Colombia legally recognises union between three men, a possible world first

When the officiant at the ceremony says “you may now kiss the groom”, Victor Hugo Prada will have to choose which of the two men standing with him he’ll kiss first: Manuel or Alejandro.

The ceremony, planned for Colombia in the coming months, will celebrate the first legalised union of three men in the country – and possibly the world.

“We want to make what’s intimate, public,” says Prada, at 23 the youngest of the three. “We have no reason to hide it. We are just helping people realise that there are different types of love and different types of family.”

When a public notary in Medellín signed the paperwork last month formalising the union between Prada, Manuel Bermudez and Alejandro Rodriguez, local newspapers declared it the first three-way gay marriage.

In a legal sense however, theirs is not a marriage, according to Germán Rincon-Perfetti, the lawyer who drew up the document. “By Colombian law a marriage is between two people, so we had to come up with a new word: a special patrimonial union.”

The document states that the three of them constitute a family and are each others’ legal partners. “We are not three friends living together. We are a family, a trieja,” says Prada, using the Spanish version of the term “throuple”, which indicates a stable relationship between three individuals. “We were already a family before this. The paperwork just formalised it.”