Help Me Find a Hot Plus Size Queer Outfit for a Gay Wedding
I absolutely love weddings. I love the planning, colors, flowers, food, and even the drama. Part of the fun is dressing up in ways we normally don’t get to. Even if you aren’t in the wedding party, you have an excuse to dive deep into your closet and find that one nice thing from that one event you went to a couple years ago. Better yet, it gives you an excuse to do hours of online shopping.
No matter the type or location of the wedding, there’s a social etiquette to wedding attire. If the couple doesn’t specify black tie, then we all pretty much accept business casual attire. For some, that may look like a suit. For others, this could be a khaki and printed shirt option. And for others, it could be a simple but elegant dress.
Sure, I guess the rules apply even if you’re queer, but what if they didn’t? What if you decided to dress to your full maximalist potential at the next wedding? If you’re going to a gay wedding, you might as well be GAY! So let’s dress for it!
As you may or may not know, our very own Managing Editor Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is getting gay married in February! The vibe is bold, dramatic, peacocking, and ultimately flamboyantly queer. I would like to make a statement with my look. While this particular dress code vibe certainly isn’t the case for every queer wedding, it’s fun to have a few go-to personality pieces on hand for any special occasion where you want to sport a little flare. So, let’s pick an outfit to flaunt at our next gay wedding!
As a plus sized baddie on a budget, I’ve listed these from least expensive to most expensive, and the size ranges are included as well. It’s hard to be gay and look cool and not be broke! Check out the following ideas for plus size wedding guest outfit inspiration!
Long-Sleeve Tie-Neck Maxi Dress ($40, sizes 10-40)
This Lane Bryant option is definitely more for the holiday months (especially February). If you live in a colder climate, this could pair well with a statement jacket or fun jewelry. I could see myself wearing it with platform patent leather boots and a leather jacket, or going high femme and doing heels with a furry pink coat.
Satin Double Breasted Blazer ($40, sizes 14-28)
Eloquii is my go-to store for more dressy occasion plus size wear. This green color isn’t necessarily the most bold, but if you pair it with its matching pants or statement trousers you could certainly brighten it up.
ASOS DESIGN 90s oversized organza shirt in white ($45, sizes 2XS-4XL)
So, this isn’t exactly bold, I just thought it would be a hot look to sport off your newly healed top surgery scars. Or, I don’t know, wear glitter nipple coverings and call it a day. Pair it with a brightly colored duster or cape for a dramatic look.
Off-The-Shoulder Velvet Swing Dress ($62, sizes 12-40)
The velvet purple is bold but still understated and extremely romantic. This is a great option for femmes wanting to try out colors beyond a neutral palette.
Plus Size Velvet Sequin Flare Pants ($75, sizes 14-22)
I LOVE Nasty Gal’s whole aesthetic, but they only go up to a 22. When you can find things that fit, they often have flashy, higher quality pieces for a fair price. This pink and black pattern is also available in a skirt and matching blazer, depending on your size.
Printed Blazer With Faux Leather Collar ($78, sizes 14-32)
Again, Eloquii is great for more plus size options. I was immediately drawn to this paint suit combo, because it’s still neutral colors (so, I could wear the top or bottom to work), but together it’s quite bold.
Plus Size Tassel Beaded Mini Shift Dress ($95, sizes 14-22)
This screams NYE party to me, but if it fits your all-around vibe, it’s the perfect dress for dancing the night away and catching a cutie’s eye.
Men’s OppoSuits Slim-Fit Novelty Pattern Suit & Tie Collection ($99-119, sizes 36-52)
I’m going to be honest: I have no idea what the quality of these Kohl’s suits are like. However, they seemed in my budget, versatile, and inclusive in size ranges. Some of them could be a little costumey, but some patterns or colors could be spot on for the vibe or venue.
The Empower Double Breasted Blazer ($139, sizes XS-3XL)
A friend sent this to me because she thought of me. It’s 100% my vibe, and depending on how bold you usually dress, it could be a statement fit for you. This pattern has most sizes available, but if you have different size needs you could play around with their different patterns (like the one with snakes!).
Glitter Detail Brocade Wide Leg Mary Fit Pants ($139, sizes 10-30)
I’ve never heard of Ulla Popken, but their stuff kept popping up in my searches, so I thought I’d include this shimmery pink pant suit set. They have a lot of dress options, so if that’s something you want to try, I’d give their suggestions a look as well, even if it’s
LALA ORIGINAL: Make Me Wanna Lala Boyfriend Blazer in Be Yourself ($152, sizes XS-3XL) styled with LALA ORIGINAL: Mirrorball Mesh Dress + Slip ($144, sizes S-3XL)
I LOVE THIS LOOK. IT’S SO GAY. It’s also $300 in total. Am I thinking about getting it anyways and blaming it on my manic tendencies? Maybe.
LALA ORIGINAL: Lala Satin Playsuit in Wild Woman ($178, sizes XS-3XL)
I’ve never been a huge animal print fan, but for whatever reason this year feels like the time for wild animal chic. It’s the perfect combo of a funky pattern and a satin cloth to give it that elevated push it needs for fancy events.
I’ve spent far too long searching for options that aren’t basic or neutral, and let me tell you, it’s hard work! While fast fashion typically is the most affordable route, it has its obvious drawbacks, and I’ve tried to stay away from the big names. If none of these places/options work, the last suggestion I have for you and myself is to hit up plus size thrift stores like The Plus Bus based in Los Angeles but also available online. Since it’s all donation based, their inventory is constantly changing, so what I suggest now may not be up tomorrow. However, they always have some killer pieces like this 13 Going on 30 Dress and this ASOS Jacquard Blue and Gold Dress.
It’s tough out here, and I feel like I’ve now expended my options. Look, we all just want to look gay and hot! So, if you have any further suggestions PLEASE hit me up in the comments.
How To Make the Website for Your Lesbian Wedding
With less than a month to go before my own lesbian wedding, I’m trying to impart some wisdom I’ve gathered over the past year+ of wedding planning, which if I’m being honest has been quite fun! With periods of stress, sure. If anyone tells you they planned a wedding with zero stress ever, they are either lying or have achieved superhuman levels of cognitive and emotional ability. Something I realized early on in the wedding planning process was that soooooo much of the easily searchable advice is not only written under the assumption of straightness but also just woefully heteronormative, catering to strict ideas of gender, family, etc. Even a lot of queer wedding advice out there can be frustrating and broad! And while I don’t think I’m exactly reinventing the wheel here, I hope my wedding planning advice has been practical AND imaginative beyond the basics. My guide to queer wedding dress codes was definitely intended as such. But alas, sometimes you also just want to know about the basics when planning a wedding. Perhaps you just want to know what the fuck to even put on your wedding website. Well, I’m here to talk about exactly that!
Wedding Website Basics
My first rule of wedding websites is to not get toooooo bogged down with the look. The Knot and other wedding planning services offer free website services with so many templates to choose from. Unless HTML is your passion, you don’t need to design a whole website from scratch. Pick a template, pick your colors, and roll with it. If your wedding has a visual theme, pick something to match, but again, don’t get too fussy! There are plenty of other things to get fussy with. Keep the URL simple, too. The usual way to do it is to just include your and your partner’s first names.
There are a few other overarching decisions to make: Do you want to password protect your website? I did this, because my fiancée is a bit of a public figure and because she wrote about our wedding for a major national publication, and idk, I just didn’t want randos knowing where and when our wedding is! If you password protect your website, make sure the password is on the invitations when you send them out. Accept the inevitability that at least four people will text you to ask for the password for the website even though it is on the invitation. In my personal experience, GAYS APPARENTLY CAN’T READ.
Your wedding website is where you’ll collect RSVPs. All the major wedding planning services have straightforward ways of doing this. My fun piece of advice is to include a couple questions on the RSVP form that are personalized! The Knot, which we used, allowed you to add custom questions, so we did one where we asked people to make song requests (in theory, this will reduce the need for people to make requests of our DJ on the actual night) and another where we asked people to say what they’re looking forward to about the wedding in six words or less. Since it’s easy to pull a spreadsheet of all our RSVP responses, I’ll have all those answers in one place, so I can maybe include some in the zine I’m hoping to put together for me and my partner after the wedding. Some of my favorite answers include: “Gay literary wedding of the century,” “to yell gayyyyy (non-derogatory) at you 2 (on the dance floor),” “screaming about love in public,” and “the girls and the gays.”
You can choose to make your guest list available to all guests or keep it hidden, depending on your preferences. We decided to make ours visible, because we figured the nosy gays would wanna know!
Components of a Wedding Website
The following are the different tabs to include on your website, which are super easy to edit, add, and adjust when using an online wedding planning service for your website, especially if you’ve ever put together a newsletter or used a block editor of any sort. Some of the following tabs are optional, and I will indicate when that’s the case!
Homepage
On the homepage of your website, make sure all the MAJOR details are included: date, time, location. A countdown can be fun (and are usually built into most templates). One photo on the homepage, perhaps from your engagement shoot if you did one, will suffice, but don’t get too fancy just yet. You want this landing page to drive home the most pertinent information without distractions. My wedding website says the date…three whole ass times. Again, just trying to make sure the gays are actually reading.
Photos
This is an optional one! But if you want to include photos from something like an engagement shoot on your website so you can show off your wonderful, disgusting love, make it its own tab so that only those truly interested are bombarded with your faces.
Wedding Party
Another optional one! If you’re having wedding parties (we call ours our VIPs instead of using any gendered language, and plus it just sounds cooler), it can be nice to create a tab that includes their names, photos, and bios that you write. These can be the stories of how you met each of them, things you like about them, etc. You can even drag them a bit here, because as queer people it is our right to playfully drag our friends. For mine, in addition to doing individual photos and short blurbs for each person, we also included a gallery of photos of us with our VIPs and officiant through the years. It’s a cute touch, even if the only people who really look at it are the people featured.
FAQ
Non-optional in my opinion! Even if you are having the most simple wedding in the world, if it’s big enough to necessitate a website in the first place, it’s big enough for an FAQ. You can use the FAQ to reiterate the time when people are expected to arrive at the event (which should obviously be on your homepage, too, but it’s good to state it again, right at the top of the FAQ for the gays who will be late no matter what).
Other logistical details such as parking, directions to the venue, etc. can be included on the FAQ. It’s a good place to outline your policies on +1s or bringing children. For sample language if you’re doing a wedding where you aren’t letting people bring anyone they want, here’s what I wrote:
Our wedding is strictly RSVP only. We have so many people who we want to celebrate this day with, and we’re pushing the capacity of our venue. As a result, we’re not doing blanket +1s for all guests. Your invitation is addressed to the folks invited (in some cases, they’ll just be listed as “guest”). If you have questions about +1s, talk to Kayla!
I specified “talk to Kayla,” because if people were to ask my fiancée to bring a rando, she would 100% say yes, because she is a Sagittarius who likes to include everyone! So maybe figure out ahead of time if you or your partner is the stronger choice for being on +1 mediation duty. Our wedding is also children-free, so I made sure to say that on the FAQ along with a note that my niece would briefly be in attendance as the flower girl before leaving the premises. It’s totally fine to not allow children at your wedding!
You can also use the FAQ to explain any details you think your guests should know about the food being served. We’re not doing a formal sit-down dinner but rather will have stations throughout the event, and I explained all this on our website so people know what to expect.
The dress code and your wedding hashtag, if you have one, can also go on the FAQ. And then you’ll want to think about some more specific things that might apply to your wedding in particular. I included “what will the weather be?” on mine, because I anticipated people being confused about Florida in February (the short answer, however, is we can’t know what the weather will be in Florida). At the very end of the FAQ, I included an open invitation to guests to ask me and my fiancée about any concerns they may have about traveling to Florida in its current political climate. That’s obviously very specific to my wedding, but I encourage you to think about those kinds of things when putting your FAQ page together. The day is about you and your partner, but you want your guests to feel safe and comfortable, too. How can you best serve that?
On the note of hashtags, your FAQ can also include any kind of social media “rules” you might have. Don’t want people to use their phones during the ceremony? Say that. Want people to wait 24 hours before posting so they can live in the moment? Let em know! My fiancée and I aren’t doing any strict social media rules, because we met on Twitter, so anything seems fair game at our wedding.
Accommodations
Technically optional, but I do think it’s nice to include a few potential options for hotels you recommend to your guests with notes about how close to the venue they are/what the best way to travel to the venue might be. I also included a list of recommended neighborhoods for folks looking to book an Airbnb and encouraged people to reach out to us with questions.
Things To Do and Eat
While this is optional, it is the number one thing I recommend when putting together your website (other than putting the time and date in multiple places). I spent the most time on this part of our website, and I have received so much positive feedback about it! I broke my list into categories of Activities and Restaurants + Bars. For activities, I included a mixture of genuinely fun touristy things as well as things my fiancée and I like to do together, like bowling and going to our independent movie theater. For each entry, I included a short blurb about why it’s fun. For the Restaurants + Bars section, I grouped things mainly by type and loosely by neighborhood. So coffee shops go together, along with brunch spots, dive bars, cocktail places, our favorite spots, etc. I also included a few splurgey options (and noted they’re more $$$ in the blurbs) in case people want to treat themselves while here.
Most of our guests are out of town guests, so it felt especially important to provide all these recommendations. It also just felt personal. My fiancée and I are hoping to show some of our guests who have never been to Orlando (or who only associate it with the theme parks) why we love it here so much. Sharing our favorite things to do and places to go feels like really welcoming them into our lives for the weekend.
If my guests decide to go off-book and go somewhere that turns out to be mediocre, I don’t want to hear about it!!!!!!!!!!!
Registry/Gifts
You can automatically add a registry to wedding websites so your guests can easily find where they’re supposed to go to get your gifts. But even if you’re not doing a traditional registry, you’ll want to include a tab for whatever it is you ARE doing and label it either “registry” or “gifts.” (If you’re not doing any gifts at all, then put that in your FAQ, because people WILL ask or buy you things you don’t ultimately need/want.)
For example, my fiancée and I are asking for cash donations only. Half of the contributions will go to our honeymoon fund, and the other half will go to Zebra Youth, an LGBTQ+ youth org in our city. We explain this on the website and include several ways for people to give money to the fund. We also specify on the website that we’re asking for contributions on a truly sliding scale basis and that no one should feel like they have to give.
Weekend Itinerary
In addition to the time and date displayed clearly on the homepage, you’ll want a more detailed schedule of events in a separate tab on the website. This can include your rehearsal dinner if you’re having one and any pre-wedding or post-wedding events. Even if those events are informal/unofficial, it’s good to include as much info as possible in case people are planning their travel around when people will be hanging out/doing wedding adjacent things. For example, while we’re forgoing the day-after-wedding brunch some people do (hello, we want everyone including ourselves to SLEEP IN), we have teased on our website a special outing the following evening for anyone who might still be in town…
Your Story
Optional (and in fact, we didn’t do this) but sweet! A lot of couples like to include their love story on their website. It’s cute! I love to read about love, especially queer love. I literally think the only reason my fiancée skipped this part is because we’ve told the story of how we met a million times? In fact, you can read about it right here on Autostraddle.
It might sound like a lot, but the more thorough your website is, especially when it comes to more personal aspects, the fewer questions you’ll get from guests later on when you really should be focusing on other aspects of planning! My recommendation is to set aside a few date nights with your partner where you work on the website but also do something nice, like going to a cafe to do it or having a glass of something sparkling. It doesn’t have to feel too much work if you mix it with pleasure.
How To Set the Dress Code for Your Queer Wedding
If you’ve ever frantically googled something along the lines of “cocktail attire???” or “what the fuck is evening wear” or “wedding dress codes explainer,” you are not alone. I was raised in an environment in which one might assume I understand the various nuances of dress codes. Hell, I was forced to do cotillion!!!!!!!! And yet, I am pretty clueless when it comes to these stringent attire rules, which is especially frustrating because I have a lot of anxiety about underdressing for events (and would almost always prefer to overdress!). I think it’s safe to say dress codes, like a lot of etiquette rules made a billion years ago by (probably) straight people, are outdated and often even discriminatory, especially when it comes to gender. (While we’re getting into it: Dress codes implemented at restaurants are also often employed with racist and/or classist motives.)
When it comes to weddings and other similar formal events, dress codes are expected. But sometimes I think even people specifying a dress code don’t really know what they mean! I went to a wedding that specified cocktail attire and turned out to be the most overdressed person there. It was partially a misfire of my own, partially a misdirection on the part of the specified dress code. And look, it wasn’t disastrous — like I said, I’d prefer to overdress anyway, because I’m a showy Gemini who never minds a bevy of compliments. But my lifelong frustration with dress codes meant I was faced with a specific dilemma when planning my own wedding. Would it have a dress code, and if so, how would I communicate it? Here’s a bit of advice I have based on my own wedding planning that might help if you’re also stuck on how to devise and articulate your queer wedding dress codes.
Do you HAVE to have a wedding dress code?
Technically, I think the answer to this is no. I think especially when planning a queer wedding, we have free rein to blow up any rules we don’t vibe with. Don’t want a dress code? No problem. Just don’t provide one when you send out invitations.
I WILL say the one setback with this route is that you are almost 100% guaranteed to receive questions about the dress code. In fact, I am probably one of those people who would ask about a dress code if one isn’t specified! For starters, these sorts of social “rules” are just ingrained in us. But also, it’s understandable that some people might only feel comfortable if they know ahead of time what the general level of casual vs. formal the event will be.
If you don’t want to do a dress code, then I think the best way to avoid an avalanche of inquiries would be to include something about it on the FAQ page of your website. You can say something along the lines of “we just want people to dress comfortably or however they feel best” or something to that effect. But also, at this point, if you’re already having to give guidance, you might as well…develop a dress code. BUT, you don’t have to just stick to the usual heteronormative categories like “black tie” or vague things like “dressy casual,” which brings me to what I think is the best way to do wedding dress codes for specifically queer weddings…
Make your wedding dress code specific, detailed, creative, and FUN!
Yes, we are queering dress codes! We are giving directions that don’t rely on gendered expectations or fussy distinctions between words that all just sort of sound the same (what IS the difference between semi-formal and dressy casual?!). I first realized dress codes can be expansive if you want them to be when listening to a podcast where the hosts shared about going to a gay wedding where the dress code was DRAMA. Drama! Now that’s a dress code I can get behind.
When it came to envisioning the overall vibe and look of my own wedding, I wasn’t fixated so much on how formal/not formal my guests would be. I mostly just wanted to avoid a sea of black and navy. I recently went to a specifically GAY awards ceremony in New York, and almost everyone was in black and navy! At a formal GAY event!!!! I wore what I thought was a very boring, simple dress, but because it was hot pink, I got a MILLION COMPLIMENTS. For doing the bare minimum of wearing color!
My fiancée and I agreed early on that we want our wedding to feel like a big gay party. I wanted to encourage this overall vibe by supplying a wildly specific and over-the-top dress code so people would really understand this isn’t a stuffy event or one to merely adhere to wedding palette trends for. I wanted color; I wanted patterns; I wanted glitter, sequins, pizazz.
The dress code my fiancée invented for the wedding was PEACOCK OUT. This was fitting on several levels: We’re incorporating peacock colors and decor in our wedding design, because we’re getting married in Winter Park, Florida, where peacocks are a significant symbol, as well as a way of incorporating some of my Indian heritage in the event. And PEACOCK OUT gets the message across: We want people to SHOW OFF their wedding looks.
Of course, we couldn’t just slap PEACOCK OUT on something and call it a day. The best dress codes are the ones that require a paragraph of detail. So this is the language I ended up putting on our website:
Peacock Out! We want our guests to be colorful, glamorous, and fun with their looks! Color! Sparkles! Patterns! If you feel like it’s “too much,” it’s JUST RIGHT. This is a GAY WEDDING. Bring the fashion and drama! If in doubt, text us your look 👀
I’ve stressed to multiple inquiring guests worried their looks are indeed “too much” that there is simply no way to outdo me. I’m going full desi bride with my first look of the evening (yes, I have two), so I’ll be decked out in costume jewelry, shiny embroidery, tassels, and color! No plain white dress to be found! There’s literally no way to outdo me, and if someone tries, hell I can’t be mad because it’ll be impressive.
If you want to go the creative dress code route, basically just envision how you’d like the overall vibe of your wedding to look and feel and go from there. Want to have an ethereal, almost witchy vibe? Tell people the dress code is COVEN CHIC. Want a floral-filled pastel dreamland? Tell people the dress code is GARDEN TEA PARTY. You’re welcome to steal my dress code! Or go with DRAMA, which I still think is an iconic choice. Of course, you’ll want to expand upon what you mean on your website or by some other means of communication, but don’t feel like you’re burdening people by providing them with a LOT of details about what to wear! People like a genuinely interesting prompt way more than vague and outdate terminology.
Your wedding should look and feel like you. A personalized dress code is the perfect way to inject a bit of yourself, your weirdness, and your style into the big day.
How To Make Planning Your Queer Wedding HOT
feature image photo by Klaus Vedfelt via Getty Images
Wedding planning isn’t exactly known for being sexy.
