The Gay Wedding That Happened Way Before You Think
By: Cecilia Olivera
Tags: LGBTQ, History, Gay Rights, Culture, Diversity

Unfortunately, things got messy for them after returning to Dumbría because some neighbors immediately recognized Elisa. Within a few hours, they had the whole village shouting at their front door. Finally, Elisa managed to escape the crowd.

Marcela stayed and went on with her life as usual while communicating with Elisa by letter, planning their next move. I say as usual but the truth is she had to deal with a lot of journalists coming to her doorstep and asking her all sorts of stuff about Elisa’s gender, among other things.

Eventually, they decided to meet in Oporto, Portugal, where Elisa would go by the name of Pepe. They worked there for a while, Elisa as a tailor and Marcela at a restaurant. In the meantime, there was an arrest warrant against them in Spain. Finally, after two months of search, they were caught and imprisoned in Oporto.

This meant that the press and the public opinion were all over them again. The thing now was whether to deport them or judge them in Portugal. At least they got to impose themselves enough to prevent the police from separating them, so they were sharing the same cell.

They had many journalists coming to interview them at their cell. The press, which had been so harmful to them, this time helped the public opinion to be on their side since they started sharing the terrible conditions they were in. But what definitely saved them was that they decided to plead that all they had was a romantic friendship. They claimed to know that they had been irresponsible but they were only trying to protect one another because they loved each other like sisters.

This made Portuguese people empathize with their story and they even received donations, some of them very large quantities of money coming from women that preferred not to identify themselves. After this, none of the involved countries wanted to be the bad guy. Eventually, the Portuguese police had to let them go because they couldn’t hold them without a trial.

So finally they got out and spent some months in Oporto, waiting for things to calm down. During this time a strange thing happened: Marcela gave birth. Making the math it seems that she got pregnant while Elisa was away learning how to behave like a man, pretending she was in Cuba. But there is no information regarding exactly what happened, whether it was part of the plan to legitimate their marriage or it was something else. So, as you can imagine, the press was all over them once again.

Knowing they had to escape before Spain found a way to have them back, they decided to go to Buenos Aires. From now on we know very little about their lives in Argentina, but we do know that Elisa married an old man in 1903. This man was unhappy with their marriage because Elisa wasn’t, well, the kind of wife he expected and because she insisted on bringing her sister and her daughter to live with them. Eventually, Elisa’s husband began to be suspicious about his wife and sister in law, so he investigated and it didn’t take him long to find pictures and headlines from the Spanish and Portuguese press. He reported Elisa but fortunately, the judge set her free without charges.

After this episode, we know nothing about them, but this could arguably be a good sign. We can only hope they had a good life after all.