The couple on their wedding day in 2014

TEN years ago today (Friday), Peter McGraith and his long-term partner David Cabreza walked into Islington Town Hall and got married.

In doing so they made UK history by being the first homosexual couple to wed.

This was made possible after a change in the ­law finally removed “the legal distinction between gay and straight relationships,” as Peter put it at the time, and introducing the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 – although it took another year for marriages to take place.

“Obviously our children were aware very particularly of when the change happened, but young people are very surprised that it’s all so recent,” Peter, 59, says of the reaction he now gets when young people find out same-sex marriage has only been legal a decade.

“They have no sense of, well, just everything that changed in the years since I’ve been an adult. And it felt slow at the time, the change in the age of consent law, and the overturning of Section 28. All of that felt like it took forever. But when people look back, they just can’t imagine that this was not [always] their legal protection, or privilege, whatever you like to think of it as.”

There have been some very dark days in this country for sexual minorities – and it’s important not to forget that, he says, while it’s true lots has improved.

Section 28, which was introduced in the 1980s partly in response to the Aids epidemic, was a way of banning all talk of homosexuality in schools. It wasn’t repealed until 2003.

For decades after homosexuality was legalised (in 1967), gay men and lesbians were unable to get a mortgage with their partners, or life insurance, leaving many in dire straits when their partners died.

“Next-of-kin rights, all of that matters a damn,” Peter said. “HIV made it apparent to us all that we needed to have recognition under the law and protections under the law. During those HIV years, when some gay men were dying without a partner at their bedsides, or their home, their belongings, their wealth was taken by the biological family because the partners just didn’t exist legally, they had no legal status.”

It is true that since their wedding, a lot has changed in terms of attitudes: at the time the introduction of same-sex marriage was a polarising issue – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were against it, despite bringing in civil partnerships, as were sections of the church, while others recognised it as an inevitability.

Now it’s seen as a case of policy bringing public opinion along with it, as today it is broadly supported across society.

While Peter, who lives in Tufnell Park, described the change in this country as “a mark of significant social progress,” he is clear-eyed about the challenges that still face sexual minorities worldwide.

In 2020, Iran and Saudi Arabia are understood to have carried out executions for homosexuality, while some countries are still outlawing same gender sex today.

Peter McGraith, right, and David Cabreza 10 years on

“I, as a gay man, feel like I’m part of a community of sexual minorities all over the world. And you cannot help but be aware of your rights and how they do or don’t travel when you travel,” he said.

“In places like Malaysia, Mongolia, or Russia or Egypt, we – and I say we because I see us as a community – don’t have those protections, don’t have freedoms, and that’s difficult, you know?”

Why is it, he asks, that women and girls’ rights are “built in” to foreign policy while LGBT rights are simply parked as too difficult to raise with authoritarian rulers or when countries are being reconstructed after wars.

“We think it’s not just OK, but it’s crucial that we build women and girls rights into that kind of work, but why not LGBT rights? And the answer is because of sex,” he said.

Throwing down the gauntlet to the next government, he challenged them to think about changing the dial on LGBT foreign policy.

“People think of sex as being unimportant and not tied into our human rights, but it’s just a basic human need for love and sex, and that doesn’t get recognition or protection under the law in so many countries, including loads of Commonwealth countries,” he said.

“And we can do something about that.”

He is, however, critical of seeing marriage as the ultimate goal for people to feel they have succeeded socially.

“It’s like, ‘thin, rich, married’ – then you’re somehow thought of as morally superior for all those arbitrary reasons,” he said.

While he wanted equality, he calls it “equality on someone else’s terms” and questions whether it is an institution he even wants to buy into.

Describing what he suspects marriage really represents, he said: “I think there remains an anti-sex attitude.

So the idea that marriage is privileged as an institution is partly because it’s almost like it’s sanitising people’s sex lives.

“It’s like David Cameron saying, ‘Well, you gays can get off your knees in your gay clubs, and you can be respectable and married like us’. And it’s equality on somebody else’s terms.

“So while I think it’s really vital that we should have the same legal rights as everybody else, I don’t think marriage is progressive.”

So why get married at all?

“For the sake of advancing LGBT rights, I think it was important to me to take the opportunity to marry, and in the context of being in a long-term couple, having kids and intending to stay together anyway, why wouldn’t I be happy to stand up and be counted?” he said, but warned that for some, it became almost an opportunity to become “de-gayed”.

Warning a side effect of the marriage law for some gays and lesbians was they didn’t feel they could “come out” until they were engaged and therefore acceptable – thereby still shaming a more promiscuous lifestyle – he said: “It was like they were saying ‘Look at us, we’re going to get married and we’re not a threat to you.

We’re not those like people who are going to shag your children or scandalise you’.”

He argues a sexually free life is important for anyone growing up and shouldn’t be thought of negatively.

He is unwilling to accept any kudos for marrying his partner – “I don’t like to think of marrying as an achievement,” he insists – but takes some pleasure from the “completely arbitrary” historic accolade of being the first homosexual to marry in this country.

“If I want to take a small pat on the back, it would be for how I am using that position, because it was clear somebody was going to have a completely arbitrary privilege of access to the media. Now I, as someone who has done a lot of freelance work over the years, so have been on both sides of the mic or camera, whereas it could have so easily gone to a couple who were fairly small-C conservative, and who really thought the world was absolutely magical and covered in rainbow fairy dust now that David Cameron had given us marriage.”

So, 10 years on, he argues while marriage is a flawed institution, it is still an important step towards equality.

He said: “I think [gay marriage] is one key to open up the recognition of LGBT rights around the world, that’s how I see it.”