Yes In Pictures

Ireland’s yes voters carried a referendum about whether same sex marriage should be legally recognized by nearly 2-to-1 on May 23.

The Dublin in 2019 Worldcon bid issued a statement supporting the result:

This is a huge step forwards in recognising that everyone should have the right to love, and marry, the partner of their choice, and it is particularly important that this has been signified via the people of Ireland….

We’re very proud of the many Irish members of Dublin 2019 who supported the ‘Yes’ vote, and went out to take part in the referendum.

A fannish manifestation of the Yes campaign were James Brophy’s comics-inspired icons for James Shields’ Mammies and Daddies Matter Facebook page. (Shields was Shamrokon 2014 co-chair and is a past GUFF winner.)

While proponents of a No vote ran ads with imagery of traditional heterosexual couples and their children (see one example here), Brophy illustrated many different couples and groupings. Brophy says:

They were intended as a parody of the no campaign logo. Showing that it’s not just mums and dads that make up families, sometimes it’s two dads sometimes its two mums. Then I added in some super hero people and they got slowly stranger and stranger as the month wound on.

I’ve had requests to make t shirts by people who didnt know the origin of the images and just thought they would be lovely to have at LGBTQ events.

[Thanks to Esther MacCallum-Stewart for the story.]

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8 thoughts on “Yes In Pictures”

Here’s the Mammies and Daddies Matter Facebook page, with more great SFFnal artwork.

My favourite SF related imagery from the Yes campaign was Nick Roche’s sketch of the characters Rewind and Chromedome from Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye. The comic has gone to great lengths to explore the relationship dynamics of a race of nominally genderless* robots. The two characters in question are shown to be very close, and over the course of a good few issues it’s revealed that they’re essentially married. And for the most part Transformers fans have loved it.

So a couple of Irish fans asked Nick, who’s one of the regular TF artists, Irish and did a lot of the design work for MTME to do a vote yes pic with them. And we got this:

https://twitter.com/NickRoche/status/600732931791921152

*Of course, they default to male gender pronouns. And there’s one female Cybertronian Transformer, the result of a mad scientist experimenting. And now there’s a lost colony of Transformers where the inhabitants evolved to have gender.