The marriage that was not allowed to exist
Two teachers marry in a Catholic church in Spain in 1901, shaking church and society.
On 8 June 1901, two women married in the parish church of San Jorge in A Coruña, Galicia. What the priest Víctor Cortiella did not know: both the bride, Marcela Gracia Ibeas, and her groom, "Mario Sánchez", were women. Behind Mario was Elisa Sánchez Loriga, who had cut her hair short, put on a man's suit and made up a life story. Mario was presented as Elisa's cousin, raised in London, the son of an English Protestant, and was baptised shortly before the wedding in order to be allowed to marry. The priest married the couple without suspecting anything.
The two teachers had known each other since 1885 from the teacher training college for women in A Coruña. Marcela's parents found their close friendship suspicious and sent their daughter to Madrid. The couple stayed in touch, eventually found teaching posts a few kilometres apart and lived together. The wedding was their attempt to make this partnership official and unassailable. It is the first documented same-sex marriage in the history of the Spanish Catholic Church, and one of the first in all of Europe.
The wedding photo, taken by the photographer José Sellier, soon landed on the front page of the local newspaper "La Voz de Galicia" under the headline "Una boda sin novio" ("A wedding without a groom"). The reaction was fierce: both were dismissed from teaching and excommunicated. Church and authorities initiated prosecution. The couple fled to Porto, where Marcela gave birth to a daughter. In August 1901 they were arrested but managed to escape, and in 1902 they took ship for Buenos Aires. The marriage certificate has never been declared invalid to this day.