There are attempts to inject some sex appeal into the long and layered process. Some wedding photographers offer boudoir photoshoot add-ons, and even though I wasn’t interested in that service specifically, I had an eye toward finding a photographer who could take, well, horny photos, because hey, those are my personal priorities in life. I want my wedding photos to be hot.
I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, when my fianceé Kristen proposed, it almost reanimated a version of the intoxicating New Relationship Energy experienced at the beginning of hooking up with someone. A honeymoon phase before any actual honeymoon. We’re always extremely into each other and have high sex drives, but the engagement also brought a level of romance back to our daily lives, something that ebbs and flows for all couples. We went on dates, on trips, and found a million different ways to celebrate the engagement just between the two of us.
But then it came time to actually start planning the wedding. Time for spreadsheets and phone calls and a bunch of other nitty gritty logistical things. We were both spread pretty thin — me with my editing work and personal projects, her with finishing a draft of her next novel, not to mention just regular life obligations — so wedding planning got slotted in on the side, on late nights or over the weekend or during morning coffee. I texted my sister, my unofficial wedding planner, at odd hours and sporadically. I attempted to have as many organizational systems as possible, including the aforementioned spreadsheets, but it was haphazard and scattered.
During this time at the beginning of planning, I also encountered a lot of gendered assumptions about who was doing the bulk of the planning. People would ask me — and just me! — how wedding planning was going, even if Kristen was right there. Even though we’re two queer people getting married, we couldn’t escape the heteronormative assumption that I, as the more femme presenting person in the couple, was in charge. My feelings about this were complicated by the fact that, in truth, I am taking the lead on a lot of the planning. But it’s not because Kristen isn’t interested, excited, or willing to help. We just both know I’m more particular in my vision and that one of my favorite things in life is to plan a party, and this is the ultimate party. So, yes, I probably had more to say about how wedding planning was going, and yet I felt resentful they were only asking me.
Wedding planning wasn’t stressful back then, but I did feel an ambivalence about it. In the past couple months though, something changed. I’m loving wedding planning. Kristen is, too. We’re having genuine fun with it. And it all comes down to the solution we found to several things at once. We found a way to make wedding planning 1. More organized, 2. More of a shared experience, and 3. HOT!!!!!!!!! And it’s quite simple, really: We go on wedding planning dates.
Once or twice a week depending on how many tasks we have to get through, we pick one of our favorite date night spots where it wouldn’t be weird to bring a laptop (so more of a bar or cafe vibe versus a restaurant) and go on a date that doubles as a planning session. We make a manageable to-do list for each of these dates, usually focusing on a specific overarching task, like when we were searching for a wedding photographer and used one of these dates to look through potential candidates’ websites and socials, full wedding galleries sent by folks we’d already had consultation calls with, and scheduled calls with others. We order food and drinks, take breaks from planning, and treat it like a real date, making sure to talk about more than just the planning itself, including all the fun stuff we’re looking forward to about wedding weekend. More than once, a wedding planning date has immediately been followed by sex. We’re connecting intimately over the planning, and it’s reminding us why we’re having a big wedding in the first place. We’re obsessed with each other and want to channel that energy into throwing a really fantastic celebration of our love with all the other people we love.
Which brings me to this, the single greatest piece of wedding advice I’ve received throughout this process: Make a new Gmail account for wedding planning. I know, I know, email logistics don’t scream HOT (…for everyone). But this was a tip imparted by a wedding photographer (who we ultimately didn’t go with for budget reasons, but I’ll be forever grateful to her for this advice), and it’s a gamechanger. Make an entirely new Google account for wedding planning purposes. You can give it a cute name or just make it literally your name + your partner’s name + wedding. Start using this email to do all your vendor reachouts and consultation calls. Use the calendar to add important deadlines and payment schedules. Add wedding planning date nights to the calendar, too! Then, when you go on one of these dates, you can open up that email account and not have to also see work emails or other personal emails that might be in your other accounts. It kind of turns wedding planning into its own part time job, which honestly, sometimes it feels exactly like that! Having the shared account where all wedding things are organized makes it a lot easier to focus when planning, which then frees you up to connect in other ways on these dates, because everything is streamlined and easier to keep track of.
Wedding planning dates have made it so Kristen and I have more shared ownership over the process. It feels collaborative and infinitely more organized. It’s also just fun and sexy to plan over a glass of wine and oysters. And these dates don’t have to happen out. They can just as easily take place at home, which we’ve done during busier weeks and when we don’t want to spend too much money (because, hello, weddings are expensive as is!). Make dinner or order in. Keep it simple, keep it sexy. Maybe every time you check something off the list, you get to treat yourselves to a literal treat or…something spicier. If you want a hot, queer wedding, the planning should feel hot and queer, too.
How To Find a Queer Wedding Photographer
feature image photo by shironosov via Getty Images
My fiancée Kristen proposed to me last Christmas morning. It felt like we had all the time in the world to plan a wedding, something we both knew we wanted to have. We took some time to celebrate and luxuriate in the engagement before jumping into wedding planning, but once we were settled back at home after the holidays, it was time to dive in. We knew it’d be a lot of work, so we’d chosen a date that was more than a year away and did our best to spread out all of the big tasks as much as possible.
We locked in our caterer and venue a full year before our chosen wedding date. I got my dress figured out much faster than I imagined, about nine months out. And about eight months out, we traveled to New York for Kristen to get fitted for a custom suit.
We pressed pause on a lot of the other big ticket items of planning a wedding for a few months when we both got busy with work and travel and work-related travel. About six months out from our wedding, we started back up again, knowing we still had some Very Big Decisions to make (and Very Big Checks to sign).
Most urgently, we needed to find a wedding photographer. There’s certainly no scarcity of wedding photographers in the world, especially in Central Florida where we live and where apparently a lot of people like to get married (has something to do with The Mouse). But we both knew we wanted someone specific to shoot our Big Gay Florida Wedding: We wanted a queer wedding photographer.
Why should you seek out a queer wedding photographer?
PeopleImages via Getty Images
Your photographer is one of your most important wedding vendors — if you’re choosing to have one! It’s of course a totally valid choice to take an alternative and more affordable path, like having guests use disposable cameras. It’s all just about what you want!
If you’re undecided about hiring a professional photographer though, I’ve talked to so many friends and family members who emphasize that the photos are their favorite thing to still have from their weddings. They’re literal memories, preserved forever. There are a lot of places to cut costs when it comes to weddings, but for me, I didn’t want photography to be one of those places.
A photographer isn’t just an important wedding role; it’s an intimate one. A good wedding photographer is going to tell you when you’re having a wardrobe malfunction, maybe even ask to fix it for you. If you’re doing “getting ready” photos, they might see you in various stages of getting undressed/dressed. If you’re doing a “first look” shoot, they’re going to be present during the extremely intimate moment of your partner seeing you/you seeing your partner in wedding wear for the first time. They’re going to interact with all your besties, your family, and be there for every single part of the big day. Good wedding photographers are going to want to get to know you very well — from the very first consultation call. They’ll ask about your priorities, your vision, and even your love story.
Having a queer wedding photographer comes with a sense of comfort and familiarity that doesn’t have to be taught or negotiated. At the beginning of our process in finding a queer wedding photographer, I had some difficulty finding a queer person who fit our other needs (I needed the guide I’m currently writing!), so I cast a wider net, just looking for people who’d presented some level of LGBTQ+ support, like having pictures of queer couples on their socials.
For example, I found a photographer who didn’t identify as queer but who linked to a worksheet about using more inclusive language for weddings. I liked that she was thinking about these things, because it’s exactly why I was prioritizing trying to find a queer photographer. We aren’t using words like “bridesmaids” or “groomsmen” for our wedding parties; we’re calling them our VIPs. To every potential photographer I spoke with, I emphasized that the wedding is queer not only in the sense that a queer couple is getting married but also in the sense that many of our guests are queer and/or trans. We don’t want a photographer to make assumptions about gender or pronouns. Kristen and I also have very different family situations: I’ll have a lot of family there, and she won’t. But Kristen still wants to do some of the traditional posed family photos after the ceremony with her chosen family. Of course, any photographer will honor a request like that, but it means something to us that a photographer really understands that situation.
When we spoke with photographers who openly identified as queer on their socials and websites, we didn’t have to ask as many of the questions we had about things like that, because they already got it. It was already baked into their business models. LGBTQ photographers asked us for our pronouns when we filled out the initial forms requesting consultation calls. On those calls, they reiterated that they ask for pronouns for our wedding parties and for anyone who we want to include in our shot lists. And they totally understood our emphasis on chosen family at our wedding. With these photographers, there was a shorthand and an extra layer of comfort. It wasn’t just LGBTQ-friendliness; it was LGBTQ-understanding and relatability.
Of course, there’s always a possibility that even after using this guide and searching far and wide, you might not be able to find an LGBTQ wedding photographer who’s available for your date, has a style you’re drawn to, and is within your price range. Being queer isn’t the only criteria you’re looking for, and it can be hard to make everything line up. We talked to one queer photographer we loved, but she was too far above our budget. I also specifically looked in potential photographers feeds to see if they regularly shoot weddings featuring one or more people of color, as that was important to me.
If you do end up talking to photographers who don’t identify as queer, here are some of the questions we asked in those situations you might consider just to make sure your values and priorities are aligned:
- Have you shot queer weddings before? How often and what is your comfortability with doing so? (You can also totally request to see photos/galleries they might have from queer weddings!)
- Are you open to using more inclusive terms to describe wedding parties and other wedding customs?
- Is there anything you’d like to know from us in terms of what we consider to be LGBTQ friendly?
That last one acts as a catch all and opportunity for you to talk about what it is you want and expect from a photographer when it comes to interacting with you and your wedding guests. It presents an opportunity to talk about things like pronouns. But wording it in this way also throws the ball in their court. It’s a question that invites questions. It gives you a chance to gauge if they’re interested in learning from and listening to you.
How to go about finding a queer wedding photographer
Kosamtu via Getty Images
Take your time.
Give yourself the gift of time. If you’re able to, start looking for a photographer early in your wedding planning process so you can be pickier. Making yourself available to multiple consultation calls will ensure you get to talk to as many people as possible. Who knows — maybe you’ll get lucky and find a perfect queer fit on the first call, but that would be extremely lucky! Assume you’re going to have to talk to multiple people.
Use the gay phone tree.
As with a lot of queer things, word of mouth is everything! If you have queer friends — or even friends of friends! — who have gone through the wedding planning process and know they had a queer photographer, reach out to them and get more information. Even if those friends live somewhere else, a lot of wedding photographers will travel for an additional fee.
If you already have other vendors planned out and they’re queer, ask them if they have queer photographers in mind. A lot of vendors have a roster of people they like to work with and support.
On that note, if you find a queer photographer, reach out, and they’re not available for your date, ask them if they have recommendations for other queer photographers. A lot of photographers will automatically recommend other folks if they’re not available on your date, but you can specifically ask for queer or queer-friendly options.
Be clear about your priorities from the start.
When filling out the initial form to request a consultation call with any photographer, it’s good to emphasize you’re having a queer wedding and are seeking vendors who are enthusiastically LGBTQ-friendly. On all of my request forms, I wrote BIG GAY FLORIDA WEDDING. It’s good to do this, because if you’re reaching out to someone whose identity is unclear (not all queer photographers highlight their sexuality in their business branding), they might take this as an opportunity to “come out” to you.
But I also found this a successful approach when reaching out to non-queer photographers who turned out to be unavailable for our date. The first alternative suggestions they sent back were out n proud queer wedding photographers, because even though they weren’t available to provide direct services for me, they still understood my priorities as a client. Great wedding photographers are super thoughtful like that.
Follow Queer Wedding content accounts on social media.
Confession: Way before I was even engaged, I followed the Instagram accounts @dancingwithher and @dancingwiththem, because seeing queer wedding content legitimately fills me with joy…and because maybe I have secretly dreamed of having a big wedding one day. Another Instagram account to follow is @handhweddings.
These accounts are great to reference during the photographer search, because you can check out photographers who are tagged in specific posts. You can also just treat the posts on these feeds as a mood board for the style of photos you want. It’s going to be a much more inclusive reference point than using Pinterest.
Our engagement photoshoot was done by a friend, and I found it helpful to reference potential poses on these feeds. (Btw, skipping an engagement photoshoot or doing more of a DIY one is one way to cut costs. A lot of wedding photographers will let you swap out the engagement shoot in their set packages for something like a second shooter or print credit or just take some money off the total cost. The biggest drawback here is that engagement shoots give you a chance to meet and get comfy with your photographer ahead of time.)
Scrolling through @dancingwithher, @dancingwiththem, or other similar accounts, it’s not super easy to filter or screen for location. A lot of posts will be geotagged, so you can manually scroll until you find a nearby place. It isn’t the most efficient process, but if you live in a major city, you might get lucky. You can also ignore location and just try to find and follow queer photographers whose style speaks to you. As mentioned before, wedding photographers will often travel, but you’ll be charged a travel fee in most instances, so this is not a budget-friendly approach.
You can also try to find queer wedding photographers on TikTok, though I admittedly had better luck on Instagram. Using TikTok to search for “gay wedding [YOUR CITY]” or something similar can definitely lead to content that can then lead to potential vendors. Getting more specific with a search like “gay wedding photographer [YOUR CITY]” also works. You might have to go down a bit of a research rabbit hole, but again, it’s worth taking the extra time to search.
(I find social media to be more navigable in this department than just Googling “queer wedding photographer [YOUR CITY].” But you can give that a whirl and see if it’s more effective for where you live. Some cities have LGBTQ business bureaus that highlight these vendors.)
Once you follow one queer wedding photographer, it becomes easier to find more.
Use databases that already exist.
The Dancing With Her website has a searchable database of inclusive wedding vendors. I will say…the database greatly preferences major cities like NYC, LA, Chicago, etc. There were no photographer options for Orlando or even for Florida last time I checked.
I expanded my radius to include nearby states and found a photographer in Texas who I liked enough to schedule a consultation call with. It’s important to remember your values and priorities when looking for a wedding photographer but also to be flexible. Kristen and I wanted a Florida-based photographer for a couple reasons: money and also because Florida means so much to Kristen. We were very intentional about planning to have our wedding here, in her hometown, in a place that means so much to her and is coming to mean so much to me. We want vendors who reflect that. So I never thought I’d talk to someone in Texas, but the more we thought about it, the more we realized a queer person living and working in the wedding industry in Texas is going to understand the complexities and nuances of having a queer wedding in Florida. And this person would probably understand us and our wedding values more than a straight ally based in Florida. It didn’t work out for other reasons, but I’m glad we set up that consultation call, because it forced us to reexamine our priorities.
Mainstream wedding hub The Knot also allows you to search for wedding photographers in your area and filter for LGBTQ-owned businesses. On their photographer search page (which will automatically have your location if you’ve registered for The Knot, but you can also manually enter it), go to the filter category called “Supports Diversity” (lol) and check the box for “LGBTQ+-owned businesses.” They also have other specific identity markers you can search for, like Black-owned businesses, Asian-owned businesses, Pacific Islander-owned businesses, etc. The Knot will show you average price ranges for each vendor, and you can easily send a quote request or request for a consultation call all within The Knot. Going back to the previous social media section, even if the results that come up on The Knot’s directory aren’t a fit, you can always look to see who they follow or are followed by on Instagram.
I was not able to find a way to search specifically for queer wedding photographers on Zola, one of the other popular wedding planning websites.
You may now be wondering: Well, did you find a queer, Florida-based wedding photographer, Kayla? Yes! Yes we did. I’m writing this from a place of personal success!
It took a few weeks (relatively short!) and a lot of internet/social media sleuthing. I probably filled out close to 10 consultation call request forms, and Kristen and I did four consultation calls (relatively few!). Two calls were with queer photographers, and two were with straight photographers. Side note: It’s nice to let any photographers who you decide not to go with know you’ve gone in another direction. I thought we’d have to do more calls, but we got lucky with our fourth, which was with a queer, Florida-based wedding photographer who we instantly vibed with. For our privacy, I won’t disclose additional details beyond that for now, but making it official with our queer wedding photographer (we just signed the paperwork last week!) felt like one of the biggest wins of this wedding planning process so far. 🥂
You Need Help: Should I Invite My Friends’ Whole Polycule to My Wedding?
Q:
My fiancée and I are putting together the guest list for our wedding and we’ve run into a social quandary. It will be a small wedding, and we want to invite two of our mutual friends who are married to each other. We mostly knew them as a monogamous couple, but since we moved to another state, they have become part of a polycule. We love our friends, and want everyone at this intimate gathering to feel comfortable. We’ve never met the two newest people in their relationship, but they all seem to be getting more serious about each other. Should we invite just the two friends, or the whole polycule? How do we know when a +1 should actually be a +2 or +3?
A:
Hello! Fellow queer person currently planning a wedding here and experiencing intermittent guest list stress, so I am answering from that perspective! The simplified version of my answer is this: Basically, you can treat these friends the same way as you treat other friends who have maybe started new relationships where you don’t know their partners. Are you automatically inviting all of your monogamously partnered friends’ partners even if you’ve never met them before or don’t really have your own friendships with them? Then it might be the most “fair” to consider inviting these friends’ partners. If you have left off some friend’s partners who you don’t know, then it’s fine to leave these ones off, too, regardless of how serious the relationship is.
My slightly more complicated (or perhaps liberating for you — idk!) answer is that you can invite or not invite whoever you want to your wedding. A lot of “guest list” etiquette is outdated when it comes to +1s — and I don’t mean in the sense that obviously old and heteronormative rules don’t take into account polycules or poly relationship structures but just in the sense that +1s in general don’t always need to be the default. Not everyone on the guest list for my wedding gets a +1 — even for some folks who are monogamously partnered! My fiancé and I basically went with our own personal “rules” for +1s, which weren’t codified rules at all but just rather who we thought it made the most sense to invite. We have some friends who are newer to our lives, and it just didn’t make a ton of sense for us to invite their partners who we’ve never met. We have some friends who we spend a ton of time with who never really bring their partners around, so in some of those cases, we also didn’t feel bad about not extending +1s. I have cousins in Norway who are invited who are married or otherwise in longterm partnerships whose partners are not invited, which I knew would be especially chill because Norwegians think Americans are kinda extra with all the +1 stuff at weddings.
The size of your guest list is the #1 determining factor for the cost of your wedding — full stop. I don’t think anyone understands this until they’ve planned a wedding themselves (myself included!), but the smallest adjustments to size can make a huge difference. It’s not “just a few extra people” in a lot of cases; it automatically makes the price of food, drink, programs, etc go up. And if you’re planning a small wedding, then it makes it all the more true that small fluctuations would have a big impact. The thing that really stands out to me is that you’ve never met these other people in the polycule. Except in a few very rare cases, my fiancé and I aren’t inviting anyone who hasn’t been met by at least one of us.
Every time I experienced stress while working on our guest list, I had a helpful friend who reminded me that there’s no way to make everyone happy; you should focus on making yourselves happy. No one should be invited to a wedding solely because you feel socially obligated to do so. You have to come up with whatever “rules” make the most sense for you — and they can be amorphous like ours ultimately were.
Of course, no one should feel excluded just because they choose a polyamorous approach to their relationships. Ask yourself this though: If these two people who you’re both friends with had recently broken up and were now seriously dating new people, would you invite those new partners? If any of your monogamous friends broke up and started seeing new people, would you invite those new people, too? If the answer is yes without a doubt, then sure, go ahead and invite their full polycule. If the answer is no or you’re unsure, then maybe remind yourselves that what really matters is the people you’re closest to are at your special day, and sometimes that doesn’t include everyone those people are also close to.
Also, something that’s helpful to keep in mind is that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with guest +1s being on, for lack of a better phrase, a “backup list.” If you have enough people decline when they RSVP to your wedding, then perhaps you can add in extra +1s — either for these friends or for other friends who are in new relationships or even for single friends who you think might benefit from a date. In general, my guest list has what I call a “no randos” policy, which basically means no blanket +1s for folks — except in a few individual cases where I know the person invited ONLY knows me and my fiancé and I wanted them to have a buddy. See, this is what I mean by amorphous rules! Be flexible and not overly constrained by etiquette, which can be super rigid!
I totally understand the impulse of wanting to make sure your approach to social expectations are inclusive and fair, but I also think it’s okay to play by your own rules when it comes to a wedding and go with your instincts. So long as the decision is being made from a place of what you actually want and not what you think others expect of you, I think whatever choice you make is ultimately yours and doesn’t have to be defended to anyone. The fact that you’re asking this question in the first place signals to me that you take your friends’ relationships seriously.
You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.
Blush and Bashful: How To Plan a Lesbian Wedding Ceremony
feature image photo by martinedoucet via Getty Images
Somewhere in between thrifting 50 floral print hankies and meeting with the queer chef who is catering my wedding, I realized that I had to actually… figure out what I wanted my wedding ceremony to look like. Sure, the event is essentially a backyard campout weekend with an incredibly specific aesthetic, but it’s also the time we’re setting aside to get married. So I guess we should… do that!
Whether you’re planning on legally involving the state in your union or not, the ceremonial part of the wedding is a major component (unless you choose not to include it, which we’ll touch on in this post, too). So it’s worth talking about a little bit or a lot a bit when planning a big gay wedding, and we’re here to talk about planning a big gay wedding! So let’s get into it!
