March 31st, 2025Just sayin’…
By Donna Kelly
We went to our first gay wedding a week ago. In Sydney. It was fantastic. Very casual, in a cafe in Surry Hills. Great celebrant called Zoe.
I met one of the grooms, Steve Dow, back in Frankston Leader days, but he was always destined for bigger things. Including his husband as it turns out.
More about that later. Anyway Steve is a freelance writer and author and so I have asked his permission to run a piece from his speech on the night. It is an essay he wrote 20 years ago, in 2005, that was published in The Age, and titled All my friends are getting married.
“There are certain delicious, subtle things about being a gay couple, out of the range of society’s radar. Hands furtively held on the armrest in the cinema, or a covert brush against one another in the street.
“My partner – also named Steve – and I moved house from Melbourne’s Prahran to Sydney’s Darlinghurst and, in doing so, gained such liberties.
“Public affection between persons of matched sex is not the done thing in Chapel Street on a Saturday night. That is Oxford Street behaviour, on dedicated Mardi Gras evenings.
“Most intimate relationships around us already come with a tradition of public affirmation: gifts and ribbons and cake and speeches follow solemn vows between a man and a woman, to the exclusion of all others, for life.
“Other relationships, such as ours, tend to inch along in a linear fashion, unmarked by pomp, although the signifiers are clear to those who care to notice the detail.
“Steve and I have never been much for bouquets. But contemporary same-sex marriage debates do make me ponder if I would like that public approval, and moreover the legal protection of a piece of paper that confirms I hug the same guy on the couch every night.
“Steve and I met one surprisingly sober autumn night in April 1999 at the Sir Robert Peel Hotel in Collingwood during a men-only monthly dance party marketed as, ahem, Throb.
“Climate is something of a conduit for fidelity: Melbourne’s winters can be long, so gay boys begin their annual hunt to partner up against the cold.
“It was dark in the disco, but I chose well. He was dancing tall and alone with his shirt off in a corner, showing off his squarely constructed shoulders. Classic square jaw. ‘Hi,’ I might have said, ingeniously. ‘Hi.’ He smiled.
“‘Want some water?’I asked, proffering my half-full bottle, which I suddenly no longer saw as half-empty. ‘Sure.’
“We danced off centre stage together. A cheap date, even considering the $5 door charge. He’d seen me some weeks earlier, marching up and down Peel Street, preparing for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, torso exposed with fairy wings strapped to my back, a little white wrap around my butt. A Melbourne Marching Boy in miniature.
“We barely fitted in his small one-bedroom South Yarra flat that first year, but we were happy. He quickly dubbed me Mini Me, after the small person in the Austin Powers films. Naturally, I named him Bigger Me. It’s the closest we edge to tactility as a public couple. I can’t tell you where my wings flew.”
Fast forward 20 years and in his 2025 wedding speech Steve said: “After 25 years together, and more than seven years since marriage equality was achieved, the question has become, ‘Why get married now?’, with the implication ‘what took you so long?’, to which my answer is, this is to celebrate Steve and I making it this far.
“We want to mark the occasion with friends and family as well as to thank you for accepting us for who we are. We want to respect and celebrate our respective differences with one another.
“We also have an eye to looking after one another as we get older, especially after being reminded of our mortality with the loss of mine and Steve’s parents. So, there’s the legal certainty that we are one another’s significant other.
“And the other question is ‘who proposed to whom?’, to which I have no answer – it’s been a long road to get to this point, and the detail gets lost in the martini mists of time.”
Congratulations Steve and Steve – and many thanks for the honour of inviting us to your wedding. We had a blast – best wedding ever. And while it’s early days, may I say I think marriage becomes you. Just sayin’…
