My journey towards 200 LGBTIQA+ weddings

I have been an authorised marriage celebrant since 2015. From the very early stages, I knew I wanted to have two separate businesses and two separate websites: one for straight couples – BrontePrice.com.au  – and one for LGBTIQA+ couples – Gaycelebrant.Melbourne . Even though this was some years prior to marriage equality being made legal in Australia, I knew that eventually LGBTIQA+ couples would be able to marry.

And meanwhile, LGBTIQA+ couples still wanted the only thing available to signal that they and their relationships were serious – a commitment ceremony. It was, of course, a consolation prize offered by the Australian government of the time. Queer couples were allowed to celebrate their love in front of their close friends and families, if they had them, but could not sign any of the legal paperwork or say any of the legal words associated with legal marriage ceremonies that were reserved for straight couples.

Before Marriage Equality

It was a time of great anguish.

Straight couples were able to get married, of course, but many of them had LGBTIQA+ siblings or friends or work colleagues to whom marriage was denied. As a celebrant, I recall having to say at every marriage I conducted: ‘Marriage, according to law in Australia, is the union of a man and a woman . . . ‘.

I found those words galling. As a gay man, authorised to marry straight couples, I had to say these words that prevented me marrying the person I love, simply because of who I am. I remember breaking down in tears at one wedding I conducted in the leadup to marriage equality, at the time in the ceremony when I had to say those awful words.

There was a lot of hype.

Straight economic analysts who believed the fable that members of the LGBTIQA+ community were cashed up and would want a ‘big gay wedding’ trotted out economic forecasts of how many pink dollars would be injected into the economy. Those analysts predicted that half of queer couples identified by the ABS would wed in the first year of marriage equality! They’d based their forecasts on data from straight weddings, of course, and those forecasts were wildly off the mark because they were baseless. You can check my responses to the hype, here, when I was interviewed on The Project. 

There was great distrust and a feeling of helplessness.

Many in the LGBTIQA+ community didn’t believe that other Australians who had the right to vote at elections should have the right to also vote on our human rights – i.e. to approve or not approve of our right to get married. Right up to the moment when the results of the postal vote were announced, there was a horrible feeling that the result could be ‘no’.

After Marriage Equality

There was an immediate sense of euphoria as queer people across Australia began to think that they could finally marry the person they love – marriage was no longer based on gender or sexuality. Some couples who’d been together for many years rushed to get married. Some who knew that one of them was at the end of their life were among these. They wanted to make the most of what time they had left.

Many whose partner had died in the years when it was illegal for queer people to get married were left with thoughts of ‘what if?’. And, for those who did get married, there was a lingering sense of having been robbed of what many straight people take for granted – a long, happily married life together. Time – years! – had been wasted, waiting for the right to get married.

I remember the excitement and pure joy in the air when I married a straight couple on the first day marriage equality had been made law. As I said the new, inclusive legal words that married this couple (and all other subsequent couples), there were shouts of approval, tears and wild clapping. In fact everyone gave the words a standing ovation. And there, amongst those guests, was a very happy gay sibling of one of the people getting married. Amazing.

The Effects of COVID

Melbourne was in COVID lockdown for more than 260 days. During these times, it was illegal for celebrants to perform weddings. It was a tough time not only for those who rely on the wedding industry for income but also for couples who had planned their wedding and were forced to postpone them, some having paid for flights from overseas, accommodation and venues etc.

On the flip side, COVID gave people time to think about themselves, their relationships and what marriage meant to them. Many couples realised that they actually wanted a marriage more than a wedding. This fundamental shift in thought ushered in significant change to the wedding industry. Many weddings became smaller, more intimate, and changed to an elopement style with only the couple, the celebrant and two witnesses present. Guest lists were slashed from 100 to 10 or fewer. Couples worked out that they could spend the money they’d saved for a wedding on travel, or on a deposit for a house and so on.

Personally, COVID saw a change in most of my weddings from larger to smaller, more intimate events that were less costly and much less about the princess bride and much more about the couple and what their relationship means to them.

Finding my Tribe

Don’t want to spend a fortune at a wedding venue but still want to have a ‘wedding feel’ and get married in your home? If you’ve got enough space, create a small pergola-style chapel in one of your rooms – it may be your dining area or lounge room, perhaps. Go the extra distance and make an aisle with a white or rainbow-colored path in the middle of the aisle, leading to the chapel. It can be as simple or as complex as you wish.

It took some time for me to work out who was my perfect couple. I now marry lots of LGBTIQA+ couples from outside Australia, especially from countries where there’s no marriage equality. You can check out where they come from, in the pie diagram below.

It takes such bravery and strength for these people to come to Melbourne to get me to marry them. In some cases, they risk their lives to complete the paperwork and sign it in front of a local ‘authorised witness’ as required by Australian marriage law. Often they have been disowned by their blood families, or their friends and families don’t know they are getting married. Some of them will continue to live separately with elderly parents as carers until the parents die, without ever disclosing that they are LGBTIQA+ or are married.

