History of same-sex unions
A celebrated achievement in LGBT history occurred when Queen Beatrix signed a law making Netherlands the first country to legalize same-sex marriage.[2][when?]
[6] An example of egalitarian male domestic partnership from the early Zhou dynasty period of China is recorded in the story of Pan Zhang & Wang Zhongxian.
Famous Greek couples in same sex relationships include Harmodius and Aristogiton, Alexander and Hephaestion, Agathon and Pausanias, and the aforementioned Sacred Band of Thebes.
"Marries a woman" nubit feminam might be cubit infamen "goes to bed in a dishonorable manner with a man" as a condemnation of homosexual behavior between men.
(Theodosian Code 9.7.3) [25] According to Robin Lane Fox, among the unusual customs of the isolated oasis of Siwa (now Egypt, once Libya), one of great antiquity which survived to the 20th century was male homosexuality and same-sex marriage.
In the year 390, the Christian emperors Valentinian II, Theodoisus and Arcadius declared homosexual sex to be illegal and those who were guilty of it were condemned to be burned alive in front of the public.
Nevertheless, Historian John Boswell argued that Adelphopoiesis, or brother-making, represented an early form of religious same-sex marriage in the Orthodox church.
[31] (However, the historicity of this interpretation is contested by the Greek Orthodox Church[citation needed], and Boswell's scholarship critiqued as being of dubious quality by theologian Robin Darling Young.
[32]) Alan Bray saw the rite of Ordo ad fratres faciendum ("Order for the making of brothers") as serving the same purpose in the medieval Roman Catholic Church.
In late medieval France, it is possible the practice of entering a legal contract of "embrotherment" (affrèrement) provided a vehicle for civil unions between unrelated male adults who pledged to live together sharing ‘un pain, un vin, et une bourse’ – one bread, one wine, and one purse.
[34] A same-sex marriage between the two men Pedro Díaz and Muño Vandilaz in the Galician municipality of Rairiz de Veiga in Spain occurred on 16 April 1061.
[36] Michel de Montaigne, a 16th-century French philosopher and prominent essayist, reports having heard a third-party description of a same-sex wedding occurring some years earlier using the usual Tridentine marriage ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church.
[39][40] The Boxer Codex, dated 1590 or earlier, records the normality and acceptance of same-sex marriage in the native cultures of the Philippines prior to Spanish colonization.
[42] In 1781, Jens Andersson of Norway, assigned female at birth but identifying as male, was imprisoned and put on trial after marrying Anne Kristine Mortensdotter in a Lutheran church.
As of January 2025[update], same-sex marriage is currently legal in twenty European countries: Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
"In many tribes, individuals who entered into same-sex relationships were considered holy and treated with utmost respect and acceptance," according to anthropologist Brian Gilley.
[49][50] Court decisions, starting in 2003, each already legalized same-sex marriage in eight out of ten provinces and one of three territories, whose residents comprised about 90% of Canada's population.
[54] In March 2005, two Unitarian Universalist ministers Kay Greenleaf and Dawn Sangrey were charged with multiple counts of solemnizing a marriage without a license in the State of New York.
Similarly, Reverend Jimmy Creech of the First United Methodist Church performed his first "commitment ceremony" of a same-sex couple in 1990 in North Carolina.
On 26 June 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that marriage is a fundamental right and must be extended to same-sex couples.
