Jessie Lewthwaite reflects on attending her first gay wedding and how queers have defied old fears to embrace love on our own terms.
Having moved to New Zealand in 2013 in pursuit of a right Australia was still denying queer citizens, I am very surprised it has taken me until 2025 to attend my first gay wedding. Normally, I cringe when I hear anyone describe a wedding as “gay”, but this was my first one, so I was pretty excited by the gayness. And honestly, the girls could’ve gone gayer with it! I didn’t spot a single rainbow, but they both wore suits, so points for that.
The wedding was beautiful, emotional and freezing cold as it was outside in winter in Queenstown. I was one of the few people who didn’t cry, but only because I think my tear ducts had frozen. The brides kept some wedding traditions we all expected but had done away with others, mostly the boring ones, and that got me thinking: what (apart from the obvious) makes queer weddings queer? And what the hell were people so worried about when they were trying to stop us from doing this?
For context, marriage equality was legalised in New Zealand in 2013, and by global standards, that is considered early adopting. My home country didn’t let the queers get married for another four years, and our problematic fave, the United States, didn’t manage it until 2022. Remember, before we had marriage equality, it was heavily debated whether gay people getting married would erode the fabric of society?! We were too sexually promiscuous for marriage and the poor churches would be forced to marry us against the will of God! If queer people were even half as powerful as conservatives think we are, we would have gotten marriage equality decades earlier.
However, when we were granted the right to marry, none of this nonsense actually happened. I remember distinctly being told, “If we let the gays get ‘marriaged,’ people will be marrying dogs next!” Like all slippery slope theories, it was all just scaremongering and pandering to people determined not to change. Eagle-eyed readers will see this pattern used over and over, and still today. I’m now hearing, “But if we let trans people change their gender on birth certificates, people will be identifying as cats next!” Honestly, we kind of deserve that asteroid hurtling towards Earth… wish it would hurry up already.
But despite all this, we do in fact have the right to marry, so what have we done with that right? Well, first of all, we have thrown out some wedding traditions that are dumb. I’ve always found it really strange that once you are getting married, it is time to rank your friends. (It reminds me of MySpace, back in the day, when you had your ‘Top Eight’.) The whole “I like you third-most of all my friends, so you get to stand here on the day” thing is a bit weird. Get rid of it. Fathers walking daughters down the aisle to give them away like a second-hand armchair? Absolutely not. And that stupid practice of smashing cake into each other’s faces. The straights can keep that one.
I suspect the real fear was never about the sanctity of marriage, but about how ordinary—and beautiful—queer weddings can be. A space filled with love, acceptance, and celebration. No condemnation. No fire-and-brimstone speeches. Just joy. Because in my (admittedly limited) experience, queer weddings are a lot like straight ones—except, like everything else, we are doing it our way and the guests tend to be better dressed.