What does a wedding ceremony entail?
Haha, okay, so the first thing I did when writing this post is google “what do you need to do to legally get married.” I’ve clearly spent more time thinking about the floral arrangements than the nitty gritty details of marriage so far! But the thing is, legally getting married and having a wedding ceremony are not really the same. To get legally married in the United States, you need to get a marriage license and then a marriage certificate. The laws are mostly the same across state lines, but a quick internet search will give you the details of your specific state.
A wedding ceremony is not something that can be dictated by a quick internet search, because it’s highly personal! You and the person or people you’re marrying will work together to create your ideal ceremony, and that can truly include… well, anything. A lot of big wedding websites will have “guides” for the general flow of a wedding, but having attended quite a few queer weddings at this point, I can say that our ceremonies do not always represent those ones at all. For example, my partner and I don’t have a wedding party, so no one is coming down the aisle before us in the “processional” — it’s literally just us walking down the aisle together. For another example, two of my best friends did a beautiful hand fasting ceremony together at their wedding, and there was no aisle at all — they were already standing together at the front of the space when the guest filtered in, and we all did a spiral dance together to close out the ceremony and then dispersed naturally, rather than having a formal exit or “recessional.”
So while I do think it can be useful to look up general templates of wedding ceremonies if you have no idea where to begin, I also think if you want to just throw the whole template out the window and do it however you want to, that’s cool as hell. The main point of a wedding ceremony is for you and your partner to declare your intentions in front of your community, and as long as you do that in a way that feels good to you, you’re killing it.
Who is going to officiate?
One thing that all wedding ceremonies I’ve ever attended have had is an officiant. That’s the person who leads the ceremony, and in movies says things like, “You may now kiss the bride!” (They say that in real life too, it just feels like such an epic movie moment to me every time, lol.) An officiant can be a religious leader (many Jewish people have a rabbi officiate, for example), a good friend, or anyone who is legally certified to officiate a wedding (my understanding is that you can become an officiant swiftly and easily on the internet, so it’s truly a “whoever you want” kind of moment).
Some things to think about when choosing an officiant: Is it important to you to have a religious leader officiate? Would you like a family member or friend to do it? If you’re choosing someone you don’t know, do they have the same values as you and do you think they will listen to your desires for the way your ceremony will go? Do they have experience officiating a wedding before? Do you think they can pull it off without crying? (One of my best friends was recently demoted from officiating another friend’s wedding because she sobbed so hard at the last wedding she attended no one believes she could make it through her little spiel, lol.)
My partner and I asked two of our best friends to officiate our wedding because we didn’t want any strangers at the wedding, we didn’t mind if the officiant wasn’t a rabbi even though we are Jewish, and because we want them to bring their personality and their energy to the ceremony. It’s just one more way we can make the event intimate and special for us.
Will your community participate?
Something that is quite common during wedding ceremonies is asking your community to participate in some way. This can mean assigning a few readings to people (it can be very meaningful to choose readings with the people you’d like to read them, so you know they believe in the words they’re sharing, or to give them some options to choose between), having your guests all pass around a special crystal or other magic object to imbue with love and community that you’ll then hold onto, or doing a “group vow” which is essentially when everyone at the wedding recites a promise to support the people getting married.
Some religions have community participation built into their rituals (to speak from my experience, in Judaism the Seven Blessings are usually read by seven different guests, and we’re having all our guests recite the final blessing together so every single person feels involved with the ceremony) but it’s easy to include this in your wedding even if you aren’t religious and won’t be doing any explicitly religious rituals; you just have to plan accordingly and decide what would feel good to you. I am always a fan of having guests read poetry at a wedding ceremony. Perhaps that’s a given as I’m a writer and a lesbian, but truly, what is better than a love poem read by a hot queer in celebration of a big gay wedding?!
How the fuck do you write your vows?
When I originally pitched this week’s column subject I said it would be “How to write your vows” but lol, it turns out I do not know how and the internet has been only mildly useful in educating me! So I pivoted to a subject I felt more knowledgable about, and now we’ll address the vows as one aspect of your ceremony. And the answer to how you write your vows is… if anyone knows please tell me?!
Seriously, I’ve polled lots of different friends about this and have not received much useful advice. One friend said, “I wrote them the night before the wedding in a panic and honestly blacked out while reading them so I don’t even know what I said,” and that does seem to be the vibe. Currently I know my partner feels pressure about writing her vows because I’m “the writer” of the family, and I feel pressure about writing my vows because I’m “a writer”… perhaps the only truth of wedding vows is you will feel some pressure around writing them?!?!
I will say that I have been getting aggressively targeted ads on Instagram for this app called Provenance that helps craft ceremony scripts and vows, but when I finally decided to try it out (for science!), it immediately asked me to pay cash money to access the vows portion of the website, so never mind on that.
So, okay, here’s my answer to this question as of now. When I have sat down to write the rough draft of my vows, I’ve tried to think of it as four parts: 1. Our love story, 2. What I love about my partner, 3. Why I appreciate our community and their support, 4. What I promise/vow to do for/with my partner in our married life together. And my goal is to keep it between 1-3 minutes because in reality, as much as our loved ones love us, no one is at our wedding to attend a long reading… they just wanna celebrate our love and get to the dance party! I realize this is a very tiny amount of practical advice and I apologize. I’m finding that it’s really hard to write wedding vows! If anyone has any better practical advice, I’d genuinely love to hear about it in the comments.
Will you include religious or cultural rituals?
There are so many religious and cultural rituals when it comes to wedding ceremonies, and what you include will be entirely up to you. My partner and I are Jewish witches (Jewitches, if you will) so we’re doing a few Jewish rituals plus a magic ritual. We’re also signing a ketubah (a Jewish marriage contract) as well as a state marriage license. The way we pick and chose what rituals we wanted to include was very intentional — we are lucky enough to not have any immediate family members telling us what to do for our wedding, so we just went through the options of what we could do and decided which ones mattered to us. We included some and set aside others.
It should go without saying but I’ll say it anyway: If you are choosing a religious or cultural ritual for your wedding, make sure it is from your collective religions or cultures, not an appropriative moment. I saw some white women selling “dream catcher bridal headdresses” at the bridal expo I went to and it was truly disgusting — do not be this person!
I would actually really love to include some guest posts to this column about specific wedding rituals for different religions and cultures, so if you’ve participated in one and would like to write about it from a first person perspective, please pitch me (vanessa [at] autostraddle [dot] com, but please don’t expect a reply until late June because, you know, my wedding is coming up, lol).
What if you want it all to be private?
That is totally okay! I have friends who hosted a wedding party but wanted the actual ceremony to be private so they did it on a separate day a few weeks before the event. I have friends who wanted their entire wedding to be very private so they only invited ten people. I have seen a lot of Instagram posts about couples saying “private vows” to each other that are more personal (or simply longer) and then saying shorter more public vows during their wedding ceremonies. If you want things to be extremely private you can always elope! And I’m sure there are a million other ways to create a more private wedding ceremony. While legally you do have to have a couple of witnesses to call it a marriage, your ceremony can look any way you want it to, and if that means you actually don’t want others looking at it, then they shan’t! Your wedding, your calls.
Blush and Bashful is a biweekly queer wedding planning column.
Blush and Bashful: How To Save Money on Your Lesbian Wedding
feature image photo by toncd32 via Getty Images
I have to be honest — when I started writing this article, I did some research online to see what major bridal publications are suggesting when it comes to saving money on a wedding, and I ended up feeling shocked about all the things people actually spend money on to begin with! Which reminded me, of course, how “wedding” is one of those words that seems to have just one definition, but actually has a million — a wedding is truly what you make it, and it can truly cost whatever you decide to spend on it!
That said, this list is quite specific to the wedding I’m planning, which is a budget affair. I was never going to pay someone to print our invitations on fancy cardstock or to address them with fancy calligraphy (thank you Zola print shop!), I was never going to serve sushi at our reception (we’re going buffet style, baybeeee), and I was never going to buy boutonnieres for our groomsmen because, to be blunt, we don’t have any! (To be fair, we don’t have a bridal party at all, so we won’t be spending money on florals for anyone besides the brides to hold or wear.)
I think the general vibe of this article can be used regardless of your actual budget for your wedding, but as always, I’d love to hear in the comments how you saved money or are planning to save money on your event. Here are some tips and tricks I’m using to save money on my lesbian wedding!
Buy your own alcohol
When I started planning my wedding, I was adamant that the main thing I cared about was the food and the beverages. Everything else I was comfortable being low key about, but I wanted an abundance of delicious food and drinks and I wanted everyone to feel very taken care of in that regard. The cool thing is, you do NOT need to hire a bartender or do a fancy bar scenario in order to provide a truly top notch drinks experience for your guests.
I am having a backyard-style wedding, so buying our own booze and non-alcoholic options is an obvious choice, but even if you’re working with a caterer, many of them will give you the option to purchase your own beverages. A friend of mine who works as a professional caterer even suggests this to her clients, because she knows how much money it will save them and is a good person, lol. You don’t have to do anything fancy — buying wine and kegs and sparkling water and juices is just fine — but if you want to do some batch mix cocktails, that’s doable on your own, too. My partner and I went out to a bar and tried a bunch of drinks to see what tastes and vibes we wanted to emulate at our wedding, purchased some gallon batch drink dispensers, and will be mixing up our own cocktails on-site.
Have a smaller wedding
Depending on who you are as a bride/groom/person getting married, this one is either a no brainer or incredibly challenging.
If you’ve always dreamt of a small intimate wedding, you’re nodding your head vigorously right now. But if you have a large community, are anticipating having to invite a lot of family, or simply love a giant party, this is a really hard suggestion to take on. The truth is though, literally everything will go down in cost if there are fewer people at your event. Think of everything you are going to provide: food, drinks, chairs, table spots, potentially transportation, rentals… even the amount of space you need (and thus, the cost of the venue you rent) is affected by how many guests you invite.
My partner and I wanted to invite all our friends, and to be honest the act of paring down the guest list was really challenging and in some cases emotionally painful. But our financial reality was such that we could only afford a very small wedding. If you can keep your guest list tight, you will save money across the board. It’s just math.
Spend less on your dress
Okay, I used the word “dress” because it rhymes with “less,” but obviously you can wear whatever the heck you want to your wedding! The sentiment still stands though: How cheap can you go while buying these garments?
Wedding dresses and formal suits and all sorts of fancy dress wear comes in a huge range of prices — you can literally drop $20,000 on a dress in a blink of an eye. Can you imagine?! But even more “reasonable” wedding clothes can be really expensive for the average consumer. That said, there are many ways to go with a cheaper plan. You can thrift, you can keep an eye out for trunk shows and sample sales, you can buy a lightly used dress either online or at specific stores that cater to this, you can buy a dress you like that isn’t “a wedding dress” and thus will be dramatically cheaper, you can rent an outfit… these are just a few options when thinking about how to get the cost down on your dress/wedding outfit.
Plan ahead as much as possible
Depending on the length of your engagement, you may have a lot of time or you may have very little time to plan your wedding. The further you can plan ahead, though, the better when it comes to saving money.
As is often the case in life, everything feels more relaxed when you have ample time, so you can shop sales, look for free stuff, and get multiple quotes for services to make sure you’re getting the best deals.
Some particular things to keep in mind here: rush shipping will always cost more, so if you’re able to order things (like invitations, party favors, any ceremonial ritual items you want, etc) far out, that’s ideal. Some days of the week are more expensive than others when it comes to weddings — a venue may charge less for a Sunday wedding, a photographer may charge less for a weekday night, etc. When you start prepping for a wedding, you will find yourself looking to buy the weirdest, most random things, and not all will scream “wedding,” so being able to shop sales at any time is useful (for example, those batch gallon drinks dispensers I referenced above just went on sale at my local grocery store because it’s finally grilling season in the PNW, and I took the opportunity to snatch up several of them… way cheaper than purchasing them full price).
I also really utilized OfferUp (a Facebook Marketplace adjacent app) for decorations, and being able to keep an eye out for the past year to see when folks are getting rid of like, three huge floor rugs or five giant rolls of pink tulle has been invaluable. I’ve spent almost zero dollars on decorations, simply from having the time to find deals and drive to the suburbs to pick them up.
Mix up fake and real floral
You may not be doing floral centerpieces or decorations at all, in which case disregard this tip, but I know a lot of people do drop a ton of money on fancy florals for a wedding and I’m here to say… you don’t have to! I was initially very skeptical of fake floral, but I have been so impressed with the quality of fake flowers these days (available at Goodwill or craft shops) and I find they look just as good (if not better!) than real flowers when mixed with greenery or other decorations. If you really don’t want to use any fake floral but still want to save money, you can go with only greenery, and it will be much cheaper. And if you’re looking for cheap real flowers and are okay doing a bit of work yourself, skip the florist and go directly to a supermarket like Trader Joe’s or Fred Meyer (or whichever store sells food and flowers near you) first thing in the morning the day before the wedding and go wild there.
Accept help
Something that has been really surprising to me over the course of this process is how much my friends and family want to help with the wedding. I initially felt like I was being annoying or asking too much when I requested assistance with wedding-related tasks, but the more I’ve leaned in to accepting help, the more it’s become apparent to me that people in my life are genuinely excited about this and genuinely want to pitch in.
Accepting help for your wedding looks different for different people. You may be hiring a wedding planner and day of coordinator and not really need (or want) your mother in law to weigh in on every detail. You may be throwing a backyard wedding and absolutely do want all hands on deck in prepping your garden for the ceremony and your house for the reception. You may fall somewhere in between those two points. But whatever kind of wedding you’re having, think about the ways in which receiving help would actually feel helpful, and practice asking for and then accepting that help.
I was planning to pay for bridal bouquets, but a close friend who grows a gorgeous garden asked if she could make them for us as a gift. I accepted. One of my best friends is a bedazzling queen, and she offered to bedazzle my Tevas and my partner’s Crocs (yes we’re wearing Tevas and Crocs), and I was thrilled. My mom wants to help me bake the cupcakes we need for dessert, and I’m delighted to let her. All of this help is being offered freely — it’s stuff these people genuinely want to contribute — and it’s both saving me money and creating a very special atmosphere around my wedding. If there are ways, big or small, that your community can show up for you — let them! You’d do the same for them.
Don’t include things you don’t care about
This step is arguably the most important one when it comes to wedding planning, period.
Weddings are steeped in cultural norms and expectations, and once you start planning it’s hard not to get swept up in that. But if you don’t care about something — don’t do it. And even more importantly: don’t spend money on doing it.
My partner and I didn’t send out save the dates because we didn’t want to; we just sent our invitations out super early instead. We initially weren’t going to print programs, which I actually still think is an excellent money saving tip, but then we realized we have a lot of Pagan and Jewish rituals happening at the ceremony and many of our guests will be unfamiliar with them, so we did print programs after all because we wanted to include explanations about the ceremony rituals so our guests could follow along. This is a key example of only including things you care about: it turns out it is important to me to have programs, so we’ll spend money on them. But if you truly don’t care about it, that’s a great way to save!
Here’s a short list of things you may not care to spend money on for your wedding: a fancy venue, an elaborate outfit, a huge guest list, party favors, floral arrangements, a guestbook, something blue… or maybe you do care about all those things! There is no right or wrong way to host a wedding — but when you’re thinking about how to save money at your gay wedding, it’s a good idea to get really clear on what is and isn’t important to you, so you can spend and save accordingly.
Blush and Bashful is a biweekly queer wedding planning column.
Blush and Bashful: Why Am I So Stressed About a Wedding Hashtag?
feature image photo by mtreasure via Getty Images
I guess every bride has that One Thing.
Or maybe every bride like me has That One Thing.
Or maybe some brides have Many Things.
I don’t know, maybe some brides are extremely chill and have Zero Things!
All I know is that despite promising myself and my fiancée I wouldn’t get too stressed out about any aspect of the wedding, I somehow found myself fixating for hours over (and yes, definitely stressing)… our wedding hashtag. I want to roll my own eyes into the back of my head and then walk into the sea when I admit it, and yet! It is a truth! For some reason, deciding on the hashtag we would use at our wedding was the thing that kept me up at night for weeks. WHY?!?!
Well, for those who don’t know, wedding hashtags became popular more than a decade ago (I know, because I spent a lot of time in 2013 complaining about how stupid having a wedding hashtag was) as a way to organize the wedding photos people posted to social media. It was also a branding gimmick, a way to give your wedding a theme, so to speak. People tried to be punny; they rarely succeeded. (I’m sorry! It’s true!) I used to hate wedding hashtags. Then I accepted them as a necessity; it made sense to use a hashtag to keep all your photos under one general “link” on social media. Then I became fixated on creating the perfect one for my wedding. Except… I couldn’t.
Listen. When I say people rarely succeed at being punny (or creating a good hashtag at all), I am including myself in the offending parties! As a general rule, people getting married are people, not brands. Perhaps you work in copywriting or advertising and are a genius when it comes to creating snappy slogans and cute headlines, but most of us are mere mortals (yes I am the kind of writer who has a terrible time generating my own headlines and naming my own projects). So the hashtags inevitably end up being long, unwieldy, easy to misspell, and completely defeating their purpose, if we can argue they ever had a particularly useful one.
But instead of admitting defeat, I doubled down. I’m a writer! I’m a thinker! My partner is funny and creative! My friends all own small businesses and have learned to market themselves on the internet! I grew up on the computer! I SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO THIS. That’s how I felt. Amid practical to-do list items such as “get wedding dress altered” and “meet with caterer to confirm menu,” I kept stubbornly writing: “CREATE WEDDING HASHTAG.” And then I would feel embarrassed about wanting to create a wedding hashtag, and embarrassed about not being able to, and so! stressed! out!
I learned some weird things about wedding hashtags while fixating on this. Did you know there’s such a thing as a random wedding hashtag generator? Or that you can pay someone to create a custom wedding hashtag for you? I did not know such things! I was not stressed enough to partake in these options, but to be totally honest I considered it, and that in itself was stressful to me! WHO HAD I BECOME?!?!?!
When my best friend finally suggested that maybe we actually didn’t need a wedding hashtag, I was so high strung about it I fought her for a while before realizing what a gift she was offering me. Oh yeah. It was like I snapped out of a haze, came back to myself. I’ve never wanted a wedding hashtag. I don’t want a neon sign with a punny phrase that isn’t actually punny combining our names together for a photobooth. I promised myself and my fiancée that if any aspect of planning the wedding became too stressful, I’d trash it. (For example I’d been really dead set on hole punching heart-shaped confetti out of dried leaves and thank goddess I swiftly talked myself out of that before ever taking a heart-shaped hole puncher to a single leaf, bless my heart, because the mere thought of it stressed me out.) But somehow, the wedding hashtag had snuck into my brain. I like to think of myself as a chill bride (lol, okay, no one is fooled, but I am fairly low maintenance compared to many!) but the truth is, Planning A Wedding is laden with preconceived notions and societal expectations, and it’s easy to fall into those holes even if you’re careful about keeping an eye out for them. For a reason I don’t fully understand, I chose to fixate on a tiny detail of our wedding that I truly don’t give a fuck about. I let it stress me out, I let it upset me, I let it consume a lot of my time.
And then, I let it go.
My fiancée and I always agreed not to do shit we don’t care about for our wedding — we aren’t having a bachelorette party because we don’t want one, we didn’t have a bridal shower for the same reason, we shan’t be wearing garters or anything borrowed or blue because we don’t find those traditions meaningful… this is our vibe. And so finally, after letting it become A Big Deal in my mind, working through it, and letting it go, I have accepted that a wedding hashtag is one more thing we won’t be doing for our wedding. Because I think they’re silly, sure, but mostly because I can’t think of a good one and I no longer care enough to try.
What was your One Thing that you inexplicably let ruin your life / stress you out beyond belief when planning a wedding? What do you imagine your One Thing might be? (Weirdly, it’s rarely what you think it will be, but fun to guess regardless!) Did you have an amazing wedding hashtag and want to yell at me because yours was punny and it’s rude to imply all aren’t? SEE YA IN THE COMMENTS XOXO.
Blush and Bashful is a biweekly queer wedding planning column.
Blush and Bashful: How to Elope
The more I write about lesbian wedding planning for this column, the more I realize that there’s no way I can cover every relevant topic when it comes to getting gay married. When my friend and former Autostraddle writer Kristen shared with me that she and her wife had chosen to elope, I knew that she’d be able to talk about this particular wedding planning choice better in first person than I’d ever be able to. I asked if she would write an essay about it for Blush and Bashful, and delightfully, she said yes! So below is Kristen’s reflection on why she and her wife decided to elope, what that meant to them, and how you can consider if eloping is the right choice for you. — Vanessa
When we got engaged, I hadn’t planned on eloping. We agreed that a courthouse wedding was on the table, but then daydreaming got fun. I initially did the full fantasizing/Pinterest thing and had lovely ideas about vineyards in France, taprooms in Montreal or a cute farm in rural Ontario. Maybe we could have a midnight grilled cheese cart! But since we were looking at venues that didn’t typically host weddings, the rejections started piling up, my anxiety increased, and settling on a traditional wedding seemed like an inevitability.
