History, LGBTQ
The Gay Wedding That Happened Way Before You Think
The story of Marcela and Elisa
June 8, 1901, in an almost empty church in La Coruña it took place a historical event: the first gay marriage in the history of Spain more than a century before it was legal.
This story remained forgotten until two decades ago, only known to local people in the Galician villages it took place in. It wasn’t until a man called Narciso de Gabriel found a tiny piece of information and spent years investigating this event that it came to the Spanish media attention again. I say again because, oh boy, it was a huge scandal.
Elisa Sánchez and Marcela Gracia, the protagonists of this story, met when they were studying to be school teachers and almost immediately started a relationship.
Though ‘romantic friendships’ were a common thing until the last decades of the 19th century in Europe, Elisa and Marcela had to struggle for almost 10 years with their families trying to keep them apart from each other until they found a way of living together in a village called Dumbría without raising too many suspicions. Also, it was quite common at the time for teachers to live together to share expenses.
The main reason for gossip was Elisa’s masculinity rather than the fact of two women living together. Discussing if Elisa was or wasn’t a woman would be extrapolating our contemporary categories to the past, which can be problematic and beyond the scope of this article. But we can say for sure that gender is a huge part of this story.
For now, this is just a regular nineteenth-century lesbian story. But hold on to your sits, because it gets bumpy.
At some point in 1901, Elisa and Marcela began to plan a way to get married. How were they going to do so? Well, the first part of the plan was to fake a huge fight that would lead Elisa to make the decision of leaving Spain and going to Cuba.
After Elisa ‘left’, Marcela satisfied their neighbors’ thirst for tattle by telling them that Elisa had left to Havana because she was furious since Marcela wanted to marry Elisa’s cousin, Mario, who was a fine gentleman that lived abroad and was going to move back to Spain to join her in holy matrimony. She would also tell everyone how much Mario looked like Elisa. ‘He has her same height, her same voice, and similar manners, even her same temperament! If they weren’t a man and a woman I would think they are the same person!’, she would tell them preparing the ground so-so.
Meanwhile, Elisa was somewhere learning how to smoke, looking for men’s clothes, cutting her hair, and practicing more manly manners to then return home as the announced cousin Mario.
But to get married they not only needed Elisa to dress and perform as Mario, they needed documents that Mario obviously didn’t have. So they told the priest of the church where Elisa had been baptized as a kid that he was Elisa’s cousin and when he was very little before he could even get baptized, his mother married an English man and took off to England. But now he was back in Spain to get married in the eyes of the almighty catholic God, to which this priest clearly couldn’t resist.
Unfortunately, things got messy for them after returning to Dumbría because some neighbors immediately recognized Elisa. Within a few hours, they had the whole village shouting at their front door. Finally, Elisa managed to escape the crowd.
Marcela stayed and went on with her life as usual while communicating with Elisa by letter, planning their next move. I say as usual but the truth is she had to deal with a lot of journalists coming to her doorstep and asking her all sorts of stuff about Elisa’s gender, among other things.
Eventually, they decided to meet in Oporto, Portugal, where Elisa would go by the name of Pepe. They worked there for a while, Elisa as a tailor and Marcela at a restaurant. In the meantime, there was an arrest warrant against them in Spain. Finally, after two months of search, they were caught and imprisoned in Oporto.
This meant that the press and the public opinion were all over them again. The thing now was whether to deport them or judge them in Portugal. At least they got to impose themselves enough to prevent the police from separating them, so they were sharing the same cell.
They had many journalists coming to interview them at their cell. The press, which had been so harmful to them, this time helped the public opinion to be on their side since they started sharing the terrible conditions they were in. But what definitely saved them was that they decided to plead that all they had was a romantic friendship. They claimed to know that they had been irresponsible but they were only trying to protect one another because they loved each other like sisters.
This made Portuguese people empathize with their story and they even received donations, some of them very large quantities of money coming from women that preferred not to identify themselves. After this, none of the involved countries wanted to be the bad guy. Eventually, the Portuguese police had to let them go because they couldn’t hold them without a trial.
So finally they got out and spent some months in Oporto, waiting for things to calm down. During this time a strange thing happened: Marcela gave birth. Making the math it seems that she got pregnant while Elisa was away learning how to behave like a man, pretending she was in Cuba. But there is no information regarding exactly what happened, whether it was part of the plan to legitimate their marriage or it was something else. So, as you can imagine, the press was all over them once again.
Knowing they had to escape before Spain found a way to have them back, they decided to go to Buenos Aires. From now on we know very little about their lives in Argentina, but we do know that Elisa married an old man in 1903. This man was unhappy with their marriage because Elisa wasn’t, well, the kind of wife he expected and because she insisted on bringing her sister and her daughter to live with them. Eventually, Elisa’s husband began to be suspicious about his wife and sister in law, so he investigated and it didn’t take him long to find pictures and headlines from the Spanish and Portuguese press. He reported Elisa but fortunately, the judge set her free without charges.
After this episode, we know nothing about them, but this could arguably be a good sign. We can only hope they had a good life after all.