Naturally, I still marry lots of Australian LGBTIQA+ couples, also. Some have attended the marriages of friends or family members or have simply googled ‘Gay Celebrant Melbourne’ to find me.

It also took some time for me to work out what my couples wanted. Most couples I marry shun the trappings of straight weddings. In fact, some tell me they want a marriage, not a wedding. Others tell me they want a gay wedding, not a straight wedding. And so, that’s what they get.

Marketing

When I first became a celebrant, I spent an extraordinary amount of money in the first couple of years on wedding expos, wedding professional awards, google ads and so on.

Unsurprisingly, I got poor return on my investments.

• I was rorted by several SEO companies.
• I got poor results from several wedding expos.
• And I soon learned that wedding industry awards are paid for (people pay to enter them) and mean little. I don’t need awards or the approval of others to know that I am good at what I do.
• As for Google ads, it soon became apparent that they require very deep pockets and, as soon as the ads stop, so does any benefit you may gain from the ads.

I learnt that SEO was the main game I needed to play.

Fortunately, I met a reputable SEO professional in 2017 and I have engaged him ever since. He ensures my websites are well optimised and that my blogs and other resources are research-based and in demand. He has also helped me create a seamless experience for my couples. My contact form now asks for their gender, sexuality and pronouns (all optional), and that information feeds automatically into my Client Relationship Management (CRM) system. That way, I have the relevant information before I meet couples for the first meeting. It helps me be respectful toward them and also allows me to come up with new ideas at that first meeting about their ceremony that I may not have come up with, otherwise.

Being a Safe Space

It’s important for me to ensure my couples saw me as someone who is authentic, someone who is safe for them, no matter what part of the LGBTIQA+ community they are from. I don’t judge. I don’t ask questions that are none of my business. I don’t treat them as freaks. I don’t see myself, my work or my commitment as a fad or a phase. What people see in me is what they get.

I focused on making my website a resource that could be tapped into easily by anyone, no matter where they were from and no matter their personal circumstances. My mission was to help couples who wanted to get married.

I understood that, unlike many straight couples, most LGBTIQA+ couples have not been married before. They have no idea what’s involved or what’s required to get married. That’s why I developed a free wedding guide e-book that explains all of this. It’s also why, at the click of a mouse, couples can translate my entire website into any of 17 languages, to make it more accessible for them.

As someone with an interest in data analytics, I soon found it helpful to use my marriage data to enable my couples to check out the differences between straight and LGBTIQA+ couples who I marry. Blogs such as this provide data-based evidence that the marriage journey for LGBTIQA+ couples is often different than for straight couples.

I’ve also used my experience as one of Australia’s most prolific LGBTIQA+ marriage celebrants to advocate for changes and improvements to various processes and forms used in marriage. I’d like to think that these efforts have helped the regulation of marriage become more inclusive.

Doing Something Different – Because we ARE different

The rituals and traditions associated with weddings are straight – for obvious reasons. They evolved in times when LGBTIQA+ couples were prohibited by law from marrying the one they love. Some of these rituals and traditions are deeply seated – for example, walking down an aisle or exchanging wedding rings.

But the fact is, these rituals and traditions – and how they came about – have little relevance to LGBTIQA+ couples.

That’s why I wrote a free e-book designed to offer LGBTIQA+ couples some alternatives – ie rituals and traditions that are more relevant and pertinent to them. You can check out the e-book here.

But there are other ways we can affirm our gender and sexuality in our journey to getting married:

• We can be careful about wedding suppliers. Ask them how they show they are allies, what they do, rather than what they say, to demonstrate that they are embracing of LGBTIQA+ couples
• We can have toilets that are non-gendered, if we’re a wedding venue
• We can show that we’ve updated our website and paperwork to show that we’re at least trying to be inclusive
• We can offer to include a protest statement about marriage, as part of their ceremony.
• We can offer them some readings written by queer or trans or non-binary poets and writers, rather than the usual offerings written by straight authors. The same with music.

It’s taking steps like this that give LGBTIQA+ couples the confidence to navigate their own wedding journey rather than succumb to the pressure of straight friends or family members to simply have what is essentially a ‘straight wedding’.

And, at the end of the day, surely we as wedding professionals can do better than offer LGBTIQA+ couples events that are the essentially the same as last weekend’s straight wedding?

Conclusion

Perhaps the best way of summing up my journey towards 200 LGBTIQA+ weddings is to quote the words of one of the two people I married 7 years ago in my first LGBTIQA+ wedding:

“Hello Bronte! Yaya, seven years today. You must have passed some magic onto us, you lovely thing. They say you never forget your first (celebrant), so we will never forget you, nor would we want to. Congratulations on 200 weddings of the same sex variety. 400 hearts bound together, that’s quite an achievement. Onward and upward dear Bronte XXX”