and light it was too late. We divorced after the minimum period, which was a pretty blatant 'abuse' of 'the system'.
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