Gay marriage in Spain was legalized in 2005. However, the first recorded marriage of women took place in the distant 1901. But without the knowledge of the Catholic Church.
A film had to be made to find out about the marriage of two women who managed to fool the Spanish Catholic Church and unite their lives forever. “Elisa & Marcela” is now on Netflix and tells a true story that shocked the public, especially about the plan behind it.
The story of Elisa & Marcela
Elisa Sánchez Loriga and Marcela Gracia Ibeas met in La Coruña, at the time they were training to become teachers. They fell in love, families reacted and the two women moved to Madrid. But according to historian Narciso de Gabriel, who wrote a book about the pair, they ended up in schools in the province a few kilometres apart. Somewhere there they decided they wanted to get married.
The plan they set up to fool the Catholic Church
Elisa and Marcela made sure that the world knew that they had quarrelled and how Marcela was expecting the child of a man no one knew and planned to marry one of Elisa’s cousins. So “Mario” comes into the story as the relative who was on good terms with the family and had grown up in London as an atheist. And just like that Elisa became Mario, changed her appearance, posed for the wedding photo, which was held on the same day. A marriage that remains legal in La Coruña to this day.
What happened to Elisa & Marcela?
The women’s well-laid plan collapsed very quickly and the local newspaper, La Voz de Galicia, revealed the plan under the headline “A marriage without a groom”. Forced to flee Spain, they first ended up in Portugal where Marcela did indeed give birth to a daughter, were briefly imprisoned and in 1902 left for Buenos Aires. Others claim that they remained together until the end of their lives, hunted, and according to a 1909 Mexican newspaper, Elisa committed suicide in Veracruz.
The film through the eyes of the writer and director
Isabel Coixet brought this incredible story to the big screen in 2019, and now we can enjoy it through Netflix. “I think about how incredibly brave these women were, especially Elisa who had to play the man. I was thrilled to learn about their story, which raises a lot of questions. We don’t know what happened in the end,” said the filmmaker. She added that more stories of gay women need to be told.
This article was published in Antivirus Magazine
This article was translated from Greek by DeepL (AI translator)