Queering up the Wedding Industrial Complex at Toronto’s gay wedding show
There were tulle-wrapped columns, shiny bridal gowns on headless dress forms, and an abundance of tiny, intricately iced cakes. Couples dawdled, hand-in-hand, pausing to peer at hand-printed invitations or admire an eruption of baby’s breath and peach roses. Amidst it all, Naomi Nadea shimmied down the fashion show runway sporting a feathered headdress, a bejeweled bra, and an extremely small white thong.
This being Toronto’s first large-scale gay wedding show (GWS), the audience politely applauded the statuesque St. Lucian drag queen’s gyrations, then turned its attention to models sporting the latest in Goth and Trans wedding fashions.
Same-sex marriage was legalized in Ontario in 2003. Throughout the early aughts, LGBT couples streamed to Toronto City Hall and supportive religious parishes, getting hitched under the benevolent gaze of the state and/or God. A few gay-focused wedding shows popped up in 2004, but newly engaged same-sex couples largely escaped the predatory gaze of the Wedding Industrial Complex. Now, almost a decade after legalization, gay marriages are a subset of the wider wedding universe—like Italian or Jewish nuptials, but more, ahem, fabulous—and it’s high time they got their own damn wedding show.
A word about wedding shows: Prior to my marriage (full disclosure: to a man) earlier this year, I wandered through several wedding shows. In hetero-ville, these are the domain of wild-eyed brides-to-be and their enabling (or long-suffering) mothers and maids of honour. Hotel ballrooms overflow with pastel booths offering prize draws—who doesn’t want a Caribbean honeymoon, let alone a free one?—and the tinkle of gently plucked harp strings. Periodically, a lone glassy-eyed groom is spotted wandering aimlessly, his arms weighed down with swag bags, his hands full of DJ flyers.
Attending a wedding show is like shopping at Costco: plenty of options, lots of tasty samples, bulk buying, with the tantalizing promise of customization. Of course, you can match your zebra-print cake to the groomsmen’s waistcoats. An ice-sculpted champagne fountain? Obviously.
Ultimately, the GWS offered a similar experience with these made-to-order and counter-cultural factors ratcheted up a few notches. There was the aforementioned drag queen, as well as a scantily clad “acrobat” performing gravity-defying feats on a golden pole. A tiny, unitard-clad contortionist spun hula hoops while putting herself into joint-defying pretzels. Scrumptious Brazilian bongo players provoked admiring glances from well-coiffed gentlemen. TV host Deb Pearce, a self-identified butch lesbian who is eight months pregnant, livened up the crowd congratulating engaged and newly married couples between short bursts of wedding fashion modeled by pretty and punky queer young folk. (Sample of Pearce’s banter: “Eight years together? That’s like, 74 in straight years!”)
Pearce, who married last year without the benefit of a GWS, succinctly summed up why one is necessary. “It is essential for gay- and queer-identified couples to go to an event where vendors don’t assume they are marrying a partner of a different gender. We want our gay dollars to go toward merchants that are supportive and accepting of our community.”
The vendors, many of whom I recognized from my forays into straight-girl wedding shows, were supportive of the gay community, but they were after business, not warm fuzzies. Soft-focus portraits of brides and grooms were prevalent, and the wedding party fashions—with the the exception of the pleather-corseted Goths—were insipid. (Can we please start a gay-straight alliance to abolish the convertible dress?)
But, as Pearce pointed out, love is love. And weddings, gay, straight, trans, or otherwise, are weddings. Sometimes we just want matching white tuxedos and twinkle lights, a funk band belting out “At Last,” and bongo players.
Preferably in very short shorts.
