Twenty years since the first gay civil union: the first antecedent of equal marriage

On July 18, 2003, César Cigliutti and Marcelo Suntheim became the first legally recognized homosexual couple in Latin America. The law that made possible the union between the two had been sanctioned in the early hours of December 12, 2002 by the Buenos Aires Legislature. Cigliutti was president of the Argentine Homosexual Community (CHA) and when the City of Buenos Aires was discussing autonomy, the organization approached the Legislature with a draft Civil Union Law, which had been drafted by Judge Graciela Medina, which granted Buenos Aires the power to regulate de facto unions. In 1996, the City of Buenos Aires undertook to remove the obstacles that limited equality, freedom and impeded the full development of people and effective participation in the political, economic or social life of the community after emancipation. And a few years later, exactly six years later, the Buenos Aires parliament sanctioned Law 1004, which established the creation of an exclusive public registry for civil unions formed “freely by two people, regardless of their sex or sexual orientation.” The possibility of registering in this registry gave couples, both homosexual and heterosexual, the right to obtain a certificate of accreditation of cohabitation and thus had access to benefits: social work, credits in common and days of sick leave of the couple. ” I imagine myself in 1984: if someone came from the future and told me that I would be able to marry whoever I wanted and that a trans man was going to get pregnant, I would have replied ‘you’re crazy’ because… we were debating whether we were sick or not! To be told about getting married was like thinking about The Jetsons,” Cesar Cigliutti said at the time. Cigliutti and Suntheim married in Spain in 2008, where same-sex marriage was already legislated. Cigliutti passed away in 2020, until his death he presided over the Argentine Homosexual Community (CHA) and was the Secretary General of the Association of Social Security Personnel (APERSES). First gay civil union: antecedent for civil and matrimonial protection normsAt the international level, there were few countries in which the issue was just beginning to be discussed and fewer in those that had been legalized, such as Holland or Belgium. In Spain and some states of the United States, the Civil Union was just beginning to be discussed. Therefore, countries that had some kind of regulation of same-sex couples were a minority. The Civil Union of the City of Buenos Aires was the regional precedent for the treatment of different civil and matrimonial protection norms for same-sex couples conquered later as the Equal Marriage Law, which was sanctioned in Argentina on July 15, 2010, seven years after Cigliutti and Suntheim became a couple.

Original source in Spanish