Amanda, Therapist & Regina, Professor
One sentences sum-up of the wedding vibe: A queer vegan craft beer wedding in LA.
Soundtrack for Reading: “I Remember” by Whitley
Other Cool Stuff We Should Know About
This wedding was a long awaited event. We became engaged the summer of 2008, anticipating moving to California in the next year. That November, Prop 8 passed, and although same-sex marriage became legal elsewhere in the interim, we decided to wait until we could legally marry in our chosen home. We were fortunate that when Prop 8 was overturned five years later, so was DOMA, and our marriage would be recognized at both the state and federal levels. We were excited to get married, finally, and were a little less excited about planning a wedding. Having few visible examples of same-sex weddings, and finding that the examples we did have did not fit us, was both freeing and overwhelming.
We planned our wedding with the intention of remaining true to our ethical values by having an all-vegan wedding and using small and local businesses whenever possible. This meant getting to work with our friends too! Our friend owns Golden Road Brewing and the attached venue where we had our ceremony and reception. He was excited to have us as the first same-sex wedding at the venue, and we were excited to get married at our favorite brewery. Our photographer was our friend’s husband, and now our friend outright. Our cake and cupcakes were baked by two women who started their own business in the last five years. Several vendors were queer-identified and vegan. In addition to making choices aligned with our values, another benefit of working with small businesses and friends was getting to really work collaboratively with them both in creating our vision and in working within our budget. We felt they were excited to work with us and found that what we received went above and beyond what we expected.
We thought that we wanted our wedding to predominantly be a party with our best friends and immediate family with the focus on the reception, as we are not religious. However, when we chose our officiants, we chose our mentors—our professional mentor and her wife who have been role models for us in their social activism, and they became ordained online for us. We wrote our own ceremony and vows, and as we went through this process, the ceremony became an increasingly important part of the day. We had initially planned to have a short and sweet ceremony and in the end our ceremony was about an hour! We made social justice and the issue of marriage equality a significant part of our ceremony, and our friends and family told us being able to hear about how these issues directly impacted us, our relationship, and our decision to marry, was very meaningful.
We definitely did not sacrifice the reception for the ceremony! The reception was also the rocking party we wanted it to be, and the dance floor was packed the entire night.
Favorite Thing About the Wedding
Amanda: Wiping away Gina’s tears during the ceremony and vows.
Regina: Discovering the funny ways the details of our vows overlapped despite keeping them secret from each other until the ceremony.
