NLGJA Insight

By Adam Griffiths
InSight Staff Writer

Gay marriage is no big deal in Québec. It hasn’t been since it was legalized here on March 19, 2004, when the province became the third in Canada to allow full marriage benefits to same-sex partners. Sixteen days prior, Eliot Spitzer, then-New York attorney general, issued an informal statement announcing his state would recognize same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions.

And so Sharon Rozen, an event planner from Québec, had the idea to cater a business specifically toward same-sex couples from the United States, primarily those in New York, looking to take advantage of the new freedoms. Rozen is one of three partners that make up Toujour L’Amour, and they specialize in gay destination weddings in Montréal.

She said she doesn’t marry Québecquois gays and lesbians “because they could do it themselves if they wanted to.”

“Marriage is not a big thing in Québec,” added Aron Wohl, a notary who works with Rozen. “In the French-Canadian populations, it’s only something like 20 or 30 percent that get married. I think the same-sex is a little lower.”

There were 22,038 marriages last year in Québec, according to the Institut de la Statistique Québec, and only 455 of those were same-sex marriages. In the United States, 2,162,000 couples tied the knot in 2008, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control. (National data on same-sex marriage in the United States do not exist.) There are about 7.8 million people here in Québec, compared to 300 million in the United States.

“Québec has the lowest percentage of people who get married in the country,” said Tanya Churchmuch, a Tourisme Montréal manager who focuses on LGBT travelers. “People tend to shack up here a lot more than actually go through the entire process of getting married. Common law marriage has the exact same recognition as ‘marriage marriage’ does. ‘Marriage marriage’ is a lot more symbolic than it is practical, which is very different than the U.S.”

This is a fact Rozen has built her business around and a reason why Churchmuch said “it’s not actually one of our priorities.”

Rozen said while the impact of lesbian and gay Americans coming to Montréal to get married isn’t too noticeable economically, it’s certainly taking money away from her clients’ home states.

“The people who are coming here to get married are upper to middle class people, who have the resources and who want to spend their money to get married,” she said. “And the point is they can spend it here or they can spend it at home, but they’re spending it here partially because it’s a destination but partially because their home won’t let them.”

She organizes about one same-sex marriage each month, and she’s been doing weddings for same-sex partners since around the time New York began recognizing same-sex marriages. Most of the Americans come from New York or other Northeastern states where gay marriage is either legal or recognized.

She likes to ask couples why they chose Montréal, when “you can get married at breakfast. You can get married at dinner. You can have a Thai tea. You can have anything you could possibly imagine, and it can be done.

“I think they come to Montréal because it’s a very romantic, European-type city. They’re looking for legal marriage rather than civil union or some other thing. Most people have a positive association with visiting Montréal. In some cases, the couple met in Montréal, or they had visited Montréal.”

So who’s seeking out her services and the perfect wedding in a foreign, yet accessible city?

“The people who are choosing to get married who are gay are similar to straight people in Québec in the sense they’re more conservative,” Rozen said. “It’s a stabilizing factor that they have a long-term commitment to each other. They may or may not be planning to be having children or to adopt children. They have a family, and this is just a process in recognition of that.”

This may or may not have something to do with the long-standing Québec tradition of mandatory posting of wedding banns at least 20 days before a wedding, same-sex or otherwise. As Wohl explained, copies of these provincial announcements hang on a post at the courthouse. Even though you don’t have to be in Québec for the duration of the waiting period, Churchmuch explained it does put a damper on the city’s attractiveness for many looking for a more immediate arrangement, and as a result there aren’t “a lot of quickie marriages here in Québec.”

“We’ll have people come a few months ahead of time, search out their venue,” Churchmuch said. “They’ll determine who they want to marry them. They’ll figure out those kinds of things. They’ll visit caterers, and then they’ll come back two months later for their actual wedding, which is very different than people who are coming to Toronto who decide almost Vegas-style that, ‘Oh my god, it’s legal, let’s get married.’”

Because those who typically work with Rozen aren’t simply looking to get hitched, she puts great attention to making each ceremony special. “It’s like organizing your child’s or your relative’s wedding,” she said. “You want every detail to be perfect at every level.

“You can get married in about five minutes here. The notary just reads a few articles. That’s the legal requirement. Everything else is what’s meaningful for the couple.”

Everything else from the after-party, which Rozen said one couple is currently planning on spending at Cabaret Mado in Montréal’s gay village, to if or how much of the partners’ families attend to the ceremony.

“We’ve had people who come with their entire family,” she said. “We’ve had one side show up, and the other side will not. And then we have people who don’t come with their family, and that’s a different tone.”

The ceremony should be entirely up to the couple, Wohl said, but part of it is a function of who’s attending. “At the beginning, we had a couple from New York who came with both their families,” he said. “It was before it was recognized in New York, and the parents of both were just in tears. They were so thankful they could do this here. It was just 20, 25 people. It was very touching.”

And both Rozen and Wohl are aware of the duality of the ceremonies in which they prepare and participate. Yes, they’re sacred commitment ceremonies, but “it is basically demanding certain rights and having them, when others still don’t have them in certain places,” Rozen said.

“I think, in terms of gay marriage, the couple tends to be more moved in a sense because it’s something that’s new that they couldn’t do in the past,” Wohl added. “It’s like a political statement they can take advantage of.”

But it doesn’t seem to be a platform any native gays or lesbians are rushing, en masse, to take up. “Montréal just generally is a very welcoming destination for the LGBT community, and historically, has always been known as that,” Churchmuch said.

“Montréal is kind of a destination where people will come here because they know they can be themselves, but also once they get, it’s an amazing city – you have Old Montréal, you have people speaking French – it’s basically a different destination than anywhere else in North America. It’s kind of like you have this opportunity to get the old European charm, hear a foreign language and you can be totally gay, you know?”

So while it might feel underwhelming to Americans to whom the Québecois attitude may come off as offensively casual, “it’s just a normal part of society,” Wohl said.

Churchmuch said her organization is simply looking “to really have people come in and enjoy themselves.” They’re not advertising in wedding magazines — they’re just maintaining a very LGBT-friendly image. Whether they’re getting married or just vacationing, 6 to 7 percent of tourists coming to Montréal are LGBT, but they make up 10 to 11 percent of tourist spending here.

“If you get married here, we’re so happy you get married here,” Churchmuch said. “If you just want to come and visit, we’re happy you want to come and visit.”

There is no issue with gay marriage. No fuss, no uproar, no polarizing dichotomy. What those in the United States are still selling as one of the top issues on the LGBT agenda, Canadians have been operating and living out for half a decade. “It’s pretty open,” Rozen said, “which is sort of the way it should be.

“If someone is involved in a relationship, and they are committed to someone else, they feel marriage is appropriate for them, then they should be allowed to marry. That’s sort of the position the state takes.”