At the start of 2017, I could not have imagined that Australia would end
the year by following in the recent footsteps of America and Ireland to
legalize same-sex marriage. Since 2004, twenty-three bills regarding
marriage equality (or the recognition of overseas same-sex marriages)
had been introduced into the federal Parliament, and only four made it
to a vote. All were defeated. Even though two-thirds of Australians had
been shown, repeatedly, in polls over the past decade, to support
same-sex marriage, like most people, I had lost all faith that our
politicians would ever get the job done.

Then the current Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, started taking steps
to fulfill the commitment made by his predecessor, the arch-conservative
Tony Abbott, to put the question of same-sex marriage to the people in a
plebiscite, a compulsory poll to gauge public opinion. This may sound unusually enlightened for a conservative government, but
it wasn’t. The plebiscite was a way for Turnbull to avoid ruffling the
feathers of the harder-right members of his government, letting him pass
the buck onto a public that had already given their mandate for change.
Unlike Ireland, Australia didn’t need a referendum to change its
Constitution in order to legalize same-sex marriage. The High Court had
already, in 2013, found that marriage as defined in the Constitution
includes same-sex unions. All that was needed was a parliamentary vote
to change the wording of a 2004 amendment to the Marriage Act of 1961,
an amendment that purposefully defined marriage as the union between a
man and a woman. Yet the Turnbull government decided to drag the entire
country, and the L.G.B.T.Q. community in particular, through the
enforced hoop-jumping, indignity, and trauma of having the most
private decisions judged, once more, in the public arena.

When Turnbull’s proposal for a plebiscite was defeated, he announced
that the country would hold an arcane-sounding and very expensive postal survey, which would be non-compulsory and non-binding. “With all the
love in my heart for Australia, I think you’re absolute idiots,”
Ireland’s most famous drag queen, Rory O’Neill—who uses the stage name
Panti Bliss—said at the time. “Surveys, plebiscites or referendums are a
bad way to go about it—they’re stressful, they’re hurtful, people say a
lot of horrible, homophobic things.” On my paper ballot, I had to resist
the urge to write or draw something to reflect these same thoughts in
the generous white space beneath two little boxes, for Yes and No,
printed under a single question: “Should the law be changed to allow
same-sex couples to marry?” (The Australian Bureau of Statistics, which
administered the survey, had publicly discouraged voters from doodling
on their forms, and also warned against including “correspondence,
complaints or other communication” in the reply-paid envelope. Some Yes
voters filled their envelopes with glitter, in protest.)

I decided against glittering my own envelope after reading an interview
with the executive director of Australia’s Equality Campaign, Tiernan
Brady (who had previously run Ireland’s successful Yes campaign), in
which he explained that, though the organization remained opposed, on
principle, to the postal vote, it hoped that the vote in favor of the change would be
delivered so resoundingly that there could be no excuse for the
government to stall on signing marriage equality into law. To mail my
ballot back, like many of my generation, I had to get reacquainted with
my local post box—which had a freshly drawn chalk rainbow on the
pavement in front of it.

On the morning of November 15th, thousands of optimistic but anxious
Equality supporters bedecked in Technicolor gathered in city centers
across the country to await the televised results. When a Yes vote of
61.6 per cent was announced, I was on a tram in Melbourne and heard the
roar of celebration from the crowd outside the State Library, as well as
the simultaneous pinging of my fellow-passengers’ mobile phones as
social media lit up with virtual expressions of joy. Afterward,
strangers kept stopping to hug me, and one another, on the street. A
friend who has been with his partner for ten years texted me, joking
that they now have the sacred right not only to a fairy-tale wedding but
to a messy divorce. (Australia has a one-in-three divorce rate.) The
happiness was not unmitigated. Many L.G.B.T.Q. friends expressed to me
their exhaustion and resentment at the trials they had unnecessarily
been made to endure. Others didn’t trust that Turnbull would be able to
make good on his tweeted intention to see that same-sex marriage became
“the law of the land by Christmas.”

As the media parsed the results, certain unexpected fault lines became
visible. It wasn’t that the rural heart of the country had voted against marriage equality
while the cities had voted for it. The contrasts were most stark within cities: electorates adjacent to each other—but often divided by a
physical barrier, such as a freeway, which also delineates class
differences—had sometimes voted in opposing ways, not along
political-party lines but along religious, economic, or cultural ones.
Where I live, North Sydney, Yes won, with 71.8 per cent of the vote. In
Bennelong, one electorate to the west, a slim majority voted no, a
result commentators believe was partly due to Bennelong’s large and
relatively conservative Chinese and South Korean communities, many of
whom identify as Christian.

Once the Senate had passed the bill, forty-three votes to twelve, there
was one final hurdle: a vote in the House of Representatives. More than a
hundred M.P.s—some wearing rainbow ties or socks—spoke on the floor of
Parliament during the debate, many emotionally sharing their own
stories. In his speech, the conservative M.P. Tim Wilson re-proposed to
his partner and fiancé of eight years (his partner, Ryan, said yes).
Just two weeks before Christmas, the bill was signed into law, redefining
marriage as the “union of two people.” Ian Thorpe, the Australian
swimming legend, whom I’d interviewed earlier in the year about his role
as an Equality Campaign ambassador, was in Parliament’s overflowing
public gallery that day to watch history being made. He joined in with
supporters singing the classic Seekers song and unofficial national
anthem, “I Am Australian.” (He later said that they’d debated the song
choice beforehand, and decided on the latter because nobody Thorpe’s age
or younger knew the words to “Love Is in the Air.”)

The regular wedding invitations dried up for me years ago; now I can’t
wait to have new excuses to get frocked up and work on my rusty
disco-dance-off moves. Marriage-registry offices in many cities stayed
open on the Saturday after the bill passed to meet the huge demand
from same-sex couples to register their intent to marry (a month’s
notice is required); in some, the clerks wore multicolored waistcoats.
The new forms have replaced the terms “bridegroom” and “bride” with
“Party 1” and “Party 2”; and there is a third gender option, allowing
for “indeterminate, intersex or unspecified.” A few same-sex couples
have already been allowed legally to marry because they had ceremonies
planned before the law was changed. Same-sex couples who had married
overseas awoke on December 9th to find themselves legally married in
Australia, too.

Forty years ago, when the 78ers, as they came to be known, first marched through Sydney as part
of the international Gay Solidarity Celebrations (initiated after New
York’s Stonewall riots, in 1969), they were met not by adoring crowds
throwing confetti but by police brutality: fifty-three people were
arrested, and dozens were assaulted. This New Year’s Eve, the
world-famous Sydney Harbour fireworks display will include a visual
tribute to marriage equality and the upcoming fortieth Sydney Gay &
Lesbian Mardi Gras. I will be watching the fireworks with my two little
boys from a bushland park on the city’s northern shoreline, and have
told them to keep their eyes peeled for the rainbow-hued waterfall of
fireworks—red, yellow, green, blue, purple, silver—that will cascade
from the Harbour Bridge and be reflected on the surface of the water
beneath it.