One day after a particularly sleepless period, my wife arranged a date night at a sake bar. Underneath an artificial sakura tree, she proposed in a much more meaningful way. “Let’s first be clear… I do want to get married. But I’ve seen how stressed you’ve been. Would you want to elope instead of throwing a wedding? Or we can have a wedding too! Whatever you think you need.” And holy shit I said yes.
For a bit of background, I worked in the wedding industry during uni and must have attended twenty weddings in my twenties. There were always lovely touches and charming ideas, but I never connected with a wedding and thought, “this is exactly what I want.” Having been at the periphery of so many nuptials, I realized that no matter how much you bend over backwards, there’ll always be one guest that vents their disappointment to the couple, which is pretty deflating.
When you elope it’s fantastically freeing to only focus on yourselves. You know that you’ve already disappointed people, so you don’t have to dance around, pretending to meet people’s expectations! You can question whether you actually like something, or whether it’s just an unquestioned tradition. Don’t care about linens? Find being given away creepy? Hate pre-wedding rituals? Indifferent towards center pieces? Couldn’t give a flying fuck about invitation paperweight? Then don’t!
We got to have a bunch of gleeful conversations, asking each other what mattered to us on our wedding day. We wanted to elope during a larger vacation. We wanted to find a private location where we could forget the outside world for a long weekend. We wanted to self cater, as cooking is what had brought us together. We agreed we should invest in a suit my wife could wear for years rather than a dress I’d only wear once. I was adamant that we find a photographer that could capture everything so I could remember that day when I was old and senile. And of course, we wanted to self finance, but I didn’t want to blow through our savings. Luckily eloping is a lot cheaper than a 200 person wedding!
We ended up planning a road trip around New Zealand in the shoulder season. We looked up glamping spots and managed to book idyllic tree huts nestled on a hill in a town outside of Auckland. We found a commercial photographer whose eye mimicked a style we adored. We found a florist that was passionate about growing her own blooms and was game to source edible botanicals. We learned about a performer that toured her Jane Austen musical throughout Fringe fests, that happened to be a celebrant. She in turn arranged our witnesses: a charming lesbian couple (and their dog) that were curious why two Canadians would travel to the other side of the world to get married, and happened to be free on a work day. (Coincidentally we were invited to their anniversary where we got to hear from a generation of queers that forged their own path when marriage excluded them. Yet they still celebrated us!)
So discuss the plan As, plan Bs, and plan Cs, making sure that you’re both in agreement when you might have to switch your planning approach. The marriage is what counts, so confirm that the wedding planning is building that foundation, not eroding it. Getting to place my wife’s happiness over societal expectation was a true gift. That honesty put us on stronger footing than a midnight grilled cheese cart ever could have — although, to be fair, I still think that would’ve been an excellent idea.
Blush and Bashful is a biweekly queer wedding planning column.
Blush and Bashful: Let’s Talk About Wedding Registries
Feature image photo by Tash Jones – Love Luella Photography via Getty Images
I’m gonna be honest — a very fun part of getting married and hosting a wedding party is receiving presents! When I was younger, I used to think wedding registries were kind of cringey but, as we’re learning together as I write this queer wedding planning column, many of my attitudes about wedding protocol has changed as I’ve gotten older.
I think in my early twenties, I thought of registries as prescriptive and unexciting. I rarely had the kind of money to spend on a registry-suggested gift, and I also just found it bizarre to essentially make a wishlist…in my mind, surprising friends with a DIY present was the ultimate loving gesture, and taking away the surprise element and the DIY element seemed so… capitalist (don’t worry, I’m rolling my eyes at my baby dyke self so you don’t have to, even though obviously a part of me still lightly agrees with her — love to be queer and contain multitudes!).
Anyway, the point is, wedding registries are definitely a thing to consider when planning a wedding, whether you’re into them or not. So let’s get into it!
What is a wedding registry?
A wedding registry is basically a list of presents you and your future spouse would like to receive. It’s like a Christmas list you can share with your entire wedding guest list. If you’re like me (a Jewish person who is not used to creating Christmas lists and is sometimes shy about asking for what she wants) the concept can be… horrifying. But I must admit, it’s also quite practical.
You can make a wedding registry at one specific store, or you can make a universal registry online. If you pick a specific store, you will be including items only they sell (some stores have the same owner and thus do a sort of umbrella option for wedding registries), and if you pick a universal registry you’ll be able to pick items from literally anywhere and add them to your list. My extremely anecdotal experience is that folks who are a little bit older are used to registries at specific stores and might miss the chance to waltz into West Elm and ask a sales assistant for The Friedman Registry, and folks who are a little bit younger are surprised that was ever a thing and are used to registries that solely live online, usually at wedding websites like Zola and The Knot or at big box stores like Target or (sigh) Amazon.
Why you should make one
As far as I can tell, there’s really no Right or Wrong move when making a wedding registry. Like most things when it comes to wedding planning, you need to decide what feels right for you.
Like I said, I do find registries practical. You and your partner(s) can think about what you need and can guide guests to give you gifts you’ll actually use. This can include traditional things (like kitchen items), adventure accessories (like snow shoes), or money funds (honeymoon funds are very popular). One of my close friends admitted that she initially thought wedding registries were awkward, but the older she’s gotten, the more she loves them. She told me she wants to get her friends what they actually want and likes to be told what to do so she can make it happen. Another friend told me she and her wife like to find the weirdest or funniest item on the registry and purchase that. Don’t be afraid to be weird and specific — your loved ones want to get you the things you want, and they can only do that if you tell them what that is!
In terms of deciding on exactly which registry host you’ll use, that’s also up to you, though it felt a bit stressful for me because of all the options out there. A pro for choosing a specific store is that someone who wants to get you a gift could go into that physical store, ask for your registry, and do some window shopping in person if they prefer. A pro for a universal registry is that you don’t have to juggle multiple lists — it’s all in the same spot. Also check out bonus offers that come with different registries. Many stores will offer a discount on items you add to your registry but aren’t gifted once the wedding is over, so you can “complete your list” (lol), and the Zola host (which, full disclosure, I am using) allows you to exchange gifts seamlessly and will hold off on sending you your gifts until you pull the trigger (rather than when the person actually purchases it) which is really handy if you’re moving or if you simply don’t want to manage keeping track of gifts and thank you notes until after the wedding.
A wedding registry is also cool because it helps loved ones avoid purchasing a gift someone else has already given you. The store or the online host will update your registry as soon as an item is purchased, so you won’t have to deal with returns when two people want to buy you the Yeti cooler. In general, this is a real “tell people how to take care of you” kind of moment.
Why you might decide to skip it
Okay, that said, I have quite a few queer friends who decided to skip registries. The main reasons were either (1) the people getting married didn’t want to receive gifts and either requested no presents or a donation to a mutual aid fund or charity instead and (2) the process was too overwhelming so they just didn’t do it and accepted whatever gifts people chose to give them.
Both of these reasons make sense to me, and if you truly don’t want a registry, skipping it is just fine (and I’ll share some other options in just a moment). But if you are considering skipping it because it feels overwhelming and would like to be convinced otherwise, read on!
How to make a registry
Creating a registry, once I got started, was actually intuitive (thank you to Zola’s easy to use website) and fun, as well as a cute exercise for me and my fiancée to create our ultimate wishlist together (guess which one of us chose multiple heart-shaped Le Crueset dutch ovens and which one of us chose a shop-vac and some fancy gardening tools!), but before I dived in I was really intimidated by the process.
My hot tip is to make a universal registry, ideally with the wedding site you’re using, and then just do it. Thinking about balancing multiple registries (something that was much more common before online shopping was so ubiquitous and before universal registries were so accessible) was way too stressful. The universal registry solved my personal problems around this task.
Once you get going, just treat it like a wishlist. We’ve intentionally included a lot of different price points for gifts and selected the option for “make this a group gift” for all our big ticket items so friends can go in on things easily together. I’ve also had a really nice time chatting with close friends about what they included on their registries, or what they wish they had. One of my dear friends told me she didn’t create a registry and really regrets it, because she wishes she could’ve gotten a lot of very specific cookbooks. I then asked her to share her list of must have cookbooks with me and added all of them to the list. If anyone chooses to gift us one of those, I will always think of both the gift-giver and my friend who suggested the book when I cook from it, which already makes me feel sentimental.
Here are some alternatives to wedding registries
Receiving gifts is not something everyone wants, and if you opt out of making a wedding registry, I totally get it! Here are some other options of things you can request if you really don’t want wedding gifts.
First, it’s always an option to just say “no gifts, please.” Friends who really want to gift you something honestly still will do so, but it takes a lot of pressure out of the expectation.
Next, I’ve had a lot of friends request donations to specific mutual aid funds or charities, often with a little bit of explanation about why that particular fund matters to them. This is a great option, especially if you feel all your material needs are met and you’d rather have money to share with others in your extended communities.
Finally, I recently saw a very cute alternative to traditional registry websites: SoKind Registry bills itself as The Alternative Gift Registry and allows people to dream up any kind of “gift,” without a focus on the material. So for example the friend who created the SoKind registry I saw asked for things like “the gift of your time sharing a new skill with us,” “homemade art,” and “your favorite recipes.” The tagline for SoKind is “more fun, less stuff,” and if that resonates with you and you want a formal way to ask your friends to gift you less physical things and more creative ideas, this might be a good option for you.
What did you do?
As someone who once rolled her eyes at wedding registries and is now joyfully using a traditional one, I’m so curious what everyone else has chosen to do when it comes to wedding registries! Did you use one? Do you wish you had? Do you have any regrets or Hot Tips? Let us know in the comments!
Blush and Bashful is a biweekly queer wedding planning column.
Blush and Bashful: What It’s Like To Be Queer and Engaged
You know how when something happens to you, suddenly you start to notice it happening all over your little personal universe? Like when you learn a new word and all of a sudden it’s everywhere, or when you discover a new plant you love and immediately start to recognize it in places you’ve always frequented but never really noticed?
That’s kind of how I feel about being a lesbian who is engaged!
For so long, I felt like none of my friends or community members were engaged or married, and suddenly when I became engaged it felt like everyone was getting engaged and/or married! I’m sure this was already happening in the background of my life and I just didn’t notice, but it’s been really fun to connect with other queers who are engaged because everyone does things so differently and it’s helpful and interesting to learn other people’s reasoning and thought processes around things that the mainstream (heteronormative, patriarchal) culture assumes are just set in stone. Nothing is set in stone! You can do whatever you want!
So if you’re wondering what some queer people who aren’t me are thinking about when it comes to getting engaged and wedding planning (or not wedding planning), this installment of Blush and Bashful is for you.
Adrienne & Jenny
Do what YOU want to do! Have a long engagement if you want! Elope if you want! Have a chihuahua walk you down the aisle!
Did you expect to get married in your life?
I never expected to get married! I’ve never been very conventional and never had dreams or fantasies of marriage when I was younger, a wedding, having kids, the whole thing. I am still very happily childless (other than my two chihuahua sons) and rather indifferent about marriage. Additionally, I have been out since I was 15, and while I have had some queer friends get married, I have also escaped being inundated with the Marriage Industrial Complex. I’ve been in exactly one wedding, which was a queer wedding and involved me as a member of the wedding party walking down the aisle in a dress that I selected with a chihuahua in a tuxedo as my companion. I am a university professor, and one of my graduate students was telling me she had three weddings to travel to and spend money on just in Winter Term alone! I find the whole normative pressure of needing to have weddings be a certain way to be incredibly stressful!
Tell me about the proposal.
The proposal was very special and meaningful. I have been fortunate and privileged enough to have access to potentially the most beautiful place on earth — a slice of farmland on the Umpqua River in Roseburg, Oregon. I spent my childhood summers there with my grandparents and have been traveling there annually every year to camp out for my birthday. 2020 was the last summer I had access to the ranch before it was sold, which is a huge loss I am still processing today. My partner Jenny and I traveled there for our birthdays (Leo Femme 4 Leo Femme) in 2020 and she planned a huge surprise and had me spend time down at the river while she decorated the popup tent trailer. When I came back up, she proposed to me. It was the sweetest and most heartfelt thing ever. It was so deeply meaningful to have the proposal take place somewhere that is the most important place in the world to me.
What’s the most surprising thing so far about being engaged?
Other people’s expectations! We have had a long engagement, which I feel great about, and do not want to have a wedding. People have been really perplexed about us not wanting to have a wedding.
Are you planning a wedding?
No, we are going to elope and take a trip to Mexico in June. We have many reasons for not wanting a wedding, but I would say the most prescient are finances and both of us being introverted. We will be self-funding anything we do, without family support, so it just made the most sense for us to spend money traveling instead of on a big party for other people. I have had so much fun at other people’s weddings, it makes sense when people have them! It just isn’t for us. In my former life, I was a social butterfly party girl and may have really liked having a wedding. A combination of the lasting effects of chronic illness, sobriety from alcohol, and pandemic stunting socialization have made me introverted!
What would you say is your “reasoning” for getting engaged?
Wanting the legal protections of a marriage and wanting to say “my wife” in an aggressively homosexual way!
If you could give One Hot Tip to other queers before they got engaged, what would it be?
Do what YOU want to do! If wearing a fluffy white dress and having a more traditional wedding is what you want, then do it! But do not feel pressured to have the queer version of Say Yes To The Dress if that does not resonate. Have a long engagement if you want! Elope if you want! Have a chihuahua walk you down the aisle!
Kayla & Kristen
My very wise friend Christina keeps saying during the wedding planning process: “You are never gonna make everyone happy, so why not make yourselves happy?”
Did you expect to get married in your life?
I rather actively insisted I would never get married during the period of my life when I was closeted. I even wrote about it in an op-ed for my college’s newspaper. It’s funny, because the surface level interpretation there is that sure, I didn’t want to get married to a man. But when I look back on that piece, I see a more nuanced thing happening where the subtext was that I was uncomfortable with the heteronormative institution of marriage. I couldn’t imagine other possibilities yet, because I hadn’t come out as queer. Once I came out, I was like oh yeah, I want this. And I won’t pretend like I’m embarking on some radical alt wedding path, but I am doing things in a way that feel specific to me and my partner, our relationship, and the queer communities we belong to. I never could have imagined that for myself before. Coming out unlocked my queer imagination.
Tell me about the proposal.
I had no idea it was happening, even for the first two seconds of it happening. We had talked about getting engaged, as all couples should. And we both knew Kristen would be the one to propose. But we didn’t have any kind of established timeline or expectations outside of that. Just like… a proposal is coming… one day… who knows when or where or how! So yeah, I was surprised! She debated between doing it at Christmas or at our fourth anniversary trip a couple months later. She texted my sister to ask what she thought about a Christmas proposal, because she knew my scary Scorpio sister would be honest with her, and she knows I care about my sister’s thoughts a lot. In scary Scorpio fashion, my sister took two full days to get back to her but ultimately gave her the green light for a Christmas proposal. It was a perfect setting honestly, because it meant we didn’t have to spend two hours on our proposal day FaceTiming all my relatives lol — we could tell them irl! I wrote a short essay about some of the other proposal details, but something that stands out to me about it that I don’t go into there is how lost for words she was when she gave me the ring. Kristen is someone who is never lost for words, but she was nervous! She’d been having stress dreams about it for weeks! It was honestly so cute, and I’d take that over a rehearsed/carefully scripted proposal any day. It was so real and also signified to me how big of a deal it was for her.
What’s the most surprising thing so far about being engaged?
How quickly people ask you about wedding plans! I get it, it’s typically the “next step,” but I think I mistakenly thought maybe because we’re queer, people wouldn’t have had these normative timeline expectations locked and loaded for us. This didn’t just come from my family (expected!); it came from other queer people, too. Also, I think neither of us has necessarily fallen in love with the word “fiancé” haha. We LOVE being engaged; I like to talk about it all the time, but something about that word! We liked “girlfriend” and we really like “wife” and like yeah who cares we should just use the words we wanna use and don’t HAVE to use fiancé if we don’t want to, but I find it funny that neither of us has super taken to it.
Are you planning a wedding?
Haha yes, I know I just complained about this question, but YES! We are. We’re in the earlyish stages of it, but knock on wood, it’s going well so far. We have a venue, a date, a caterer (who is a queer friend!). Sometimes it feels stressful, but most of the time it feels good, especially since I’ve made a point to be like we have to talk about it as much as possible. It’s going to be complicated in a few ways that are relatable to most queer folks; we’ll both have family members who won’t be in attendance, but she has significantly fewer who will be invited. But so far, we’ve been navigating all these things really well together. The stress doesn’t come from us but from outside sources.
What would you say is your “reasoning” for getting engaged?
We’ve both known we wanted to marry each other for a while. I can’t remember the exact first time we talked about it, but it was something we were on the same page about early on. I don’t think she necessarily thought she’d marry again after her last marriage, but that shifted when we started dating. For me, I’ve wanted to be a wife for a while now haha. Once I came out as a lesbian, I knew I wanted to be married. I’m deeply monogamous; I’m deeply drawn to domestic life. Not that either of those things are required for wanting to get engaged, but it just really fits my desires for relationship structures and life. I knew I wanted to specifically marry Kristen pretty early on in our relationship and can even remember the first time I thought it, but I don’t wanna say it here in case it’s something I wanna save for my vows, and she reads every Autostraddle article lol.
If you could give One Hot Tip to other queers before they got engaged, what would it be?
Obvs find a way to talk about it ahead of time. Get on the same page about whether you want to have a wedding or not before the engagement happens. Be open to changing your mind about specific details though. It’s not a big deal if you think you want a big wedding and then realize you actually wanna elope, so long as you’re talking about it. I think even for queer folks there can be a pressure as to how you’re supposed to do things. Do what you want! My very wise friend Christina keeps saying during the wedding planning process: “You are never gonna make everyone happy, so why not make yourselves happy?”
Sa’iyda & Beth
Start doing your research as soon as possible!
Did you expect to get married in your life?
Yes! I didn’t think I’d marry a woman, but I always knew that marriage was in my future.
Tell me about the proposal.
My fiancee Beth and I had talked about proposing to each other. She’s been married before, but she did the proposing. I felt like she deserved to know how it felt to be proposed to. My original plan fell through because of COVID, so I proposed on Thanksgiving 2020, sitting on our bed while we watched TV after dinner. She proposed to me on Christmas 2020 using a book that she had commissioned by a friend who’s an artist. It told our love story and had “Will you marry me?” at the end. When I finished reading it, she was in front of me on one knee.
What’s the most surprising thing so far about being engaged?
How little things have changed, lol. We’ve been engaged for two years now, and honestly, it hasn’t changed our lives that much.
Are you planning a wedding?
Yes! We’re still figuring out the financial aspect of things, but we’ve got our plan mostly solidified.
What would you say is your “reasoning” for getting engaged?
It felt important to me to get engaged because I’m surprisingly traditional. Getting engaged is the natural progression to getting married. Plus, I really wanted a pretty ring and to celebrate the fact that I’ve found my person.
If you could give One Hot Tip to other queers before they got engaged, what would it be?
Start doing your research as soon as possible! You may think you know, but it’s so nice to be able to hit the ground running when you start planning.
Yasmeen & Clio & Their Polycule
I want to get married to emphasize to each other and to our community that commitments like this can extend to more than just one person, more than just romantic relationships, and that the four of us are a family, that this is something a family can look like.
Did you expect to get married in your life?
Yasmeen: I definitely hoped to! I had a childhood with a lot of change in it, so to me marriage and home ownership were markers of a stability I really longed for. When things first started becoming serious with me and Soren, the partner who brought me into our polycule, it was important to me to know if (non legal) marriage between us was within the realm of possibility so I could temper my expectations early on.
Clio: Not really! It wasn’t something I was particularly expecting until I was asked (the first time around, with my husband Soren — with the four of us, I was the one doing the asking). Growing up, my parents were divorced and so were the parents of most of my friends, and it just never really seemed like a particularly good idea. In high school and college, I developed more political objections to marriage as an institution, so it took some convincing to get me to think that it was possible to approach it in a way that didn’t feel so straight and patriarchal. Everyone in my life was pretty surprised when they found out *I* was getting married, especially so young.
Tell me about the proposal.
Yasmeen: My polycule was already all living together and committed to each other when I met Soren, so I’d always said that if there was a proposal, I wanted it to be from all three of them, since we’d be living one life together. We’d already had talks as a family about heading toward marriage/building a life together, but I wasn’t expecting a proposal for another year or more when Soren asked my ring size. Clio, Soren, our other partner and I were at Clio’s family lakeside cottage on a road trip around the East Coast and Canada when they proposed to me. Before we left, they let me know that the ring wasn’t going to arrive before our trip, so I really wasn’t expecting it to happen when it did! They suggested playing some guitar on the dock one afternoon just before sunset, so we were all sitting down there singing along when Clio said “I think I’m going to grab a folding chair to sit in instead.” Then they came back without the folding chair and I thought, I guess they changed their mind, and they went “actually I think this would be a better way to sit” and everyone was on one knee with the ring!
