Hey APW,
Long before I started working for APW, I was an avid, daily, wake-up-in-the-morning-and-check-my-phone-reader. APW at the time was one of maybe two or three places online that mixed feminism with weddings, and Meg was one of the most vocal supporters of marginalized groups in the wedding space. (Also, truth telling: that bar was—and remains—sadly very low.)
My favorite time of year back then was always APW’s Pride Week. While APW has always published Queer weddings alongside straight, cisgender weddings (and you can find a link to all of them right in our menu), Pride Week was the one week of the year that was dedicated exclusively to Queer voices. I was only twenty-two when I started reading APW (which, I can’t) and finding a space online that unabashedly celebrated Queer love so explicitly felt like a true and genuine revolution. Especially for a young woman like me, who was navigating a newly discovered bisexual identity while trying to wrap her head around getting married really young to a cis-dude and all the implications that come along with it.
Looking back, I realize that Pride Week was also a beautiful fuck you to a wedding industry that insisted on othering Queer voices, wouldn’t put Queer couples on the cover of magazines, and made sure Queer love was always separate, never equal.
But as time went on, the cultural narrative around same-sex marriage shifted. And in 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality, making same-sex marriage a federally protected right. At that point, I was part of the APW team. So, since Queer voices had always been part of the central APW identity, we thought (hopefully) maybe we didn’t need Pride Week anymore. Maybe the more revolutionary act would be to phase it out, and let Queer voices simply exist on our pages among all the other voices we publish, same as always.
When I look around at the wedding industry now, I see so much change. Mainstream online wedding publications can’t get enough of feminism, and they love a #twobride wedding. But there is still such a long way to go before we have full representation of all the identities that make up the Queer community. Trans and non-binary couples seldom see the light of day outside of a few expressly progressive publications, and Queer love is still mostly celebrated as long as it’s thin and white and able bodied and a lot of things that are just a little less Queer.
So we’re bringing Pride Week back. It’s worth noting that even though this week is dedicated to Queer voices, this week is never going be inclusive of all perspectives. In fact, our editorial team has been working on a bunch of non-binary wedding stories, and as luck would have it, none of them were ready in time for Pride week. Which frankly, is how it should be. Queer wedding stories should be something that all wedding publications are working on all the time, that get published when they’re good and ready. So while there’s no perfect way for us to do Pride Week, we still wanted to set aside this time to center and celebrate Queer voices. It’s just as important as it was almost a decade ago–if not more so.
So welcome back to Pride Week. Thanks for being here with us, and for trusting us with your stories.
Cheers,
Maddie
