Training the registrar's team 2005
2005
“When they were introducing the Civil Partnership Act (2005) the
registration service came to talk to us (the LGB staff group at Staffordshire County Council) about how they should
advertise, what sort of leaflets they should prepare and so on. We had
a number of meetings with them. The printers had done some design that
we thought wasn’t going to be distinctively gay enough and we gave them
some advice and they actually came up with some really nice stuff.
Then
I got rung up one day at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. They were training
the registrars how to do civil partnerships and the chap who was going
to come and talk to them about terminology and the reception of the gay
community to the Civil Partnership Act had cried off sick. ‘Would I
come tomorrow?’. Well, I did and actually it was really interesting
because most of the group, and about half of them were there, were
really quite enthusiastic about civil partnerships and some of them
were quite anxious. I talked to them about the reception that civil
partnerships had had in the gay community and that some people wanted
nothing whatsoever to do with it. They saw marriage as something that
was archaic and then other people were absolutely delighted. Some
people would be anxious about being identified because they’d been
together for many, many years, pre-Wolfenden. There was a concern that
words that we used amongst ourselves may not be appropriate for them to
use. Then one of them said ‘I was a bit worried that a gay celebration
might be a bit err, flamboyant’ and one of the others said ‘Oh, come
off it. There can’t be anything more extreme than a Goth wedding.’ And
they all burst out laughing. Other anxieties included all the pictures
of couples in their wedding suites, and I said, ‘Well, just add some
others, you know, as soon as you can, so it’s not all one way. Don’t
take them down!’ Because they’d been hearing things like ‘You’re going
to have to take down all of these sorts of pictures because it will
make it unwelcoming’ and things like that. Nearly all of the wedding
venues in Staffordshire had been quite happy to accept gay weddings.
And so they should be, because the money’s there. Apparently, they
liked what I did and so I got invited to do the next group and they
were slightly less welcoming. They were more hesitant, but it still
went well. And then the following year, two friends of ours were doing
their civil partnership and they’d done a bit of going around to decide
where to go and get hitched, and they said they got the best reception
in Staffordshire, so they went there. I was quite pleased by that. But
that was the kind of thing that came out of the group. We got consulted
on things as well as, from time to time, inviting people to come and
explain themselves. We invited the county’s occupational health
physician to come and talk to us, because we wanted to know how he was
going to serve our community and he clearly hadn’t got a clue. People
saw us as more powerful in fact than we really were, but we did have
quite a lot of influence.”
Contributed by: Gill Coffin, 63