Clio: ^Ditto the above. It wasn’t that sly — we really didn’t think the ring was going to arrive in time, and then it arrived in the mail early the *night before* we left on the East Coast trip! So, we decided at the last minute to bring it anyway and propose in Canada even though we told Yasmeen we wouldn’t — we figured a surprise would be fun and she probably wouldn’t be too mad about it. The rest we figured out via text in our groupchat during the trip.
Yasmeen: I was not at all mad! There were so many emotionally touching moments on that trip, even before the proposal, that if I knew it was coming I think the anticipation would have taken me out.
What’s the most surprising thing so far about being engaged?
Yasmeen: For me, it was that it didn’t magically fix my insecurities or fear of abandonment — I’d always thought that if I reached a certain threshold of commitment I would suddenly be totally chill, but it’s really brought home for me that that stuff is way more internal than situation-based.
Clio: This really shouldn’t be a surprise, but — how big a deal it is, how much weight everyone puts on it, especially people who aren’t the ones getting married (family, etc). I haven’t known that many people who have gotten married, and I tend to be pretty hands-off with my friends’ and family’s relationships, so it can feel strange to suddenly have everyone all up in mine. It’s stressful but it’s also nice — getting engaged lends a sense of legitimacy to things, and it feels nice to be celebrated by others.
Are you planning a wedding?
Yasmeen: We have a Pinterest board, but that’s about it! We want to get married in whatever new town we move to on the east coast, and that move won’t be for a couple years.
What would you say is your “reasoning” for getting engaged?
Yasmeen: I wanted to get engaged as a marker of intent toward lifelong commitment before we started making steps like moving in together or (Soren’s favorite thing to do with loved ones) getting matching tattoos. One value I think we all place a high priority on is doing things with intention and being very clear in our commitments, so having a moment where all our conversations around what being married would mean to us (especially because being legally married to multiple people isn’t currently possible) came to fruition was super useful.
Clio: With Soren, I wanted two things: (1) our family and friends to know how serious we were, and (2) a party. I also wanted to be able to put him on my health insurance. That’s pretty much it — we already had the lifelong commitment to each other, and marriage didn’t really change or enhance that for me.
With Soren, Yasmeen, and our other partner, I want to get married to emphasize to each other and to our community that commitments like this can extend to more than just one person, more than just romantic relationships, and that the four of us are a family, that this is something a family can look like. Another party sounds fun, too.
If you could give One Hot Tip to other queers before they got engaged, what would it be?
Yasmeen: That being engaged is more a change of label than one of substance! Day to day, there’s not a huge difference between my life when we were making long-term plans but not engaged and now, other than I have a very pretty ring and very sweet memories. ❤️
Clio: These are good questions to have to answer. My hot tip is to answer the questions in this interview, haha — what are you expecting from marriage? What do you want? How do you want this to affect your relationship with your partner(s), or with other family/friends? It doesn’t have to be the typical responses, but it’s good to know what they are going in.
Nico & Sadie
Honestly, getting married is like the easiest way to take care of a lot of legal business.
Did you expect to get married in your life?
Nico: Well, I am divorced, so, yes. And as I always say, you can get married as many times as you want.
Sadie: I wanted to get married, but I didn’t think it was a possibility before 2015. In general, long-term relationships are something that’s very important to me.
Tell me about the proposal.
Sadie: We talked about proposing to each other, and we picked out rings ahead of time, and we knew we were going to get engaged on Christmas because you [Nico] really love Christmas. We had picked a location, a city park that had been designed by Louise Bourgeois, who’s an artist who is very important to us. We also thought that getting engaged on Christmas meant that downtown wouldn’t be as full of people and random spectators.
Nico: So it was 10 degrees F, and we had to thaw the car with a hair dryer and a portable battery. The fountain had completely frozen over and also the overflow water had frozen into a treacherous sheet of ice in the park. We held hands and made our way across the ice. We were going to sit on one of the benches that is a giant marble eyeball, but the seat had a sheet of ice, so we used the eyeball for support. Sadie went first and knelt down and said sweet things and proposed. I went second. I knelt down, and that was when about a dozen people approached the park wearing Steelers gear. I could see them but Sadie’s back was to them, so I had to propose with an audience Sadie did not know was there, balanced on a sheet of ice. One lady filmed it.
Sadie: I felt that there were eyes on me, so I turn around and see one woman was filming. They were waiting for us to finish so they could go look at the fountain I guess. We were obviously getting engaged, and no one cheered.
Nico: We awkwardly escaped into an alley downtown.
What’s the most surprising thing so far about being engaged?
Nico: How excited Sadie’s mom got! It was really sweet.
Are you planning a wedding?
Sadie: LOL
Nico: We are planning to elope. We’re torn between Ireland and Reno, NV.
What would you say is your “reasoning” for getting engaged?
Nico: Because our actual marriage is not yet scheduled until we have the means to go on our trip, we wanted to do something to symbolize our commitment to each other.
Sadie: Honestly, getting married is like the easiest way to take care of a lot of legal business.
Nico: We’ve been together for five years, and we’ve been talking about and imagining our private little wedding ceremony for some time, and I’m really looking forward to it! I love Sadie!
Sadie: When we talk about our future, it seemed like the next logical step. Who wouldn’t want to wake up to you every day? (Unless we’re at residencies or something.)
If you could give One Hot Tip to other queers before they got engaged, what would it be?
Nico: Have all the hard conversations (money, kids, end-of-life/dying, parents and family, debt, future plans and career) before you get engaged so that after you get engaged, it’s about planning the fun part (eloping to a beautiful green island or the desert!).
Amanda-Faye & Jo
My views on marriage, for myself at least, have fluctuated through many different forms of not feeling necessary due to my queerness and politics to wanting the same protections in my relationship that other people have.
Did you expect to get married in your life?
Not really! I never dreamed about it as a little girl or anything like that. Then, once I was old enough to understand marriage and feminism but wasn’t out to myself yet, I definitely knew I didn’t want to be a man’s wife (lol). I grew up Catholic, and nothing about a Catholic wedding or marriage ever appealed to me.
I came out when I was 17, which is sadly (for me) a VERY long time ago at this point, so my views on marriage, for myself at least, have fluctuated through many different forms of not feeling necessary due to my queerness and politics to wanting the same protections in my relationship that other people have. At the end of the day, though, it has come down to really liking my partner a lot and wanting to have a ceremony with them.
Tell me about the proposal.
We had been talking a bit about the ring, so I knew it was coming at some point in the near future, but I was very surprised by the proposal moment, which is difficult to do for me, as I am very clever and intuitive (nosy and annoying).
Jo took me to tea at The Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in Pasadena, which I had been wanting to do for a while. While we were waiting for our reservation, we walked around the rose garden. I found a rose that matched my coral-colored gel manicure and Jo saw me taking a photo of my hand next to the rose and said, “wait, I have something that will make the photo even better” got down on one knee and proposed with the ring. Then there was crying and laughing and a tea lunch I don’t remember because I was buzzing with excitement, and also it was like nine years ago, hahaha!
What’s the most surprising thing so far about being engaged?
I can’t really think of anything here, or maybe I don’t remember! Mostly I guess I was surprised by how quickly the novelty of saying “my finacé” wears off and makes you feel kinda douchey when you have a long engagement ahead. I was so ready to shed “boyfriend/girlfriend” for something that felt like a greater nod to the time we had been together (almost 7 years) and was more gender-neutral, as “partner” didn’t roll off the tongue as easily then, but fiancé was only fun for a little while before I felt like a straight gal in a romcom. I pretty much only use it now when I don’t want to come out in conversation with a random.
Are you planning a wedding?
Real planning or perpetually mentally planning? It’s the second thing! By the time this wedding happens, it better be amazing because we have ideas for days! The long engagement has been mostly for financial and timing reasons, but at this point we also really want it to be exactly what we want, which is pretty modest but also specific… and changes a lot for something so specific.
What would you say is your “reasoning” for getting engaged?
Yeah, just the boring answer. We wanted to have a ceremony to celebrate our commitment to each other and I want to have a very fun semi-destination situation in which my aging queer friends are forced to party with and pay attention to me for two solid days at least! That’s the plan so far, anyway.
If you could give One Hot Tip to other queers before they got engaged, what would it be?
This isn’t necessarily queer-specific. I loved our surprise proposal, so I’m not totally sure about this, but I think if we could do it again, I would have liked us to exchange rings mutually. I see a lot more queer couples doing that now and I really like it. I didn’t really expect my partner to want a ring other than a wedding band because they aren’t much of a jewelry person, but the more we have talked about it over the years, I think they would have liked that as well.
Evette & Teré
Don’t ever give up on love! And, most important, advocate for the type of love you deserve.
Did you expect to get married in your life?
Evette: No, I never expected to get married. I’ve also never been engaged before now. Before I met Teré, I’d been writing and thinking a lot about what it means to be intentionally single in a world that prioritizes romantic relationships. I’d even gone through the egg-freezing process as a single woman. For years, I’d been really investing in other important relationships in my life, and, in turn, I was able to invest in myself and better understand my desires and needs. By the time I met Teré on a dating app in January 2022, I was pretty disinterested in a partnership that didn’t allow me to pour into the other relationships I value. Teré understood that notion from the start, and he also modeled it in his own life. Our relationship felt effortless from the first day, so by the time Teré proposed, I knew this was the kind of relationship I could invest in day after day for the rest of our lives.
Teré: I’ve been married once, and I never thought I would get married again. My therapist encouraged me to start dating after a period of time focusing on myself, so I created a dating profile. After a couple of failed attempts, it kind of reaffirmed my expectations of never marrying again. Then, I met Evette, and I think what made it so successful is that we spent so much time getting to know each other. Of course, we were attracted to each other. We’re both beautiful people, but I think the first spark was this kindred-spirited, ancestral friendship. Through the good, the bad, and the ugly, Evette’s my best friend. I trust her with anything. For me, that’s a first.
Tell me about the proposal.
Teré: I know that family is really big for Evette, so I knew I wanted to do it in a way that included her family, specifically her nieces. I think it’s really important that we set generational examples of what Black love can be. Anyway, I was falling in love, and I knew I wanted to marry her, so the first thing I did was ask her parents and her closest friends. I talked to my little sister as well. Once I got the blessing from everyone, I knew it was a done deal. My grandfather taught me that if you’re serious about someone, start saving a little bit of money each month while you’re getting to know them. That’s how you can afford the ring. And, if the relationship doesn’t work out, you then have a lump sum of money to really take care of yourself.
I’ve been saving money from the first month I met Evette. Once I secured the bag and got the ring, I decided on a Christmas proposal. Winter is really hard for Evette, and I thought it would be really cool to tie the engagement to what is typically a tough time mentally. On Christmas Day, picture it: Black family around the Christmas tree, mysterious gift box, handwritten letter, and kaboom! I was on one knee, and she said yes.
Evette: I sure did! Teré tricked me. A couple of nights before Christmas, he’d said that we should wait to get engaged, so I wasn’t expecting it at all. I bought my dad and Teré designer boots for Christmas, but I got them in two separate colors. When we were about to leave to have dinner with my family, Teré said he wanted to take his boots to show them to my dad. I thought that was strange, but I didn’t think much more about it. After we’d all opened our gifts, Teré passed me the shoe box and asked me to open it. Inside was a series of decoy boxes that ultimately opened into a beautiful, handwritten letter. I knew something was going on when he told me the read the letter out loud. It was such an amazing moment. I’m so glad I got to share it with my family and that Teré was so thoughtful about the engagement. It’s a memory I will cherish forever.
What’s the most surprising thing so far about being engaged?
Evette: I guess what’s been most surprising is that we haven’t really been able to enjoy our engagement because people keep asking when we’re getting married.
Teré: I know, it’s wild! One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in life is to go at godspeed. I don’t know when we’re going to get married, but we’ll both know when the time is right, just like with the engagement.
Are you planning a wedding?
Teré: See what I mean? LOL. Just kidding.
Evette: No, we haven’t started planning the wedding, but we do intend to have one. We’d love to have a destination wedding, but we haven’t decided where yet.
What would you say is your “reasoning” for getting engaged?
Teré: I feel like I’m a part of one of the last generations that remembers what it was like to live and love in a time when it was illegal to get married. Not to be rude, but my first immediate reaction is I got engaged because I can — and that feels important to me. I never really had a close-knit bio family, and even when I didn’t want to get married again, I always desired to create a family. I come from a pretty intense broken home, so, as an adult, I wanted to create a better family representation for my inner child.
Evette: That is a beautiful answer, babe. For me, getting engaged feels like a natural extension of our relationship. Everything in my body and in my spirit tells me that Teré is my soulmate. I want to share Teré’s last name and have children with him, so becoming engaged and eventually getting married, just feels right.
If you could give One Hot Tip to other queers before they got engaged, what would it be?
Evette: My One Hot Tip would be to only get engaged because you desire to. Don’t get engaged because you feel pressured to or because you’re getting older and everyone else is doing it. That’s a surefire way to set yourself up for misery.
Teré: Don’t ever give up on love! And, most important, advocate for the type of love you deserve.
Blush and Bashful is a biweekly queer wedding planning column.
I’m a Cool Rock Lesbian
By which I mean I am a lesbian who likes to look at and hold cool rocks — not that I am a lesbian into cool rock ‘n roll, but I’m sure those lesbians are great.
Once, I was a Rock Tumbler Closeted Lesbian (RTCL), which means I obsessively ran rocks through a tumbler and gave the polished stones that came out to girls. Once, I gifted a rock to my best friend Anna on the playground and said something along the lines of it’s stupid girls can’t marry each other, and she pocketed the rock and said no that would be gross.
Once, by the shore of the lake my grandpa grew up on, I sifted through the sand for rocks. Most of them, I just skipped across the lake’s cool surface. Or I dropped them unceremoniously back in the water. No one asked what I was looking for, but if they did, I would have said a cool rock.
And then I found one. A perfect Petoskey stone — the fossilized rock ground down by sheets of ice into smooth, round pebbles and deposited in the waters of northern Michigan. Mine looked like the kind you can buy in gas stations up there, preserved and as if it’d already been turned many times through my tumbler which, I suppose, it had; glaciation is nature’s rock tumbler. The stone’s hexagonal spindly pattern, evidence of its beforelife as part of the coral reef, reminded me of honeycomb. I sprayed it with a sealant to make it shine and kept it on the desk in my bedroom. For a very long time, this was my ultimate cool rock.
But I didn’t remove it from my childhood home when I left for college. I never retrieved it as I moved from city to city. I collected new rocks, slipped them into pockets, found them rattling at the bottom of bags here and there. I couldn’t call myself a collector, because I had no organized way of displaying these rocks. I scattered them about, lost track of some, designated others as anxiety tokens and kept them in specific coat pockets so I could reach for them when needed.
There was nothing inside, and she asked: What were you looking for?
I answered, without hesitation: a cool rock.
It became one of our many inside jokes, the kind couples keep, nearly impossible to render on the page for others in a way that feels remotely as funny or meaningful as it does in the private lake of love. I’d reach into her pockets, over and over, and pout at the lack of a cool rock. I slipped my hand in the back pocket of her black shorts as we walked around a lake during Pride in downtown Orlando and left it there. When I finally took it out, I said in mock disbelief still no cool rock.
We were in bed on Christmas morning, opening our stockings. Mine has a pocket on the front. We bought matching ones at Target, one for the dog too, during our first December of living together. We didn’t have a mantle then, so we taped them to our bookshelves, the ones that house our merged collections. I’d never done so many holiday things with a partner before. I brought her into some of my traditions, but we also started forging our own, her estrangement from her family deepening our need and desire to create rituals together early on, to be lovers who are also family.
It was on Christmas morning that she asked me to marry her, and we were together, just the two of us, nestled in the small murphy bed in my parents’ guest room. My parents were upstairs and knew nothing. My sister was the only one whose “permission” my love had asked for, and that felt right. It all felt right, us in our own little bubble but still close by to my family.
The ring wasn’t in a box. In the pocket on the front of my stocking, there was a bulky, sparkly rock. It was halved and hinged, and when I opened it, the two sides broke apart immediately, its clasp broken. A ring fell out of this very cool rock, which looked a little familiar. The reason became immediately clear. My love said she had placed the rock in different parts of the room in the days leading up to the proposal as she tried to work out exactly when and how she’d do it. I must have seen the cool rock but glazed over it, thinking it merely my mother’s decor even though it’s much more sparkly than her usual aesthetic. There had been a cool rock in front of me this whole time, and I hadn’t thought to pick it up, to explore its contours and, most importantly, the second rock it contained.
The hinge had broken because my love had worried it endlessly when it was slipped in her own pocket a couple days before. She’d brought it with us when we’d gone to a cute part of the city I’d grown up near with its little shops and restaurants, an area that makes me immediately nostalgic for my high school years. She’d thought maybe she’d do it there, outside, the two of us with a rare pocket of alone time away from the house full of family. But it had been so cold. My lips turned blue, little sensitive Florida baby that I am now thanks to a life with her in her home state, and I was being dramatic, screaming at the wind, arms glued to my side and hands balled in fists in my pockets. Her hands were in her pockets, too, fiddling with that rock locket, loosening its hinge.
She could have done it then. She could have proposed to me with my blue lips and my dramatics. The where and when wouldn’t have mattered; it was that cool rock that made things perfect. Not a plain, smooth black box but a glittery geode with rough edges. Something not directly bound to the institution of marriage but bound to me, to us, to searching for something to hold that never loses its preciousness.
That one personal touch sounds so small, but to me it feels enormous. I was never the girl who fantasized about a marriage proposal, but she’d still managed to extract a fantasy from my heart. Here was a cool rock, one I’d been looking for a very long time.
Blush and Bashful: How One Fat Femme Bought Her Dream Wedding Dress
I was not excited about buying a wedding dress.
Or I guess it’s more honest to say I was not excited about shopping for a wedding dress.
I’m a fat femme, and I love dressing up like a fairy princess. In fact, I’d say possibly the best representation of my gender may be exactly that: fairy princess. So perhaps you’d think that finding a wedding dress would feel exciting to me. But if you know anything about the bridal industry, you’d know better. The key part here is that I’m a fat fairy princess. And I’m immersed enough in our culture to know, even though I’d never really seriously considered being a bride, that it’s not easy for fat girls to find beautiful wedding gowns. Even thin people are encouraged to lose weight before their weddings. I felt overwhelmed and flustered before I’d even begun.
My best friends suggested that we go shopping together, but I was hesitant. I understood what “shopping for a wedding dress with your best friends” was supposed to feel like. I knew they were envisioning champagne, giggling, gushing, and a lot of white tulle. “I would die to go wedding dress shopping with you,” my one friend texted me, and I knew she was being supportive and loving and genuine. I wanted to crawl under a rock, never to emerge again.
Actually, what I wanted was to feel excited with them; the two friends in question are also fat femmes, and we live in Portland, so I know I’m lucky when it comes to being surrounded with emotional body positivity and also material options when it comes to fat girl fashion. And yet, I just couldn’t muster the enthusiasm. I wasn’t sure what I wanted my dress to look like, but I knew that trying on lots of options that were too small for me or getting weird energy from a sales assistant or maybe simply looking at my body and having other people perceive my body too was going to feel really bad. But I didn’t want to disappoint my friends, and as a chronic people pleaser, I was at a loss.
Luckily my future wife has no such qualms saying no when she doesn’t want to do something, and after I spent another afternoon stressing and complaining, she solved the problem simply. “Baby, just tell them you don’t want to go. They love you. They’ll understand.” I texted my friends immediately; of course they understood. I told them I was probably going to buy a dress online. There was a Selkie option I had my eye on. They were excited for me. I tried to relax. I window shopped on my phone. I felt dread.
The thing I learned about shopping for a dress as a fat bride while browsing plus size wedding dresses (I’m rolling my eyes at the designation “plus size” but I’m also here to tell you unfortunately it gets so much worse — the amount of “curvy collections” and “busty bridal” links I had to click through to find things that might cover my body successfully was disturbing) is that there actually is quite a large inventory out there — but it’s very expensive! I had hoped to spend no more than $1500 on a dress; most of the dresses I loved were more in the $3000-$3500 range. But I wouldn’t say that’s a fat tax — it seemed like that’s just the cost of a lot of traditional wedding dresses. I was genuinely shocked!
A lot of my friends who have had weddings have purchased off the rack dresses as opposed to “wedding gowns” from “bridal shops” so I just didn’t have an accurate price in mind for how much this item costs. There’s a passage in Michelle Tea’s book How To Grow Up where she writes about accepting that certain produce at Whole Foods just costs the amount it costs. Radical acceptance, I believe my therapist would call it. You don’t have to like it, but it is what it is. I’m not a couture expert and I won’t pretend to be, but I’ve read enough of Cora Harrington’s work to know that we should pay appropriately for the labor it takes to make custom clothing. She’s tweeted about how a wedding gown is the closest most people will ever get to a custom clothing experience, and I kept that in mind while browsing. What I mean here is I don’t want to simply roll my eyes about how much dresses cost and ignorantly say they should be more accessible, because while the industry is overwhelming, when it comes to a dress, someone has put a lot of labor into creating it. So I want to acknowledge that. Wedding dresses that are essentially custom pieces are expensive! I just didn’t really know that before my research, because I was more familiar with people purchasing ready to wear dresses online, at cheaper stores, or from vintage boutiques.
