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**English subtitles available.**
Growing up in a small town in France, Romain Goubet didn’t see gay people represented in media, and certainly never envisioned his own future as a well-adjusted, openly gay man. As times changed, so too his Romain’s journey: after coming out and finding a supportive community, he eventually also found Andrew, the love of his life and the man he would eventually marry.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:08
My name is Romain Goubet; I come from Saint-Quentin in France.
00:13
I grew up in this small town in Picardy in the eighties and we’re going to say
00:19
that a lot has changed since then.
00:20
It’s true that when I grew up, I remember scenes (or rather I remember
00:28
of the absence of scene) with gays in TV.
00:32
It’s really a concept that was almost unknown to me.
00:36
Knowing it was a potential lifestyle was not even something
00:42
that crossed my mind at that time.
00:43
Now I live in New York and in between, I did a lot of studies, in Italy,
00:51
in France.
00:52
I got to see various cultures and the evolution of mentalities.
00:55
I remember the day of my coming out to my mother: I was twenty-two years old and I
01:03
remember that she started to cry.
01:05
She was supportive but there was always this mentality of “What will people
01:10
say?” on one side and “I would never have grandchildren.”
01:14
This is where I am going with this story: ultimately, we don’t know what
01:19
life has in store for us.
01:21
For work, I moved to New York and one evening in a bar, having a drink
01:29
with friends, I met Andrew.
01:32
It was twenty years after these events in the provinces, mentalities had changed
01:40
and now we saw the LGBT community almost everywhere “mainstream.”
01:46
I was then able to project myself and to know that making my life with a man was a possibility;
01:53
and that I didn’t have to force myself to be someone else, or to hide – it enabled me
01:57
to also come out at work.
02:01
In the end, the more transparent we are and the more we are honest with ourselves, the better
02:07
we feel and the more receptive people are to this.
02:12
Following this, he asked me to marry him and therefore the main event:
02:20
I had to prepare my Gay wedding.
02:23
Even for me, it was the first gay wedding that I was going to attend.
02:27
It put my whole life in perspective because “being gay” was not something
02:34
thing I knew, “make my life with a man” was not something
02:39
I was planned, and “getting married” was the greatest surprise of 2019!
02:45
At that time, we think about everything that has happened to us in life and we also
02:51
want to positively represent the community.
02:53
So, we ask ourselves the question: “What is a gay marriage?” And the first thing
02:58
that comes to mind is a Catholic marriage – French style – because that’s how
03:03
I was raised.
03:04
This is the first thing that comes to mind but on the other hand, we remember
03:08
that ultimately there are no rules.
03:10
It is something recent, which in addition was validated shortly before my arrival by
03:14
the Supreme Court.
03:15
We wonder what we want this day to be.
03:19
Then comes the journey to to understand what I want for myself,
03:23
but also for my loved ones and for the LGBT community in general.
03:28
Finally, I will pass the details to you because it’s a lot of planning, we did
03:35
an event in Paris, then an event in a small castle, because we wanted
03:38
the Americans also come to discover the country, which was an element of marriage.
03:43
We put the little dishes in big ones to make sure that people are
03:47
“impressed” or simply “happy to come.” Somewhere, we feel that we still have
03:56
an “extra mile” to go and we must go further to try
04:01
to compensate for something.
04:03
It is this mentality that will gradually dissipate now that we are better
04:08
and better integrated and accepted by society.
04:11
Nevertheless, there was this element to my marriage.
04:15
Then everything went very well, and we had a wonderful day; it’s the
04:19
most beautiful day of my life.
04:20
After the wedding, I discussed with people – these are friends who had the same
04:28
education as me but also relatives of friends, therefore from another generation –
04:32
to ask them what they thought of the marriage and to see if I had managed to change
04:37
their vision of our community a little.
04:39
I expected them to tell me all the details of the ceremony: “It was
04:44
beautiful,” “ It was magic,” or whatever.
04:47
However, the feedback that came back on more often, and that really touched me,
04:51
is that people said they had never attended a wedding with so much
04:55
love, in speeches or in ceremony (the ceremony was done by friends
05:00
in common).
05:03
I saw in their eyes and in their attitude that something had changed and it was
05:10
a beautiful wedding gift.
05:11
I had relatives of my husband’s friends who came to say thank you.
05:16
It was gratifying to see that it had allowed them to have another image of our
05:23
community, and also to see that the evolution of society had made it accepted,
05:29
for everyone and in all its forms.
05:32
Another friend came to tears, telling me that his parents had
05:41
a great time and that he had heard them for years making homophobic comments
05:47
but now they were enthusiastic, and they had changed.
05:53
It creates really good memories for us, in addition to everything else.
05:57
I just want to finish by saying that no matter where we are, no matter what life has in store
06:03
for us, it’s hard to imagine what the world will be like in twenty years.
06:07
We can make extra efforts, we control certain things – for my part, I did a lot
06:11
of studies, I tried to show that we could go further by different means.
06:16
But I never imagined that be accepted as fully, that I could
06:22
get married, and now, even with regard to my mother’s fears at the time of my
06:30
coming out, that having children is no longer impossible.
06:33
So that’s my final message: we don’t know not what life has in store for us and even
06:39
the elements that are not under our control can go in a very good direction.
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video