Nearly 16,000 couples, mostly male, have done it. It has not been the glitzy, showbizzy sensation that was predicted, nor the scandal. Elton John did it, but quietly in a plain dark suit, and Matt Lucas, of Little Britain, plans to. Yet so has the Fisheries Minister Ben Bradshaw, hardly a candidate for gold lamé. This week there is even to be a gay “wedding” on The Archers. It will be toe-curlingly naff, but never mind: rejoice that only a fifth of listeners voted it “inappropriate”.

With quiet decency, a new era has dawned. Admittedly the first gay “divorce” has been applied for, but the very fact that the couple rushed to be first in their region last December might ring warning bells. And given that one in eight straight marriages fail within five years, so far the civil partners are winning.

The Act was welcome for several reasons. One was sheer justice: it ended the ghastly situation whereby two people could live as faithful lovers for decades and yet be treated as outsiders for purposes of inheritance and pension rights, and excluded from one another’s hospital bedsides by “real” family members. It was also good because it enabled homosexual couples to affirm commitment and stability.

I never understood why right-wing politicians, clergy and commentators wailed that the Act “undermined marriage”; I would have thought imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. There is a case, indeed, for saying that this new kind of legal love-partnership has revived idealism about marriage in general. It is touching to see any two adults publicly and gladly promising to support one another in loyalty, for life, and civil partnership is even more so because it is free from all the cultural baggage and oppressive expectations that can distort the motive for marriage: nobody so far oppresses gay thirtysomethings by saying: “Oh, I’d been civil-partnered for ten years at your age.”

It should, as it embeds itself ever deeper in social habit, contribute in other ways to the general happiness of that substantial minority who find themselves — for reasons nobody has ever really fathomed — falling in love within their own gender. For too long there has been, in image and often in fact, a damaging connection between homosexuality and cold-hearted recreational sex. Gayness has too often meant — or been feared to mean — the promiscuity of cruising and cottaging, strangers behind bushes, bath-house orgies.

Some of the loudest scoffing at civil partnerships actually came from corners of the gay community: Graham Norton (who has since changed his tune a little) initially sneered that the whole point of being gay was not being like other people. It is easy enough to find websites proclaiming that the main key to gay identity in men is uncommitted sex with numerous partners. That — not homophobia or yearning for grandchildren — is why mothers tend to burst into tears when their sons come out. It is not love that they fear, but the violence, disease, degradation, self-hatred and loneliness that go with the queer-as-folk lifestyle. When their sons eventually do come home with a polite best friend and hold hands on the sofa while discussing mortgages, the mothers cheer up.

But traditionally, gay men who — on health or emotional grounds — challenge the crude mechanistic attitude are shouted down. In 1979 in the US, even before Aids, Larry Kramer’s novel Faggots openly attacked and satirised gay men’s cavalier attitude to one another’s health and hearts. He was labelled a traitor to the “culture”. On websites to this day, apologists for promiscuity accuse him of “antisexualism” and “romantic unworkable ideas” and say “. . . conditions gotta change bigtime before men stop having sex spontaneously and in the great variety of locales that they do. Conditions like the dropping of a neutron bomb!”

But Kramer was only enunciating an important human truth. Sex is an extreme of intimacy, and intimacy should involve trust if people are not to be hurt. Trust is best built up over time and reinforced by a commitment to other, non-sexual kinds of caring and support. Human beings thrive on these things. They always have. The gay heart is no different from the straight heart. With civil partnership law we have recognised this and shown the way to angrier and primmer societies such as the US.

There are wrinkles, of course. It is unkindly forbidden for any religious element to be included in the new ceremony: this, I suppose, was a sop to frightened churchmen. But churches, if they will forgive me for saying so, are going to have to grow up about homosexuality some time in the next 50 years — much as in the past 50 they have grown up about mental illness and the sinfulness of suicide. Another wrinkle is the lack of a parallel but different law to protect non-sexual life partners from ruin by inheritance tax; this is being fought for now in the European Court by two octogenarian sisters.

But that is another issue. For the moment, let us rejoice and throw confetti (though not at Matthew Parris, who meanly sneaked off to do the deed without any of us being allowed to tie old boots to his car and force unwanted toasters on him). Just rejoice. A good law was passed a year ago, and decent gentle things have come of it. How rare is that?

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