Once I had done a fair amount of online browsing, I got my heart set on this shop in North Carolina, near where my brother lives. They have an entire section for plus size gowns, and a lot of their designers seemed to make exactly what I wanted: a ballgown that would make me feel like a fairy princess. My mom and I made an appointment to go dress shopping when we were visiting my brother for the Thanksgiving long weekend, and I accepted that my dress would cost thousands more than what I anticipated.
Meanwhile, my friends had taken my refusal to dress shop with them in stride and had asked my fiancée, who they’re also friends with, if she wanted to receive the bridal shopping treatment. She was insistent that she’d buy a dress online “for like $100″ but didn’t want to deprive my pals of their fun (and is never one to turn down a day to be a diva and get drunk on champagne) so the three of them went off bright and early one Saturday morning to three different bridal stores. And guess what? My sweet frugal babe found a dress she loved for $400 at the last store they visited and she bought it on the spot! It was a sample so she could take it home with her immediately, and it didn’t need a single alteration. I was like “wow babe, check out your size privilege!” — just kidding. I mean, I did say that, but we have a very healthy ongoing dialogue about fat liberation and living in different sized bodies, and I was joking — mostly.
So here’s the twist. My fiancée had her dress. My friends had experienced their fun day of bridal dress shopping. My mom and I were ready to spend an exorbitant amount of money in North Carolina. And then — my friend texted me. She’s the one who is helping me plan the whole wedding, and as such, her phone’s algorithm decided months ago that she’s getting married and treats her like a bride. Instagram had advertised a sample sale at a local bridal shop in downtown Portland for the following weekend, and she wanted to know if I wanted to go. “It’s very lowkey. No champagne. We can go, just the two of us. You don’t have to buy anything. It just might be good to try some things on in person. I called and they have a lot of dresses in your size.” I knew that I wanted to buy my dress in North Carolina — I already had my heart set on one in particular, in fact — and maybe relieving the pressure of actually looking for something is what made me change my mind. Or maybe it was that I could tell she had so heard my concerns and was trying to cater to them. Or maybe I was just feeling spontaneous that day. I said yes.
You know how this story goes. I bought the very first dress I tried on. I mean, okay, I tried on several more afterwards just to make sure I really loved it, but I did, I loved it, and so I bought it. It’s a ballgown. It has layers of sparkly tulle. It has iridescent beading. And my tits look incredible. I’m a fat fairy princess when I put it on, and it’s going to look fantastic with my bedazzled white Tevas (listen, I’m getting married in rural Southern Oregon — she’s a fat fairy princess but she’s also a land dyke, ya know?) And best of all? Because it was a sample sale, I could take the dress home right away, and the final cost was $1000.
The reason I wanted to write about this experience is explicitly to say to other fat brides that buying a dress does not have to be a negative experience. Here are the things that were most helpful to me: I did a lot of browsing before I ever went into a shop so I knew what I liked and I also knew what I did not like, I stayed true to myself and didn’t let myself get swept up in someone else’s idea of what I “should” do when it came to the shopping experience, I took one trusted friend with me and we agreed if the sales assistant had bad vibes we would leave (our sales assistant had amazing vibes), I went to a store that stocked gowns that would actually fit on my body, and I decided to shop a sample sale to get a gown that would have been much more expensive for a much cheaper price point. If any of these options are available to you, I would strongly recommend taking them (if, of course, you want a more traditional gown — there are plenty of options outside of a bridal shop wedding gown, and plenty of reasons to go that route if you’d prefer).
One other thing I would recommend, if possible — ignore the actual sizing in the dresses. I’d heard that for some reason the wedding dress industry sizes up a lot, so if you’re typically a size 20 or 22 you might be a 24 or a 26 in a wedding dress. That can make it frustrating when asking for sizes and can also mess with your head. Even though we all know there’s nothing inherently wrong about being a larger size, we live in a world that tells us there is, and when you’re feeling vulnerable and (literally) naked in a dressing room, things that we could usually be logical about sometimes have the power to ruin our whole day. The sales assistant helping me never mentioned sizes, she simply brought me dresses she thought would fit me. To this day, as it hangs in my closet waiting to go to the seamstress who will make all the necessary alterations next month, I have no idea what size my wedding dress is. “Who cares,” said my best friend when I told her that. “It’s your size, and that’s all that matters.”
So! I’m not saying buying a dress when you’re a fat bride is easy or completely stress free — I’m just saying it doesn’t have to be a nightmare. It can even be pleasant! I had only heard really awful horror stories about the experience of shopping for a wedding dress as a fat bride, so I wanted to put something hopeful and encouraging out into the world of wedding editorial!
When my fiancée and I both reflected on how adamant we’d been about buying our dresses online, and how funny it was that we’d both ended up purchasing options we found in person instead, she concluded with this very sound lesson: “It turns out, when you go shopping for a wedding dress, it’s very hard not to buy one!”
I think it would be fun to use the comment section as a place where anyone can talk about their wedding outfit shopping experience — tell us about your bridal gowns, tell us about your tuxedo, tell us about your thrifted outfit, tell us about your themed costume wedding — but I’d like to explicitly state that this is a space for fat people to talk about their experiences, share tips, and also vent or share fears if we want to, without being policed or concern trolled or body shamed. This is always true for Autostraddle’s comment policy. That said — okay y’all, tell me all about your experience of shopping for your wedding outfits! Let’s goooooooo!
Blush and Bashful is a biweekly queer wedding planning column.
Blush and Bashful: You’re a Lesbian and You Want To Buy an Engagement Ring
Engagement rings! There’s so much to say about them! And today, we’re going to get right into it. By far the most common wedding-related question we receive at Autostraddle is some version of HOW THE HECK DO I BUY AN ENGAGEMENT RING OR EVEN START THINKING ABOUT IT so it made sense to me to address that right at the beginning of my lesbian wedding column. Also, if we think about things in a linear fashion, buying an engagement ring is often one of the first steps when it comes to wedding planning and actually getting gay married, so it’s a logical beginning.
photo contributed by VENVS
In terms of personal experience, I did not feel equipped to tell anyone how to buy an engagement ring. My ring is one I inherited from my grandma and then gave to my partner to propose to me when she was ready because I couldn’t imagine finding a ring I loved more and it also seemed excellent to not spend any money on the ring if we could help it, and my partner’s ring is the very first one she tried on in the very first antique shop we visited — she declared she loved it, the salesperson declared it was on sale, and I declared I would be buying it immediately. This is not particularly useful advice to the general lesbian population — “inherit a diamond” and “have an easy time at an antique store” is actually extremely useless advice — so I decided to go to the experts.
Luckily, I was able to interview not one but two queer jewelers who specialize in creating and selling gorgeous engagement rings (and other jewelry) to the queer community. The following information is what I learned from talking to Haley Biemiller, founder of VENVS, and Ashley McGinty, founder of Chouette Designs. Each woman founded their jewelry companies after finding the traditional jewelry industry lacking — for Haley, she felt othered during the experience of trying to buy an engagement ring for her wife, and for Ashley, she felt frustrated that she worked with fine jewelry but could never try on the rings she worked with because they didn’t fit her ring size. Both Haley and Ashley are determined to make shopping for engagement rings — and jewelry in general — a more inclusive and positive experience. Here are all their tips for finding your dream engagement ring!
The first step when looking for an engagement ring
Both Haley and Ashley agreed that the number one step when thinking about buying an engagement ring is to talk to your partner! Of course you want to talk about marriage in general, and if that’s a thing you’d like to embark on together, but in a more granular sense you want to understand what kind of ring your partner is looking for and excited about.
Ashley suggests starting a Pinterest board together and taking note if your partner really has their heart set on one specific design. Haley shared that even though the sentiment of the ring is of course important, it can be really disappointing (to both people!) if the ring purchased isn’t something that the person wearing it wanted or can envision themselves wearing. Both jewelers affirmed that there are plenty of ways to keep an element of surprise to the engagement while still checking in about what kind of engagement ring one or both partners want.
For my part, I’ll say that my fiancée and I talked about rings very openly and there was zero element of surprise for either of us when it comes to the actual jewelry, but we both planned surprise proposals for each other that were meaningful and exciting; knowing exactly what our rings would look like as the proposals were happening did nothing to take away from the sentiment of them, and the end result is simply that we both love our rings and have the exact rings we each desired. Ashley suggested that if you’re the kind of person who really wants to surprise your partner and the idea of talking about rings beforehand ruins that for you, you can purchase a very inexpensive but still beautiful piece of CZ (cubic zirconia) jewelry or costume jewelry and use that for the proposal, then once the cat is out of the bag you two can plan together what kind of ring you’ll get. This is also a great idea if you can’t afford a piece of fine jewelry right now but still want to propose — you don’t have to wait until you have “the ring,” you can always propose with one ring now and purchase another one together in the future (that’s actually what my dad did for my mom and I have always found the story very romantic!).
photo contributed by Chouette Designs
How much does buying an engagement ring cost?
During my research for this piece, I learned that the average American currently spends $6,000 on an engagement ring (and, full disclosure, I was shocked because that price seemed so high to me!). I also learned that the advice to spend X percentage of your paycheck is very dated, and apparently started as a way for women to insure they’d have a certain “security” in case their husbands ever left them, or possibly as a scheme from jewelers to encourage men to spend more money at their stores. Yikes! Very toxic all around.
Both Haley and Ashley emphasized that the most important thing to consider when thinking about your budget for your engagement ring is what makes sense for you and your budget. They both agreed that you do get what you pay for, but also that it’s very possible to get a gorgeous ring for a lot less money than $6,000, and that an engagement ring should never feel like a financial burden. “It’s a big purchase,” Haley said, likening it to a milestone like buying your first car, “but at the same time, I don’t think it should be a daunting ‘how am I going to come up with this money’ kind of thing? It should be comfortable.” She emphasized that buying a ring should be an exciting time, and that the purchase should feel fun and meaningful — to that end, choosing a very, very comfortable budget before you start looking can help make the experience only feel positive.
Haley said many of her clients are in the $1500-$2000 price range, and Ashley said many of her clients are in the $2500-$3000 price range, but both emphasized multiple times that it’s very possible to find a perfect ring for you for less than that. Like anything with a wedding, there’s really just such a giant range — I have one friend who spent $100 on a ring, another friend who spent $800 on a ring, and another friend who spent $10,000 on a diamond. The important thing is to figure out what you can afford (really truly, not in a I-will-go-into-debt-for-this-purchase way) and stick to your budget. I’d recommend not window shopping too much outside of your budget. There was one jeweler who I adored while my fiancée and I were in the pre-engagement phase and all her rings were about $5000 — eventually my partner told me to stop looking at them because we couldn’t spend that much money on a ring, and she was right. I unfollowed the jeweler on Instagram and it made me happier.
photo contributed by VENVS
How to figure out your (and your partner’s!) ring size
Figuring out your ring size is an important part of buying an engagement ring — and if you’re shopping for your partner, figuring out their ring size is obviously even more important! You can order cheap ring sizers online, and if you go into any jewelry store they’ll let you use their rings to find your correct size. If you go to an in person boutique they’ll probably take a bit more time and care to go over it with you, but it’s very easy to do by yourself, so don’t be intimidated. And the best news? Even if you get the size wrong, you can always get the ring resized! It’s true that occasionally with a custom design it can cost a lot to resize a ring (because of labor and changing the shape of the design) but in general, wherever you purchase your ring will allow you a free resizing after purchase, and most jewelers will offer to resize your ring even years after you originally purchased it for a small fee. This information made me feel a lot better when thinking about sizing my own ring (which I’m constantly worried is a little too tight? Or maybe it’s fine? Should it be looser?) so I think it’s important to impart on others as well. When it comes to ring size, you can always change it! Don’t overthink it and don’t stress.
photo contributed by Venvs
How to make ethical choices when buying an engagement ring
One of the biggest questions we’ve received from readers is how to shop ethically for an engagement ring! Full disclosure, I thought the answer would be obvious — lab grown diamonds! — but both Haley and Ashley taught me that things are a bit more complicated.
“The most ethical thing you can do is use a recycled piece of jewelry,” Ashley said. “But not everyone has an heirloom piece available!”
So what are some other options?
“It’s a tricky subject,” Haley said. She explained that for the past few years many people have been gravitating toward lab grown diamonds because they’re theoretically more ethical, but it turns out that the carbon footprint of making a lab grown diamond is just as bad for the earth as mining them. At the same time, The RJC (Responsible Jewelry Council) has enacted some heavy regulations on natural diamonds. If a jeweler is buying natural diamonds from an RJC certified vendor, they know they’re being audited 2-3 times a year to make sure all of their practices are ethical — that their workers are being paid fairly, that there’s no corruption going on in these processes. Lab grown diamonds are also heavily regulated, but with the power that goes into creating these stones, you can’t say it’s great for the environment.
If you don’t have an heirloom diamond and still don’t feel great about buying a natural or lab grown diamond, Haley recommends moissanite, which she says is the most ethical of stones. They are all created in the USA, and it doesn’t take as much power and energy to create them.
Ashley shared that with most traditional jewelers, the process of how they find their gemstones is quite “cloak and dagger” (which made me LOL, truly), but there are more jewelers out there now that have made being transparent about their process a part of their business model. For her jewelry, she works with a company called Misfit Diamonds. “They’re big on finding what the rest of the industry would call ‘trash diamonds’,” she said. I asked what trash diamonds meant and she told me those are stones that would traditionally be thrown away (!!!) because they’re not perfect. Apparently salt and pepper diamonds used to make up a big portion of those that are thrown away, but they’ve become very trendy. “Consumers are starting to realize that [‘trash diamonds’] can look really cool and interesting and unique.”
As you can see, the process of buying an ethical engagement ring is not necessarily simple — which is probably why so many of us are wondering about it. I think the information Haley and Ashley shared is a helpful starting point, and then considering your own particulars can help you come to a clearer conclusion. Is it important to you to have a very sparkly ring? Moissanite has major bling factor, and most people can’t even tell they’re not diamonds. Price point might also guide you in this process — Haley told me that whereas a one carat natural diamond would cost between $4000-$6000, a moissanite around the same carat weight would be $600-$800 (and lab grown diamonds would fall somewhere in the middle). It seems to me that choosing a queer jeweler who is transparent about where they source their gemstones is a really good step to take if you’re buying a new ring — then you have the added bonus of supporting a small queer business as well when buying your ring.
photo contributed by VENVS
Advice specifically for queer people looking for an engagement ring
Haley had some practical advice for queer couples that I really loved: “There are really no rules,” she said. She shared that she sometimes meets with queer couples who have internalized the stigma that one person’s ring needs to be more feminine and one person’s ring needs to be more masculine, but that’s not true. “Traditional jewelers will tell you it’s not an engagement ring if it’s not a diamond, or it’s not an engagement ring if you didn’t spend X amount of dollars on it… that’s not true! You don’t have to play by any rulebook.” And Ashley emphasized that for queer couples in particular, finding a jeweler you feel comfortable bringing your whole self to is ideal. “Find someone you vibe with,” she said. “You want to be excited about the ring – it’s representing you, and representing your relationship – the process of buying the ring should be something you’re excited about and something that’s affirming, not just something where you have to settle.”
photo contributed by Chouette Designs
Advice specifically for fat people looking for an engagement ring
As a fat person who, for years, just told myself “rings aren’t for me,” I was particularly excited to hear Ashley’s advice for how fat people or people with bigger fingers could have a positive experience shopping for engagement rings.
She recommended finding jewelers who have extended size runs in a lot of their offerings, but acknowledged “that can be a huge challenge, because there aren’t a lot of us.” She said scrolling social media for hashtags like #sizeinclusivejewelry and #plussizejewelry can be helpful, although she warns that some brands are proud of themselves for going up to size 10 — “which is great, it’s a start, but I would encourage you to look for brands that go even higher.”
She also emphasized that finding an affirming jeweler, ideally someone who shares your experiences, can create a better experience. “Not that I’m biased or anything,” she laughed.
photo contributed by VENVS
What these professionals wish they’d known before shopping for their own engagement rings
Okay, get ready for a truly harrowing story! When I asked Ashley this question she laughed ruefully and said, “I wish I had known not to put a raw diamond in the engagement ring.” In an effort to get her wife, someone who works in the jewelry industry, a unique and gorgeous ring, Ashley’s partner got her a ring with a raw diamond — an uncut stone. But because diamonds are so hard, the stone started to eat away at the setting — and then fell out, to be lost in the streets of Portland forever!!! “I made that mistake so that my future couples don’t have to,” Ashley joked. But seriously, she said that particular style of stone is gorgeous, but it just doesn’t hold up in a ring setting. Put it in a necklace, or earrings — something that won’t get beat up in the same way a ring does.
Similarly, Haley shared that she encourages couples to do research on the stones they’re interested in. VENVS works with a lot of gemstones and Haley says she frequently sees couples pick out their own birthstone, or their partner’s birthstone, or the stone of the month they met, which is a beautiful idea but some of the stones are very delicate. She says one stone people often pick that is not a great choice for rings is opal (I personally really wanted to buy my fiancée a moonstone ring, but decided against it when I learned how soft they are and how likely they are to get scratched in a ring setting). Haley said she wouldn’t necessarily tell people they can’t buy those stones, but it’s good to be aware that you’ll probably have to replace it down the line.
Haley also said her biggest piece of advice is to just do a lot of research in general about what’s possible for engagement rings. “There are so many endless options on what you can do,” she said. “There are so many ways to individualize your ring and make it super unique for your relationship and yourself.”
I am extremely grateful to Haley and Ashley for taking the time to educate me about this subject, and I hope this installment of Blush & Bashful helps you and your partner when thinking about how to buy an engagement ring. And remember, even if you don’t want to go to a jeweler or spend a lot of money on a ring, there are other options. If your family (or your partner’s family) has rings or even just stones that they’re willing to pass down to you, that can be a really sentimental (and cost effective) option. Scouring Etsy, antique and vintage shops, and second hand jewelers allows you to buy rings with their own histories and often with a significantly lower price tag than what you’ll find with new or custom jewelry.
And! You don’t have to get a ring. Some couples both really want to wear rings to symbolize their union, in some couples it only feels good for one partner to wear a ring, and some couples simply don’t want rings at all, either opting for other jewelry or ignoring the tradition altogether. I’ll try not to belabor this point in this column, but it must be said: the absolute best part of getting gay married is that you really don’t have to follow the script of “what it means to get married” — you can literally do whatever you want, and as long as you and the person you’re marrying agree, you’re golden.
Blush and Bashful is a biweekly queer wedding planning column.
Lesbian Weddings on TV: From Carol and Susan to Bette and Tina
The history of the TV lesbian wedding starts with Friends and takes a long and winding road towards this very day, when the Lesbian Television Titans Bette and Tina will be getting (re) married on the season finale of The L Word: Generation Q.
Let’s take a look back at all the weddings that have carried us from then to here.
1996: Friends, “The One With the Lesbian Wedding”
31.6 million people tuned in to see Newt Gingrich’s half-sibling, Candace, officiate the ceremony between Ross’s ex-wife Carol and her partner Susan — the first lesbian wedding on American television. (The first same-sex marriage was between two men on Roseanne.) After Carol’s parents bailed on the ceremony — a staple of lesbian weddings on TV — Carol wanted to call the whole thing off, but instead Ross proudly walked her down the aisle. Two network affiliates refused to air the episode, and despite the buzz and high ratings, only four people called NBC to complain. It probably helped that Carol and Susan did not actually kiss at their own wedding. But Lea Delaria was there and the hats were ICONIC.
2002: Queer as Folk, “The Wedding”
In typical QAF fashion, a bulk of this episode — the first same-sex wedding on cable TV — was consumed by the gay male characters making disparaging jokes about lesbians! The couple faced numerous obstacles on the way to the symbolic aisle, including Lindsay’s parents refusing to help pay for her wedding despite covering her sisters’ three weddings because Lindsay’s wasn’t “real.” There’s mix-ups with every element of the ceremony itself, leading Mel and Lindsay to call the whole thing off. But the gay boys rally together to save the day and provide a splendid little venue where the officiant declares them “married in our eyes.” They walk themselves down the aisle.
2005: The Simpsons, “There’s Something About Marrying”
The first same-sex wedding in an animated series arrived during a time when marriage equality was a hot-button issue following the success of several anti-equality amendments during the 2004 election. Inspired by San Francisco’s 2004 same-sex wedding bonanza, the plot concerns the Simpsons’ home of Springfield legalizing same-sex marriage to improve their waning tourism industry, which leads to Homer starting a side-hustle as a gay wedding officiant and Marge confronting her own homophobia when her sister, Patty, turns out to be a lesbian. Gambling websites were posting odds on who’d come out in the episode and 10.5 million tuned in to witness it, the season’s highest ratings. Although the wedding ended up getting canceled mid-ceremony when Veronica turned out to be a cis man who’d posed as a woman to succeed at golf (the mid-aughts, everybody!!!), it was still lauded by GLAAD and queer media, and Homer did marry other lesbian couples throughout the course of the episode.
