We’ll take your marriage.

We’ll take your word “marriage” and we’ll make it better, just like we took your word “gay” and made it better. Before we took that gay word from you, it was languishing in outdated dialogue like, “Nan had a gay disposition and a very pretty face.” A gay disposition? WTF kind of disposition is that? A light-hearted disposition? A carefree disposition? Nan wasn’t that lame, she survived The Blitz, she was a suffragette. She had a fierce disposition.

How dare you call her gay in the old sense of the word. Admit it, until we took it and made it ours, gay had drifted quietly into the language departure lounge, along with other words like “jolly” and “gosh” and “my word” and “gadzooks”. You were wasting your gay word, straight people. You were allowing it to die, or worse, to wallow for Apple Isle eternity in the vocabulary of people like Eric Abetz.

We gays changed all that by appropriating your word and now it means something less carefree and light-hearted, Vicar, and something more relevant. We brought it up to date. It was beige, now it’s hot pink. It was an afternoon of bridge and now it’s the fucking Sydney Mardi Gras. It was a polite way of saying boring and now it’s a firebrand concept that has people talking, shouting, even trolling. Some have attempted to use “gay” as a slur: “Gadzooks! Those curtains you’ve chosen for your bachelor pad are a bit “gay” aren’t they?” But even that’s better than beige. Hell yes they’re gay. They’re fucking fabulous.

We did the same thing with your rainbow. You weren’t using that to its full potential either. You weren’t working with it; it was working for you. Before we rescued it, its job was to lead you to a leprechaun’s pot of gold. Essentially you were using it for theft. You were turning the poor, innocent rainbow into an accessory to robbery. You bunch of Gordon Gekko, Wall Street Journal, Jerry Maguire arseholes see a beautiful arch of refracted light split into its spectrum of colours and all you can think about is, “Show me the money!”

So we took the rainbow too and made it ours, and in the process, we liberated it from its day job of working for the mob and gave it a new job with diversity. Yep, she works hard for the money no longer. Now the rainbow is a flag, flying high in celebration whenever the fabulous people are in town and all we ask of her is to be herself. Or himself. We don’t care. Be who you want to be, beautiful rainbow. We love you whoever you are.

Which brings me to our latest acquisition (if all things go well with the postal survey): Marriage. If we are given the right to use this word to signify our commitment to each other, like the rainbow, like the word “gay”, we’ll make the most of its potential. For starters, there’ll be more use of the word. We’ve all seen the statistics, how the word “marriage”, left solely in straight hands has been replaced with the word “divorce” all too often.

You can be sure that in the first year of us getting the right to use that word, there’ll be an upsurge in the number of married couples. It’s just simple arithmetic. If the market for marriage is widened to include same sex couples, then the numbers of the married will go up.

Those LGBTQI newly weds will also do a good job of it? Why? Because if you’ve fought for something long enough, and you finally get it, you look after it. I mean, we’ve waited so long for this. So long. Some same sex couples have been together for several decades, through the good times and bad of coming out, through the sickness and health of their questionable legal statuses, until in some cases death did do them part. That’s a heck of an engagement period, longer than an episode of Married at First Sight, that’s for sure. All the try-before-you-buy stuff has been mostly done in our case. We know we can do a good job of marriage because we’ve put in the hours.

So, why not give us your word “marriage”. Actually, just hand it over. It’s inevitable that we’ll take it anyway, but don’t fret, pet. We’ll make it a better word for you, because it won’t just be a mean and exclusive term designed to make you feel good about your heterosexuality, while others like us feel left out and bad about that for our whole lives. It will bring everyone in the family together. It will make society more harmonious and embracing of diversity. It will make children of same sex couples hold their heads higher. It will make young LGBTQI people less likely to take their own lives. It will make all LGBTQI people feel more secure and less on the outer. For you conservative types who worry about the morals of the young, it will invite more party girls and party boys to settle down. They’ll be able to get married. Not just loved-up. Married.

When we have your word at our disposal, we will make marriage great again. Think about the benefits. The world will be light-hearted. And the world will be carefree. Gadzooks, the world may even have a gay disposition (in the old sense of the word).