Going Straight—Gay Marriage in Denmark
by Geoff Jackson
I'm gay-divorced. Only I still live with my ex-husband. In different apartments. In different towns.
Let me start in the middle: the winter of our divorce, February, 2005. He had been whingeing that he'd take half of my insurance when he left me, and although I doubted he would go, I sometimes worried. Whenever he threatened to leave he would sigh, "Everything that's mine is yours." Not that he had anything! He would have what was mine over my dead body, and no sooner, thank-you!
He burly, me taller and slimmer, balding (him not me—I was starting to go white), speaking in his variation of the local Danish accent (flat like German but lit with love), he was practical in his approach to problems, while I was theoretical and wanting to talk-appreciating things in the round (including him). He'd planned the divorce, motivated it, carried it out, me nodding in the right places.
We rehearsed what we were going to say. The only difficult question was dividing up the property, so we said we didn't have any. We had been living separately for some time in connection with work—I'd been teaching in another town—so we filed on grounds of long-term separation. We didn't talk to one another across the table as the woman jotted down our details, didn't even look at each other—only related to her, as we'd planned the night before.
That night, the night of our divorce, Erik snored as heavily as always, fast asleep in bed next to me under his separate quilt.
And now the beginning: we got married in October, 1996. Erik fixed my buttonhole that day and then fixed his own because I couldn't. Then we dutifully declared our vows at the Town Hall in Aalborg, Denmark in front of friends, took photos, and celebrated back at home. Our friend Knud (dead now of old age at eighty) wanted to stick his tongue down my throat, and I was afraid the false teeth would follow. I guess he was too drunk to do more. The wedding cake was Erik's gift to me, but I kept wishing he would take his hands off mine so I could cut it.
The judge gave us each a Certificate (mine was in English and he later lost his) of Registered Partnership. The vows were in Danish-with booming flat vowels. Friends shot us again. There was confetti for outside in the hall, effusive kisses from the lesbians to show that they too belonged. Erik's warm hand slipped from mine, while his gray-green eyes locked with me.
Friends for life. I hadn't really thought so much about it before then. Jets had always whisked friends and relationships away. This it seems was for keeps. Even the beer and schnapps at the town's oldest wine-cellar (not so old, only a couple of hundred years) didn't wash that strange thought away. I was married and the only difference between us and straights now was that we couldn't adopt children or do it in a Church-get married, that is-only turn up for a blessing (which we didn't). We dutifully made ourselves known to the taxman, and at different times during our marriage one or the other got tax-relief.
Which brings me to married life with Erik: He used to tie in my tie in the morning to send me off to the Language School I founded, just round the corner from where we'd been married and handy for a beer and schnapps for lunch. He cooked me Danish "brown-potatoes" fried in sugar and butter. I got mad at him when his unemployment benefit (independent of my Language School owner income) ran out, and I kicked him out to drive a fork-lift stacked with frozen prawns in a cold-store of 30 degrees below Fahrenheit.
Then there was the evening in the Language School office when he told me he had diabetes. His sobs shook me as I knelt in front of him to tell him it would be all right, putting my arms around his waist. Such were the comforts of married life. We didn't have any property, and we couldn't afford a house. Even divorced, they'd tax us together if they could catch us together!
On the other hand, there were big legal advantages to being official. At one point I'd been living in Denmark illegally, as I sort of forgot to re-register with immigration. Those years, then, would not count towards naturalization, and the legal years prior to them wouldn't count either. But gay-married to Erik, I was first in line, since married to a Dane you get your papers earlier. On the Green Card stakes you win some, you lose some. I lost two-and-a-half years and picked up three. Not bad, in the battle against bureaucracy. Erik and I had discussed all this beforehand, and there was nothing he wouldn't do to help me stay: we loved each other, you see.
We got divorced when Erik got sick of driving the fork-lift. Thawed out of the deep-freeze and shivering into my Language School, he asked for a divorce. So he could take advantage of unemployment without my humble employment impeding him from becoming the state's responsibility. I would have him as before-for better or for worse. And now that I had the naturalization papers, we didn't need the official recognition.
When people ask me for advice on marriage, I say, "Keep a cool head." Love, now that's something else again and quite irrelevant to marriage, so let's not get too much into that here. I don't know any more if I love Erik, but he makes me happy and he's mostly around, so I'm mostly happy with him around. Without him, I would never even eat potatoes.
Geoff Jackson lives happily in Denmark with his ex-husband, Erik. Born in England, he earned two MAs and taught English at universities in seven countries in Europe and the Middle East. He came out in Manhattan in 1969, lived with his first lover in London in 1972, and cruised Amsterdam in the 1970s before settling down to become a Danish citizen.
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