This we can say for sure: best wishes to the happy couple.
From there, it gets confusing.
A gay man and a male-to-female transsexual married Saturday in Havana, three months after they met. Not exactly a gay wedding because the bride legally became a female and same-sex marriage is not permitted in Cuba, but some see it as a breakthrough of sorts.
Reuters coverage here.
The groom is said to be a dissident, which led to a falling out between the bride and her employer, the sexual education center Cenesex run by Mariela Castro.
The wedding took place August 13, Fidel Castro’s 85th birthday. Yoani Sanchez was maid of honor, some of the Damas de Blanco attended, and some U.S. diplomats were reportedly in attendance.
All that, plus the fact that the Obama Administration is dedicating some of its Cuba democracy funding to Cuba’s gay community, led Mariela Castro to say the blessed event was a U.S. show, or was hijacked to make it so.
It is reasonable to raise that question, and in fairness one has to say that if the U.S. government paid for the car, the dress, the hair, the nails, the tux, the drinks, and a roast pig and sides, then more was accomplished than with the Alan Gross operation, which cost more than $600,000 and put one guy in jail and lots of nice equipment in the hands of the Ministry of Interior. Algo es algo.
Ms. Castro nonetheless congratulated the happy couple.
The couple took a long drive through Havana. They arrived at the Plaza de la Revolucion and encountered a “tremendous operation” mounted by the police; the area was “completely blocked” and the couple could not enter, tweeted Yoani Sanchez here and here.
Paris-based writer Zoe Valdes viewed the entire event as a show of a different kind, one mounted to distract from human rights abuses by the Cuban government. “Pure propaganda of Raulismo light and Cenesex,” she calls it.
Valdes posts a photo of the couple in their convertible, right in the middle of the Plaza de la Revolucion, asking where was the police deployment that Yoani described.
With that I’m going to leave all the political questions aside and wish the couple a happy honeymoon.
2 comments:
By definition, a transsexual has the sexual orientation of their "destination" gender, not their biological or birth gender. As such, Wendy is a woman, who by definition would not be attracted to a gay man. Also by definition, Ignacio, who is a gay man, would be attracted to another gay man, not a woman. Now I can't speak to their individual situation as two human beings in a relationship, but the wedding of a transsexual woman and a gay man is 1) not a same-sex marriage, and 2) not a logical union because the partners belong to categories which do not share a mutual sexual attraction. As such it sounds to me more like the marriage of two people with marginalized sexual identities.
Agreed with David. That cannot be called a "gay wedding" or anything of the sort. It's something else. Not to be taken seriously. On top of that, the poor man is HIV positive. So this is a very strange situation. To say the least.
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