2009: All My Children
“For most of Bianca Montgomery’s life, love had been hard to come by and, in the rare instance where her affections were requited, the romance took place almost entirely off-screen. But with Reese Williams, Bianca was finally given the opportunity to love another person, on-screen. Their love story started (off-screen) in Paris — the love-at-first-sight story that Bianca deserved — but became real when the couple (and their daughters) reunited in Pine Valley.
Soon after Reese’s arrival, it becomes clear how serious this relationship is: they have a new daughter, Reese has secretly designed and built Bianca’s Parisian dream house, and Reese tearfully proposes to her “beautiful Bianca.” They share deep kisses…a far cry from the chaste kisses that Bianca had previously been afforded.
Originally, the couple planned to host a commitment ceremony in Bianca’s hometown but once Connecticut legalized gay marriage in October 2008, the celebration moved to a couple of states over. Bianca and Reese exchanged vows on Valentine’s Day 2009 in the first ever same-sex wedding on daytime television, but, sadly, their marriage was annulled shortly thereafter.” (Natalie)
2011: Private Practice, “Heaven Can Wait”
Technically this is the first lesbian wedding on a network TV drama, but most remember Callie and Arizona’s wedding on Grey’s Anatomy as the ceremony relevant to that specific milestone. After a 20 year secret relationship, Addison’s mother Bizzy and her girlfriend Susan chose to marry despite Susan’s dire diagnosis of stage IV ovarian cancer. Addison performed a Hail Mary surgery on Susan at Bizzy’s urgency, which Susan emerged from feeling better — well enough to participate in the wedding Addison planned for them both. However, it turned out Susan wasn’t actually better at all, she was just trying really hard to make it to her own wedding. She collapsed and died after the ceremony, and Bizzy’s grief led her to commit suicide shortly thereafter. Bury Your Gays at its finest!
2011: Grey’s Anatomy, “White Wedding“
The first lesbian wedding in a network drama between two long-running characters was bittersweet. Callie struggled throughout the episode with her homophobic mother who reminded her that the marriage wasn’t legal, they’re just “playing dress-up,” and then refused to attend, which also meant her father couldn’t attend. Callie, in the grand tradition of seemingly all lesbian brides on television, decided to call the whole thing off after the minister had to cancel. But again everybody rallied! Miranda gave Callie an inspirational talk and the father of Callie and Arizona’s child, Mark, walked Callie down the aisle. Callie’s Dad showed up late for the party and it was beautiful and nothing hurt!
The weird thing about this wedding was how it was paired with Meredith and Derek’s storyline: they met a baby they wanted to adopt and decided that very day to just bop in to City Hall and get married to enable them to perform a legal adoption, even skipping the Calizona wedding to do so. It’s unclear how the show itself intended this juxtaposition to land, but it ended up feeling a bit like straight people flaunting their privileges while two queer women struggled to find joy despite their relative lack thereof.
2013: The Fosters, “I Do”
“Stef and Lena Adams Foster are the closest thing we’ve ever had to a lesbian Coach and Tammy Taylor in our lives. Their love was the stabilizing force for everyone around them, especially the gaggle of children that were always running in and out of their home. Sometimes they even made time for themselves! Their wedding was extra special because it was the first lesbian TV wedding after the Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act in 2012, and because it took place on the network that started out as a megaphone in Baptist bigot Pat Robertson’s media empire, before it became ABC Family, and then Freeform. Knowing an interracial lesbian couple got married on his former network absolutely ruined his day! It also made us cry, but for good reasons.” -Heather Hogan
2015: Last Tango in Halifax, “Old Ain’t Dead”
After being praised for the love story granted to late-in-life lesbian Caroline, her wedding to very pregnant Kate (the only woman of color on the show) was immediately followed by Kate getting killed in a post-wedding car accident. Sally Wainwright (who later went on to be the showrunner for Gentleman Jack) defended her choice at the time as a way to bring Caroline closer to her mother. As Kaite Welsh wrote at the time, “she has killed off a queer woman to redeem a homophobic, judgmental snob who refused to go to her own daughter’s wedding.” A heartwarming event followed by a devastating death, this was one of many that contributed to the LGBT Fans Deserve Better movement of 2016 that challenged the Bury Your Gays trope. It also brought back memories for fans of Los Hombres de Paco, who saw Silvia murdered directly after her wedding to her girlfriend in 2010.
2015: Glee, “A Wedding”
Definitely the only lesbian TV wedding where the happy lesbian couple invited their gay male friends to join the ceremony in a double wedding held in the Indiana barn where one of the brides was born, Brittany and Santana got hitched mere months prior to the federal legalization of same-sex marriage. It honestly seemed extraordinary at the time that a network show would dare to have two queer OTPs, let alone give them a double wedding — and while it was a lot of fanservice, the fans deserved it for our service. The ceremony included an acknowledgment from officiant Burt Hummel of how unjust it was that they had to travel to Indiana from Ohio to marry legally and an affirmation of the importance of marriage equality. Jennifer Coolidge, Gloria Estefan and Gina Gershon performed “I’m So Excited!” and that was pretty wild. Bonus: Sue Sylvester manages to manipulative Santana’s Abuela into changing her mind about skipping the wedding, thwarting the lesbian TV wedding trope of “at least one relative missing bc of homophobia.”
2015: One Big Happy, “A Tale of Two Hubbies“
This NBC sitcom was heralded as the first to have a lesbian lead since Ellen but debuted to middling reviews and ended up swiftly cancelled. It centered on two chronically single thirtysomethings: Lizzie, a lesbian who has a baby with her best friend Luke (a straight man), but finds their co-parenting best friendship threatened when he falls for Prudence. In what ended up being the series finale, Luke f*cks up and misses his wedding to Pru so… Lizzie goes ahead and makes it happen all on her own, marrying Prudence herself to stop Pru from getting deported. Despite the frustration that a lesbian is sacrificing her own shot at marrying someone she’s actually dating with in order to help straight people, it was the first time we saw on TV a lesbian being able to exploit the institution of marriage for practical rather than romantic purposes, which is equality! (The second time was a year later on Shameless, when V married Svetlana.)
2016: Hollyoaks, Episode 4444
British soap Hollyoaks sent Esther and Kim through several rounds of drama before the two finally tied the knot in an effort to prove to everybody and themselves that they were in it for real this time. Unfortunately Kim is kidnapped mere hours after the wedding, causing Esther to think Kim has left her, but then she returned a few weeks later.
2017: The Last Man On Earth, “Gender Friender”
This sitcom about the sole survivors of a pandemic that wiped out most of humanity in 2020 (lol) saw the mid-final-season wedding of Erica and Gail under some interesting circumstances — their fellow survivor Carol complaining that Gail was spending too much time with her girlfriend’s children and not enough with her “legal grandchildren” (because Gail had adopted Carol in the previous season because Carol wanted her twins to have a grandmother), thus over-valuing a relationship that wasn’t legally binding. So Gail and Erica fight about it — Gail says they already live together and raise a kid together and all they lack is a “stupid piece of paper.” Erica doesn’t think the piece of paper is stupid! So Gail eventually caves and the very next day, they’re married by Tandy, who mostly uses his officiant duties to further his own storyline about trying to prove that he’s a feminist, peppered with jokes about bushes, strap-ons, penetration and scissoring!
It says something, maybe, that even when you live in a society of seven (7) grown adults with no recognized government, the concept of “legal marriage” still holds such immense weight.
2018: Steven Universe, “Reuinted“
“When Garnet revealed that she is actually a fusion of two lesbian gems, Ruby and Sapphire, it threw the entire cartoon-loving queer world into chaotic raptures. We’re only used to bad surprises! This was the best surprise! They stayed fused together, almost all the time, but they got married as their solo gem selves. It was groundbreaking for sure, the first all-ages series to have a queer wedding! It was on Cartoon Network for heck’s sake! And it was also revolutionary for the way it flipped gender expectations, and then used Ruby and Sapphire’s wedding reception as a showdown for one of the series’ scariest Big Bads. “I am the will of two gems to care for each other, to protect each other from any threat,” Garnet says, powering up her fists in her wedding dress. “No matter how vast or how cruel. You couldn’t stop me 5,750 years ago and you can’t stop me now!” The power of love, emphasis on power!” – Heather Hogan
2018: Sense8, “Amor Vincit Omnia“
This is the first lesbian TV wedding with a trans bride but it’s also unique for how queer it felt: not simply because Nomi shared a consciousness with a bunch of other pansexuals in attendance but also their non-traditional wedding garb, the gay fairies handing out weed brownies and the gloriously diverse raucous dance party that followed. The techno lights on the Eiffel Tower. And afterwards, all the sensates retiring to their respective hotel rooms for one final, ecstatic, incredibly graphic, super-queer, beautiful, smashed-together sex scene, culminating in body-swapping leading to a giant pile of naked sweaty bodies fucking spliced with flashbacks from the whole series. It was an honor to witness this orgy, I still can’t believe it happened at all.
2018: Orange is the New Black, “Be Free“
Consider for a moment that getting “prison married” is likely one of gay marriage’s earliest historical incarnations and you’ll understand the importance of this toxic union between Piper Chapman and Alex Vause. Conducted by Nicky in a DIY kippah and tallit the day before Piper’s unexpected sudden release, this hasty little occasion was full of heart and a (surprisingly unusual) example of chosen family upholding and creating their own traditions with the tools they have to do so. Its lack of legality would dog Piper throughout her post-release season as her loved ones question her loyalty and dedication to Alex.
2019: Gentleman Jack, “Are You Still Talking?”
“Anne Lister’s wedding to Ann Walker is generally considered to be the first gay wedding in Great Britain. In fact, in 2018, a blue plaque — indicating it as a place of historical significance in the UK — was placed at Holy Trinity church in Goodramgate, York, where Lister and Walker married in 1834. It was the city’s first LGBTQ history plaque, and it’s rimmed with a rainbow. Gentleman Jack depicted Anne and Ann’s wedding beautifully, at the end of the first season. They took communion together and exchanged rings, quietly, in their own pew, promising love and fidelity for the rest of their lives. Their union granted Anne Lister’s her greatest wish, and it was as swoony as she — and we — had imagined it would be.” -Heather Hogan
2020: The Chi, “Foe ‘Nem”
Dre and Nina’s wedding in The Chi‘s third season premiere did something more TV lesbian weddings really ought to do, which is follow up the ceremony with very hot wedding night strap-on sex. “We never, and I do mean literally never, get to see black queer sex scenes like that on television,” said Carmen of the scene. “I joke a lot about how great Lena Waithe’s sex scenes are, but more than that — they are important. It takes a stand that we’re here, too.”
2021: Wynona Earp, “Old Souls“
“One of the best things about Wynonna Earp‘s queer characters is that, while Nicole was seemingly introduced to be Waverly’s love interest, and Waverly’s love interest she was, over the course of the show’s four-but-should-have-been-more seasons, Nicole became inextricably intertwined with more characters than just Waverly, more plotlines than just their relationship. To the point that, if Waverly and Nicole had broken up, neither of them would have been able to disappear into the parking lot of no return. But luckily, they did not break up, and instead got engaged and spent the series finale planning, saving, and executing the big day. It was Wynonna’s show, but Waverly was Wynonna’s world, and Nicole was Wynonna’s best friend, so it didn’t feel out of place for this big, beautiful gay wedding to be the centerpiece of the last episode. They were surrounded by family, of both the natal and chosen variety, with fellow queer people, and with empty chairs symbolizing those who couldn’t be with them. It was a beautiful conclusion to their journey.” – Valerie Anne
2021: Legends of Tomorrow, “The Fungus Amongus“
“Legends of Tomorrow did something with Sara and Ava’s relationship that happens too rarely on television (partially because TV shows with queer leads don’t tend to run as long these days…) It took these two already-out, adult queer characters and introduced them as perfect strangers, then slowly, over the course of many seasons, followed them through meeting, butting heads, making up, flirting, courting, dating, fighting, moving in together, getting married, and eventually planning to have a baby together. (A baby made up of their joint DNA because aliens.) Ava went from enemy of the week to co-captain, and that really got solidified in Season 6. The entire emotional undercurrent of that season was about Sara and Ava’s relationship; Sara was going to propose to Ava but got interrupted by an alien abduction, and they spent the rest of the season fighting to get back to each other so they could get married. On TV all kinds of couples get engaged then married two episodes later, so it felt unique for many reasons, including the long buildup and eventual wedding. It was a celebration of their queer love for each other, and they were surrounded by their found family, and it was a beautiful, genuine moment. One of the best in the long run of the show. And honestly, after how Season 7 ended up going, probably should have been their series finale.” – Valerie Anne
2022: The L Word: Generation Q, “Looking Ahead“
Prior to Bette and Tina’s big day, The L Word franchise had racked up a bevy of unrealized engagements: Tanya and Dana’s “first corporate-sponsored lesbian wedding” was canceled when the brides both fell for other women, Shane left Carmen at the altar in Canada, and Finley interrupted Sophie and Dani’s wedding to declare her love for Sophie.
But then along came the Season Three finale of The L Word: Generation Q. (For which the recap will be finished posted later today!) After years of on-and-off dating and one marriage and divorce already behind them, one of television’s more storied lesbian couples promised to spend the rest of their lives together, in front of a lot of their friends, their daughter Angie and, of course, Ilene Chaiken.
Blush and Bashful: I’m Writing a Lesbian Wedding Column and You’re Invited
Feature image by Wondra
According to the wedding website my fiancée and I are using, we’re getting married in exactly 137 days, nine hours, and 28 minutes. The website also includes a “seconds” barometer for the countdown, but I could do without that level of granular planning! To be honest, I could do without the countdown entirely. As I’ve written about a bit already for Autostraddle, I’m getting married this summer and I’m actually, for the most part, really enjoying the planning process. But give a Capricorn a countdown, and she’s going to feel a little anxious!
Due to the enthusiasm of our readers and of Autostraddle’s senior staff (a couple of whom are also now engaged!), I thought it would make sense to write a dedicated wedding column as our wedding site continues to (un)helpfully count down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds (lol) to the big day. Immediately after pitching this column idea, I became a little bit anxious. I’m not an expert, I’m not having a traditional wedding, and I’ve worked really hard to enact some boundaries around my personal writing that make it difficult to share as openly as I once did. Was I the right person to be writing this column? Would it be interesting and/or useful to anyone? Would it feel good to me? Was I being a little silly to add one more thing to my Wedding To Do List?
After I calmed down, I reminded myself that no one is an expert when it comes to being a bride or planning a wedding — unless they work in the wedding industry, and even then, no one has had a wedding until they, well, have had a wedding. And of course, it’s silly to worry about whether or not my wedding is traditional when writing for a bunch of queers. As for my own boundaries, I promise to listen to my heart and only share what genuinely feels good here. As a way to mitigate making this feel too much like a diary or a personal essay series (which it is not!), I’m going to do a good amount of interviewing other people — actual experts in the industry and fellow queers who are also planning weddings.
So without further ado, allow me to introduce you to my new little column called Blush and Bashful (please tell me you get the reference), running biweekly right here on Autostraddle dot come for the next few months, right up until my website wedding countdown hits 0 and I’m walking down the aisle to say I do.
I’ve written this before, but the truth is I never really thought I’d be a bride. I wasn’t one of those girls who thought about my wedding when I was growing up. In 7th grade, my best friends and I had a notebook we passed between the three of us and wrote extensive notes in during class, and the two of them were always sketching their “dream engagement ring” or “dream wedding dress” and I just couldn’t relate. It’s not like I was so radical and anti-marriage — I fully thought I was straight back then, and definitely assumed I’d marry some guy — I just didn’t really care about planning for the future party. I was more interested in creating blackout poetry with print outs of Indigo Girls lyrics — go figure.
As I grew older, the idea of marriage seemed incredibly far away. Gay marriage wasn’t legal when I first came out, but beyond that, it just wasn’t part of the game plan for most of the queers I considered (and still consider) my chosen family. And I guess in some ways, I just wasn’t ready. I was in my twenties. I was having a nice time, or a terrible time, or a messy time, or just like, a time. I remember my most serious girlfriend from that time period was eight years older than me, and when we broke up I told her honestly that I just didn’t think I ever wanted to settle down with someone and build a life. She was convinced I was looking for someone else, and I wanted to assure her that wasn’t true. I think I’ll be alone forever, I told her. I think I like it that way. I don’t want to be alone forever, she told me, just as honest. We were in the basement of my favorite teashop trying not to make a scene. I didn’t get it.
I get it now.
I could explain it in so many ways, but I guess who cares. I wanted to be alone for a long time, and I was — and then one day I realized I didn’t want that anymore. I could find other ways to be “not alone” but I happen to have found and fell in love with a dyke who loves me and wants to grow old with me. We want to play Wingspan and have kinky sex and host dinner parties for our friends and drive to Southern Oregon and fly to Boston and raise babies and grow garlic and build a home together until we don’t want to anymore. And we want to get married and host a wedding to celebrate our love. So we’re gonna do it!
Perhaps shocking absolutely no one, as soon as I realized I was going to have a wedding, I slipped very easily into the role of Bride. As much as my younger self didn’t want to plan our a fantasy wedding to a mystery man, my 34-year-old self has embraced her earth sign femme sensibilities and feels as though she was born to plan a wedding. Growing up is weird and surprising and fun.
Here are some details about our wedding, along with the little bits of wisdom I’ve acquired from the experience so far:
- We talked a lot about getting engaged before it happened, and we were both very much on the same page about wanting to get married. The actual engagements had surprise elements to them (we each proposed separately) but no part of the “we’re getting engaged” sentiment was a surprise. I personally would hate to be caught off guard by a wedding proposal, and it’s such a huge decision I think it makes sense to talk about it seriously before moving forward.
- My partner and I initially had very different ideas about what our wedding would look like, and luckily we talked this through almost immediately after we got engaged and were able to compromise and get on the same page. My partner initially thought we’d do a very casual picnic-style situation, and I initially thought we’d have to spend more money than she expected to achieve the dreamy princess blush and bashful situation I envisioned. We talked for a long time about what was important to us in terms of the celebration, how much money we could realistically spend as well as how much money we actually wanted to spend on what is essentially an elaborate party, and how we wanted to split up the labor of planning the wedding.
- We’re having a small campout-style backyard celebration this summer. We are incredibly lucky that our friends have agreed to host our wedding on their property in Southern Oregon, which is both gorgeous and large and also incredibly sentimental to both of us. This means there are a lot of logistics to manage (both because we’re not using a typical venue and because the location is four hours away from where we live), and there’s also a very fun DIY element to the entire event, which is what I wanted.
- One of my best friends is a literal miracle human and has never met a task she can’t take on — seriously, she’s an incredible cook, she runs her own vintage shop with her sister, she’s an interior design maven, she cuts hair, she does nails and makeup like a professional…she’s just truly the most competent person I’ve ever met in my life. She volunteered to help me plan the wedding right away. It is not an understatement to say I could not do this without her. I don’t have a wedding planner, but it feels like I have a wedding planner because I have her. I would strongly recommend anyone planning kind of DIY wedding have a right hand babe like this — either someone you’ve hired or someone you’re lucky enough to call family — because it will end up feeling overwhelming no matter how prepared you think you are to take it all on.
- I should also note here that my fiancée and I joyfully decided I would be the Wedding Project Manager — we both know if it was up to her, we’d be having a picnic. She is our House Project Manager, and I genuinely don’t feel resentful or sad about her not being my co-planner for the wedding, but I would definitely recommend talking about this and making sure you’re comfortable with the level of help each person can contribute to wedding planning before things get underway. I’ll also note that I’ve heard from some friends that family members and friends can be kind of weird about making assumptions about who is the “Wedding Project Manager” (if you will) depending on gender — the more femme presenting person in a relationship is often assumed to be the one taking charge, which is obviously fucked — so if that becomes a bother to you, don’t be shy about insisting people ask both of you about wedding plan, or perhaps better yet — don’t ask anyone at all.
- For me and for my partner, the most important thing about our wedding is that it’s a celebration with our loved ones. We want to have good food and fun music, and we want everyone’s memories to be filled with hot queers and loving energy. We’ve prioritized our planning accordingly: We’re spending the most money on the catering budget and the photographer, and we’ve chosen to ignore certain aspects of a “traditional” function that just don’t make sense for ours. We won’t be assigning tables or making place cards; we don’t have a wedding party; we aren’t printing out menus or programs. It’s not that I think those things don’t matter — they just don’t matter to us. And I think ultimately that’s my number one piece of wedding planning advice so far: There is no right way or wrong way to have a wedding. The only thing that matters is that you’re on the same page as the person you’re marrying and that the two of you stay true to what you both want your wedding to be.
So! That’s an introduction to me, my wedding planning, and the position from which I shall be writing this column. I’m excited for future installments where I’ll write about how to choose engagement rings, what shopping for a wedding dress as a fat dyke was like, the art of balancing traditions with creativity, and so much more. To conclude, I leave you with the most perfect Julia Roberts gif of all time:
Same, babe. Same.
Blush and Bashful is a biweekly queer wedding planning column.
