Thursday, 2 July 2026

Fake Marriages : the real story.

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.

BBC's File on 4 Investigates how Immigration Enforcement officers are tackling sham marriages. Claire Jones follows Home Office officials as they apprehend people entering into, and organising fake marriages in order to circumvent the UK’s immigration laws. She discovers details of criminal gangs charging people up to £30,000 for a partner and 'marriage pack', a set of photos and documents designed to create a convincing back story of the fake relationship. After File on 4 Investigates asked the Home Office why more statistics are not available on suspected fake marriages, they have now committed to regularly publishing these numbers 'in due course'.

3 comments:

  1. CeresJuly 02, 2026

    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.

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  2. WoflJuly 03, 2026

    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.

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  3. WoflJuly 03, 2026

    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'.

    ReplyDelete