THREE gay men say they have gained legal recognition as the first “polyamorous family” in Colombia, where same-sex marriages were legalised last year. 
 
 “We wanted to validate our household ... and our rights, because we had no solid legal basis establishing us as a family,” said one of the men, actor Victor Hugo Prada, in a video published by Colombian media on Monday. 
 
 He said he and his two partners, sports instructor John Alejandro Rodriguez and journalist Manuel Jose Bermudez, signed legal papers with a solicitor in the city of Medellin, establishing them as a family unit with inheritance rights. 
 
 “This establishes us as a family, a polyamorous family. It is the first time in Colombia that has been done.” 
 
 Lawyer and gay rights activist German Rincon Perfetti said there are many three-person unions in Colombia but this was the first one to be legally recognised. 
 
 “It is a recognition that other types of family exist,” he said. 
 
 A ruling by the constitutional court in April 2016 made Colombia the fourth South American country to definitively legalise same-sex marriage, after Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. ||||| 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.” 
 
 Colombia's highest court paves way for marriage equality in surprise ruling Read more 
 
 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.” 
 
 Bermudez and Rodriguez have been together for 18 years and were the first gay male couple in Colombia to receive formal legal recognition of their partnership in 2000, 16 years before the country’s constitutional court legalised gay marriage. “Back then the issue wasn’t even debated,” says Manuel. During eight of those years they had a three-way relationship that included Alex Esneider Zabala. Four years ago, Prada joined the polyamorous relationship. 
 
 The four of them had planned a ceremony to celebrate their union. But when Zabala died three years ago after being diagnosed with stomach cancer, Prada, Bermudez and Rodriguez realised that a ceremony was not enough. “As much as we considered ourselves a family, we had to fight hard to be recognised as Alex’s partners when he died,” says Bermudez. 
 
 The surviving three sought to formalise their relationship through legal means. Rincon-Perfetti, who drew up the paperwork 17 years ago to seal Bermudez and Rodriguez’s union, offered to help. He knows of no other case in the world where a polyamorous relationship between three men has been granted legal recognition. 
 
 “There are a lot of throuples but it is completely clandestine,” says Rincón-Perfetti. He said he expects other polyamorous partnerships to seek the same legal status after the media attention on Prada, Bermudez and Rodriguez’s union. 
 
 Colombia’s constitutional court approved marriage equality in 2016, and in 2015 granted same-sex couples the same adoption rights as heterosexuals. 
 
 But such moves have prompted a backlash from conservatives, who this year attempted to trigger a referendum to overturn the adoption ruling. Calls have been made for a disciplinary investigation into the Medellín notary who legalised the union. 
 
 But the three men and their lawyer say their union cannot be undone. 
 
 Bermudez and Rodriguez have celebrated their 18-year bilateral partnership in several different ceremonies over the years. But for Prada, the three-way ceremony will be his first and he wants it to be special. 
 
 He has asked a female priest to officiate the spiritual part of the ceremony and envisions three dance troupes – representing water, earth and fire – giving each of the grooms away. A fourth – symbolising air – will represent Zabala, the deceased partner.
– "We want to make what's intimate, public." So says 23-year-old Victor Hugo Prada, who is gearing up to marry the two loves of his life after Colombia agreed to legalize a three-way union between Prada and his two boyfriends—perhaps the first such legalized "throuples" union not only in the South American country, but in the world, the Guardian notes. The paperwork joining Prada, Manuel Bermudez, and John Alejandro Rodriguez, which has already been signed off on by a Medellin notary, makes them a bona fide family unit in the eyes of the law, including for inheritance purposes, per News Corp Australia. "We wanted to validate our household ... and our rights," Prada said in a video making the rounds in Colombian media on Monday. German Rincon-Perfetti, the lawyer behind the groundbreaking document, is careful to note this isn't considered a "marriage" under Colombian law. "A marriage is between two people, so we had to come up with a new word: a special patrimonial union," he says, per the Guardian. Bermudez and Rodriguez were the first to enter into the relationship 18 years ago, as well as the first male gay couple in the nation legally recognized in 2000 for their union. There was originally a fourth member in this polyamorous relationship: Alex Esneider Zabala, who started a relationship with Bermudez and Rodriguez in 2004. Zabala died of cancer three years ago, however, just one year after Prada also entered the picture. "There are a lot of throuples [around the world], but it is completely clandestine," Rincon Perfetti notes. A ceremony for the three men is being planned to take place in the next few months.