Tying the bent knot
>> Kevin Bourassa and Joe Varnell discuss their roles in the push for gay marriage

by MATTHEW HAYS

Sitting down to chat about their fight for same-sex marriage recognition, Toronto couple Kevin Bourassa and Joe Varnell look like very ordinary people.

And they'd give you very little argument on that point. In fact, it's one of the key points they're hoping to make with their new book, Just Married: Gay Marriage and the Expansion of Human Rights (Doubleday, HC, $34.95). The 280 pages were spawned after Bourassa and Varnell were legally married in January of last year. Despite both Ontario provincial and Canadian laws against same-sex marriages, the two found a legal loophole and used it-a law which states that after three weeks of reading of the banns (an intention to marry), two people could be legally wed (there was no mention that the couple had to be opposite sex within the law). The couple were legally married, along with a lesbian couple, in the gay-friendly Toronto Metropolitan Community Church.

Now, they're challenging the Ontario government to officially register their union. And the book is part of that, something the couple-bank employees who've now been recast in the roles of activists-were discussing with Montreal media when they arrived in town early this week.

"Human rights are indivisible," says Bourassa. "We don't think of this so much as about our rights, but whether or not the government should have the right to let one group be treated differently. Obviously, we don't think they should be able to."

It sounds like an earnest crusade led by two white-bread Ontario gays, who are fighting for something many gays aren't even that passionate about-and might not necessarily make for the best book, either. And yet, Just Married is a great read. Full of personal details, intriguing thoughts on the concept and a simple, yet somehow profound, plea for unity in this sacrosanct, basic societal institution.

And for those who've become secure in the notion that homophobia is a thing of the past, Varnell and Bourassa's book offers a number of examples of how and why this simply isn't so. Most telling, often enough, are the details: the fact that the reverend who married them wore a bullet-proof vest to the church the day he did the honours; the fact that Bourassa's mother went through five bakeries until she found one that was willing to make a cake with a same-sex marriage ornament on top of it. "We wanted to put the human in human rights," Bourassa contends.

As for Quebec's Bill 84, which just passed last week and allows for civil unions between same-sex couples, Bourassa and Varnell give the move a mixed grade. "It's a step forward," says Bourassa. "But we're talking about equality here-complete equality." The couple feel that civil unions-what some activists have referred to as "marriage lite"-means, in essence, separate but equal.

"People who have been opposed to same-sex marriage have typically stated that something terrible will happen if it becomes a reality," says Bourassa. "But they've never really been able to point out what precisely those terrible things are. Marriage has always been an evolving institution. When divorce came along, the same conservatives argued it would mean an end to the institution. It hasn't."