[LINK] "Wilfried Knight, bureaucracy and international homophobia"

[rfmcdonald]

The tragic case of a gay married couple's separate suicides is the theme of Jeremy Feist's essay at Xtra!. Marriage equality is still important, and not necessarily achieved by any means.

If you want to see a case file as to how civil unions bear few, if not zero, of the same rights and privileges as marriage, one need only look at the tragic death of gay pornstar Wilfried Knight and his partner, Jerry. The two were together for eight years, but because they were from different countries, they couldn’t be together. Why not? Because Jerry was from the United States and Wilfried was living in London, England. Neither country has legalized gay marriage on a federal level; therefore, neither man could be sponsored for immigration status in the other’s country.

Once again, they were together for more than eight years. In the United States, marriage isn’t treated so much as sacrosanct as it is a cottage industry. You can get married to a complete stranger, you can marry someone solely for the sake of bleeding their bank account dry, and you can even dupe some poor schmuck into marrying you for the sake of a reality-TV show (only to divorce the poor bastard two months later for the sake of more episodes), but two men who love each other and who defy geography just to make it work? That is not allowed.

So the two of them went to one of the few first-world countries where gay marriage is legal: Canada. The plan was to get married and then for one of them to get a job and sponsor the other for immigration. Although Jerry successfully got a job at Lululemon, it wasn’t long before the company fired him. With the two of them backed into a corner, Jerry took his own life.

Here’s where things go from bad to worse: although Jerry and Wilfried were, in the eyes of the Canadian government, legally married, both Jerry’s will and family were based in the United States, where, in the eyes of their government, Wilfried had no legal standing in Jerry’s life. Wilfried had no legal bearing over his husband or anything in his life, and, earlier this month, he too died by suicide.