Some Things I Didn’t Expect When Planning My Lesbian Wedding
Hello, it’s me again, an unsuspecting lesbian bride planning a DIY backyard lesbian wedding even though at one point in my life I was quite adamant about never getting married. And yet, life is long! I fell in love with a triple water sign! I’ve decided I want a wedding after all! My dad was right, my priorities changed in my thirties! I’m excited to host a big party for all my friends and wear a white dress and eat cake! C’est la vie! La vie est belle! I don’t really speak French, I’m unsure why I’m leaning into these phrases!
I’ve developed better boundaries over 15+ years of writing on the internet (thank you therapy) but I’m still inclined to (carefully) share some of my life with you as it happens, which means you get to join me on this fun gay wedding planning adventure! There are many things one expects when planning a wedding (hiring someone to feed your guests, purchasing a dress, feeling somewhat stressed out about where your out of town friends will stay) but some things about the experience thus far have truly taken me by surprise! For example…
1. I have become the number one purchaser of gently used rugs in my area on OfferUp
What can I tell you — I fell for this Pinterest trend. I am desperate to recreate the boho chic energy radiating out of the DIY backyard wedding photos I keep seeing on Pinterest and I am certain that curating a dance floor out of area rugs in the middle of the gorgeous large property we’re getting married on will make this happen! But did you know area rugs can be really expensive? Like, hundreds of dollars? I shan’t be spending hundreds of dollars on 10+ area rugs, no way! But did you also know that on OfferUp you can find almost everything you need in life for super affordable prices? Including… wait for it… yep, you guessed it, area rugs! Anyway I have truly spent the past few months driving all over Portland and the surrounding areas purchasing a variety of gently used rugs that I will now ask my fiancée to schlep to Southern Oregon in her truck so we can create my dream dance floor in the woods. I also greatly look forward to transitioning from the Number One Purchaser of Gently Used Rugs in My Area to the Number One Seller of Gently Used Rugs in My Area as soon as the wedding is over. If you live in Portland and need a cute large gently used rug for cheap this summer, let me know!
2. I’m in not infrequent contact with a woman named Daphne who is renting me a Fancy Portable Toilet Trailer with air conditioning
The thing is, when you get married on your dream Dyke Land Project, sometimes compost toilets are the Main Way To Go To The Bathroom. While I was all ready to tell my guests how to poop in a bucket and cover it with straw while wearing sequins, my friends who own the land gently pointed out that no one would be interested in dumping the poop out of the bucket all weekend and it would certainly need to be done at least a few times… at which my future mother in law, who is incredibly helpful and willing to do many undesirable tasks, was like, “It really sounds like you need to rent Porta Potties” and I was like okay, if she thinks this is a necessary expense, it actually is! Sold! But in my Porta Potty Research Journey I met Daphne, who works for a company that rents out Fancy Portable Toilet Trailers with air conditioning, and we are now BFF. Or rather, we’ve spoken several times on the phone and she’s assured me the only downside of renting her trailer is that guests may talk more about the awesome toilets than they do about the wedding, to which I say — at least they won’t be complaining about poop buckets! Anyway I love Daphne.
3. I care a LOT about how to organize a refrigerator to peak efficiency
Have you ever tried to host 50+ people for a full weekend of eating in the woods at a property with One Single Refrigerator? NEED I SAY MORE?!?! (In all seriousness I have been studying weird diagrams on Foodie Instagram that suggest things like putting a Lazy Susan in the fridge and using an upside down Dutch oven lid for more room, and I will likely buy a cheap second hand refrigerator to create more space so I don’t have a meltdown on the actual wedding weekend… also if anyone reading this is a guest invited to the wedding who owns a Yeti cooler, text me right now. I’m not kidding!!!)
4. You can make a couch out of hay bales
I’m not doing this, my best friend just discovered it on Pinterest while researching seating options for my backyard extravaganza and I had an overwhelming urge to share this with you. Can! You! Believe?!!!!
5. I’m earnestly excited about this party and I’m having a lot of fun planning it
A few days ago I was having lunch with a friend who is about fifteen years older than me — she just had her second wedding — and we were laughing at our younger selves and how dismissive we’d been about the concept of a wedding party. It’s true that a wedding is expensive, that there’s no way to divest the act of marriage from the state, that some dykes more radical than I am are probably judging me for indulging entirely in Planning My Wedding (and it’s true that ten years ago, I was one of those judgmental dykes) but it’s also true that I am so earnestly excited about this party, that I am having a lot of fun planning it, and that I am letting myself off the hook for all the baggage I used to have around “wedding parties” and what they all mean.
This particular friend was like, “I love love and I love to party! And I’m not sorry!” and I am really into that vibe! I’m deeply in love with my fiancée and I’m a Capricorn who is obsessed with her friends and creating color coded spreadsheets! I’m planning an event to celebrate love in all its forms that will allow my nearest and dearest to dress up in their sparkly best and camp out in the woods at my favorite place in the world for a whole weekend! My best friend is a fucking wedding planning genius and the two of us are having a ball researching how to make a dance floor out of used rugs and how to make couches out of hay bales! I met a woman named Daphne who rents out fancy toilet trailers! What a world! What a life! I feel lucky and happy and deeply amused that my Baby Dyke Self would’ve judged this version of me so hard. I guess that’s part of growing up. I accept it.
I never expected to be a bride but it’s happening and yeah — I fucking love it. So far, that’s the biggest surprise when planning my lesbian wedding.
Have you planned a DIY backyard queer wedding? Do you have any secret hot tips for me or surprising moments of your own? I’d love to hear about the in the comments! And thank you to everyone who commented on my last wedding article, too — I am listening and making notes about what kinds of gay wedding content we can publish in 2023! In the meanwhile, I’ve got some more large area rugs to pick up. Bye!!!
Looking Back at the Queer Episodes of “Say Yes to the Dress”
When my fiancee and I got engaged, the first thing my son said to me was, “we have to go to Yes to the Dress!” I promised him that the next time we went to New York, we would absolutely schedule a trip to Kleinfeld Bridal, the home of Say Yes to the Dress.
I’ve been watching Say Yes to the Dress since it premiered back in 2007. I’ve always been obsessed with weddings and all that goes into them, and I love low-stakes drama, so a show like SYTTD is perfect. It’s a study in the human condition, and there’s a lot of really pretty dresses to look at. What’s not to love? As one of TLC’s most popular shows, it was always on, and over time it became one of my comfort shows. I legit signed up for Discovery+ just so I could watch SYTTD because I had watched the limited amount of episodes available on Hulu a million times and was bored. As a result, my kiddo became as enamored with the Kleinfeld crew as I was. My fiancee has also been subjected to watching the show ad nauseam, and now she has opinions and favorites as well.
In July of 2021, my kiddo, fiancee and I, along with my best friend, were all set to spend 90 minutes at Kleinfeld. My Say Yes to the Dress dreams were coming true, and I couldn’t wait. I did go in knowing I wasn’t going to “say yes” because we haven’t set a wedding date, but I wanted to get an idea of what was out there (I’m a Gemini moon/Libra rising. Indecision is in the stars for me). We had a lovely time with our consultant Amber, who was not only an absolute pro at picking out dresses but also at dealing with a queer couple. She didn’t bat an eyelash when I introduced her to my female fiancee; she was more confused by how adamant I was about not buying a dress that day.
I always find it interesting to look at the progression of how the staff at Kleinfeld handles LGBTQ+ brides. When the show started, same-sex marriage was only legal in a handful of states. One of the first episodes with two brides is “Family Dynamics” from season three, which aired in 2009. Middle aged brides Beth and Joy come in looking for pantsuits for their “informal” wedding. It’s hard to tell what flummoxes the consultants more: the mere existence of two brides or finding pantsuits in a store full of wedding dresses. Even though consultant Sarah isn’t new to the store, the couple is her first same-sex couple, but she insists it doesn’t matter. The challenge for her is going to be finding a wide-leg palazzo pantsuit at Kleinfeld. When Sarah pulls SYTTD mainstay Randy into the quest for pants, he also insists that even though there are two brides, they won’t be treated any differently, unless that bride is looking for pants.
Because this is one of the first episodes featuring a same-sex couple (they never say the word “lesbian” or even “queer” in later seasons) there are a lot of these affirmations that the brides won’t be treated any differently. It feels like overkill when you’re watching it now, but it was likely reassuring back in 2009 for brides who may have been afraid they’d be treated differently at the store. Here’s the problem: There’s only one suit in the store, and the two brides aren’t sample size. Joy, who says she never saw herself in a wedding dress, is more easily convinced to try one on than Beth, who is pretty firm on her desire for pants. “It’s like squeezing a 10 pound sausage into a five pound casing,” Beth admits after attempting to try on the only suit. Thankfully designer Amy Michelson is doing an in-store trunk show, and she designs the exact kind of outfit Beth is envisioning.
I’ll admit I don’t know everything there is to know about bridal fashion. But I know Say Yes to the Dress, and Kleinfeld is usually at the forefront of what’s new and trendy. It boasts over 1,500 dresses in the store, which means it really is the best place for options. So while there’s always some new “it” dress, the option for someone who wants pants is seriously limited. Also, as with all mainstream fashion sectors, bridal fashion is historically fatphobic and limited in its sizing options, especially when it comes to stores like Kleinfeld that rely on sample sizes, further limiting options for brides who don’t fit a conventional image.
In season 15, episode two, brides Jaimee and Lisa come in looking for outfits for their wedding. Jamiee wants a dress, and Lisa wants not a pantsuit, but a wedding jumpsuit. This episode aired in 2017, and unlike in 2009 when Beth’s pantsuit wants were seen as inconvenient, Lisa now has options for jumpsuits. Wedding jumpsuits have grown in popularity since the late 2010s, and even though consultant Shay had a total meltdown over the idea of finding a jumpsuit (or even a two-piece set with pants) for Lisa, he was able to do so without having to have something customized.
There are a lot of things that changed for same-sex brides between 2009 and 2017 of course. The main thing being that same-sex marriage became federally recognized in 2015. But even before that, the slow trickle of legalization across states in the earlier part of that decade saw more brides going to Kleinfeld for their wedding dress dreams. After that first episode, it became less about the fact that two brides were welcome in the store and more about the fact that wedding dress shopping is hard, no matter who you’re marrying.
When two brides come in together, it means they want a level of coordination, which is hard, because they are ultimately two individuals with their own styles and opinions. So when the consultants are running around and freaking out, it’s because they’re being tasked with something difficult: How do you blend two different styles into something that looks cohesive? Some brides want to see what the other is wearing, and some don’t, which poses a fun challenge. We see this in Jamiee and Lisa’s episode, as well as in a season 16 episode featuring celesbian chef Cat Cora and her then-fiancee Nicole. It’s sweet that they want that element of tradition.
Tradition, of course, is baked into the bridal world. One of the first things the consultants say is: “tell me about the groom.” Over time, that question became “tell me about your fiancee.” It may seem small, and to be quite honest, I don’t even know when the question changed. But it’s a big deal when it comes to inclusivity. It may cause more of a guessing game, especially when you get a queer bride without her partner, but it shows you how far we’ve come.
In 2017, Say Yes to the Dress had another first in the name of inclusivity and progress. Episode four of season 15 introduces audiences to Gigi, Kleinfeld’s first transgender bride. Paired with Shay, the store’s first male consultant (who is a gay Black man), Gigi showed the store (and audiences) that trans women can be just like any other bride. Much like in season three, there is a lot of explaining as to what it means to be a trans woman, geared toward straight, cis viewers. It’s uncomfortably invasive for those of us in the know, but when you think about the people who watch the show, it makes sense. They ask Gigi and her mom when she first knew she was trans and what it’s like to be the parent to a trans woman. One question Randy asks Gigi’s mom is “did you ever think you’d be here?” to which she honestly answers that it’s a journey. Cringey as it is, it’s an important step to show a Latina trans woman who has an affirming parent in her life.
The way they presented Gigi paved the way for Chloe, a trans woman bride in a same-sex couple who we meet in season 20. Chloe’s trans identity is presented as fact, and while they go into her backstory, there are less invasive questions from those around her. Chloe’s story comes from her. (Fun fact: We had the same consultant!) She’s clearly still finding her way, but she’s so excited, and again, it shows viewers that trans brides are just like any other brides.
Tracking these changes on SYTTD goes to show that progress can be found in unexpected ways and places. A few episodes before Chloe’s in season 20, there is an episode featuring a throuple who are all marrying each other. One of the brides is married to a man, and they both fell in love with another woman. The wedding is between all three of them, so not only do you have a two-bride wedding but also a poly relationship. It’s presented as a matter of fact instead of being sensationalized, and while their entourage admits the situation is unconventional, they’re very accepting of the union.
When you juxtapose that against another season 15 episode, it’s fascinating to see how our understanding of polyamory has evolved. In episode nine, we meet Jennifer, a woman who is in a relationship with a man who is married. Due to some personal mental health issues, his wife is no longer able to be intimate and allowed him to be with other women. Consultant Debbie is aghast, which to be fair, same. This is the same network that airs Sister Wives, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise, but to see them being so open when most people may not be accepting was cool and kind of fascinating.
Say Yes to the Dress is definitely more than just a show about wedding dresses. It gives you glimpses into parts of the world that you may not see in your everyday life. It shows people that no matter who you are as a bride, it’s all overwhelming. But when it’s presented in a way that makes queer people less of a spectacle (save it for the dresses), it’s a weird place to find affirmation.
Whenever there’s an episode with a queer bride, I always get excited. Even if I’ve seen it before (which at this point, I have), it still brings a bubble of excitement to my chest. My understanding of my queerness has evolved significantly since the first lesbian brides appeared on Say Yes to the Dress. I don’t even remember seeing some of those early episodes, even though I was watching the show. Back then, my queerness was almost a secret, and now here I am preparing to walk down the aisle for my own same-sex wedding. And I knew that when I walked into Kleinfeld with my future wife, we would be welcomed with open arms.
I’m a Queer Bride on a Budget — And I Went to a Bridal Expo
I never thought I would be a bride. Even before I knew I was gay, when I was a supposedly straight tween growing up in suburbia, when my best friends would talk about their “dream weddings” of the future, I just couldn’t relate. I like weddings — who doesn’t love a big party celebrating love? — I just never thought I’d have one. And now, here I am: a bride! Truly no one is more surprised than I am.
There are lots of ways to have a wedding, to get married, to throw a party, to legally bind yourself to another human. It should go without saying, but just in case it doesn’t: I do not think that marriage is any more or less special than any other means of making a family. It’s just a thing I’m choosing to do with my fiancée. And, lez be real: there is a dearth of media surrounding queer weddings. So I’m choosing to write about planning my queer wedding, just a little bit here and there. Hopefully, you’ll find the content useful if you are also planning a queer wedding (or perhaps dreaming about one).
Like many experiences on this planet, I barely knew anything about Planning A Wedding until I actually started, you know, planning one. So the thing about weddings is that they can be very simple (like, signing paperwork at the courthouse) or they can be very elaborate, but no matter how you do it, people are going to try to get you to spend So Much Money. If you’re throwing a party (traditional or otherwise) to accompany your wedding, you are actually going to want to hire a lot of vendors. But how do you choose them? How do you even know which ones you need? Well, my friends, I guess that’s where a Bridal Expo comes into play! I hadn’t heard of such a thing. And yet, I found myself waiting in line to attend one just a few weeks ago. I’ll get into that in a bit, but first, let me tell you about my wedding plans:
I felt very strongly that I did not want to hire a wedding planner, and I am very, very, very lucky that my best friend is an incredibly creative and competent individual who has planned several weddings already and who volunteered to be my unofficial maid of honor/party planner (we’re not having an official wedding party, so there is no maid of honor — but I have affectionately titled this pal the CEO of my wedding, to give context for the scope of how much work she’s doing). The function will take place on my friends’ property in the woods, and I’m basically doing all the decorations/tablescapes/set up myself and with the help of friends. We’ve hired a friend to do the catering, we splurged on the most incredible queer photographer whose work I have admired for years, and we’re going to make the wedding cake ourselves.
So when my best friend, who is so invested in planning the wedding that her phone and The Algorithm have decided that she is the bride, got an Instagram ad for the Bridal Expo happening in Portland, I was skeptical. Why would we need to go to a giant event with vendors trying to charge us So Much Money for things we already had taken care of? But my pal insisted that we might see some great inspirational stuff there. Also, we could sample all the cakes. Okay, sold.
When we arrived at the Expo, there was a giant line of people waiting to get inside. I’d say we were two of maybe ten people wearing masks, which felt bad. The event was free, but I’d had to give my email address to “sign up.” I later learned that was a terrible ploy, because even though I carefully refrained from giving my email to any vendors that day, it has become clear that the organizers shared everyone’s emails with every vendor. I will be receiving pleas from some man named Keith to see if I want him to cater my wedding from now until I perish. Bummer for me and for Keith.
One hot tip I would give everyone planning a wedding, no matter how tiny, if you’re going to use even one vendor or go to an event like this one: make an email address specifically dedicated to your wedding. I thought that was a silly idea because I didn’t care that much about the wedding (lol, that has changed, but I was once a sweet summer child, you know?) and also didn’t think I’d be interacting with that many people. I was wrong, first of all, and second of all, especially for an event like the Expo, I wish I’d given a specific email address that I could just walk away from once the wedding is over. Instead, it’s me and Keith for life, babyyyy. Okay, but I digress. The Expo!
It was kind of exactly what I thought it would be, which was: fun, funny, overwhelming, weird, exciting, eye-rolly, useful. I know that some people are just so sincerely Into It when it comes to weddings and I don’t want to make anyone feel bad, but some stuff is just unequivocally cringey, and I can’t hide my true feelings. White women appropriating dream catchers to make “bridal headdresses” and telling me “everyone in LA loves them?” That is fucking weird and bad! People offering “wedding coaching” services, which is “like therapy for your wedding” for when you need to wrangle the groomsmen into photos but they’re “so hungover from going to the strip club and you want to kill them?” Y’all, the straights are not okay.
But mostly, the Expo was a lot of vendors doing a very good job at selling their services, and I can appreciate that. The things I was most invested in: floral arrangements (we’re doing our own, but it was fun to see inspiration), photobooths (we’re going to have a DIY one, but I was fascinated by all the ways technology has changed since my Bat Mitzvah), cake samples (this is self-explanatory, yeah?), a bridal boudoir photoshoot situation (wayyyy too expensive, especially when I can just have my friends take nude photos of me in cute lingerie, but I think for folks who don’t have those kinds of relationships or drag closets and do have the budget, this is very cool!), and, weirdly enough, a porta potty company!
The land where I’m having my wedding has three (3) compost toilets, and my friends who own the land politely suggested that I might want to get some porta potties for the weekend of the wedding so no one has to deal with everyone’s extremely literal shit. Well, did you know that not only do they 
have wedding-themed porta potties (yes, they are white) — they also have bathroom trailers?! I rented something called The Farmgirl, and the woman on the phone told me the only problem is sometimes brides complain that the guests talk more about how great the toilets were than they do about the bride and the wedding itself. But you know what? If my guests are raving about the toilets at my wedding instead of complaining about having to sprinkle hay into a bucket they just pooped in while in formal wear, I’ll take it!
The crowd at the Expo was eclectic. It was clear some people had driven a very long distance just to attend, which endeared them to me. There were a lot of kids (which surprised me), a lot of brides, a lot of families, and, honestly, a lot of queer couples. My best friend and I got mistaken for brides together a million times — which makes sense, because we were wearing matching party dresses and kept referring to “our wedding” — and not a single vendor was weird or homophobic. Take this with a grain of salt: I do live in Portland, and the queers do sort of run the show around here — but still, when dealing with The Wedding World, I was pleasantly surprised. I was also pleased that not a single vendor seemed fat-shamey or body negative, another pleasant surprise in The Wedding World.
So would I recommend that you, a person planning a wedding, go to a Bridal Expo? It depends. If you’re hiring a wedding planner and don’t particularly want to be super hands-on, it might be a waste of your time. If you’re doing a DIY scenario and don’t want your email shared with literally hundreds of vendors and also know you won’t be using any of them, it also might be a waste of your time. But if you, like me, are planning your own wedding and still want a few “bridal” experiences,
even just to see what all the fuss is about, and you’re also open to being inspired by what’s there (and potentially unexpectedly finding the porta potty toilet rental of your dreams, lol), and you also feel confident in your ability to say “no, thank you” when people try to sell you things you don’t want or need, then perhaps a Bridal Expo is, indeed, for you! And if you’re planning your own wedding and are actively looking for vendors for specific things or want to compare options, I think a Bridal Expo is definitely for you and strongly recommend it (although I really do think you should make a specific email address for the wedding process — trust me, you’ll thank me later).
If anyone has questions about the Expo, please feel free to ask in the comments. I’ll do my best to jump in and answer them. And if anyone has requests about other Wedding Content for Autostraddle to publish in the future, let us know! When I’m not driving around the Greater Portland Area buying cheap rugs off OfferUp (for our outdoor dance floor, obviously) or scouring Goodwills for mismatched floral plates and silverware, I’d be thrilled to write more about planning this wedding. Though I never thought I’d be a bride, now that I’m going to be, I’m having a pretty nice time planning it all! I think my tween self would be confused but delighted for me.