Jove Meyer remembers the exact moment he realized that he was working in a field that was hostile to queer people like him.

“Marriage equality wasn’t legal… and I was doing a wedding for a straight Jewish couple in New York. [While] they were doing their first dance… I was in the corner sobbing, and I was very single. But it dawned on me that I was working in a field where I myself didn’t have access to the same thing that my clients did,” Meyer said. 

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It was an all too familiar feeling: Meyer came from a Christian conservative background, so he had grown up feeling the tension that queerness and religion could create. It led him to shifting his business in order to cater to queer couples, many of whom have difficulty navigating their faith or multicultural background with their identities as queer people.

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“I just got so emotional about it, and I realized that there’s an entire industry out there that didn’t include us, that wasn’t meant for us, but we still love each other, and we still have relationships without it, and there are queer people throughout history who’ve been together for decades.”

Kirsten Palladino, a writer and editor, had a similar realization as Meyer when she began planning her own wedding. “I started researching all things wedding,” Palladino shared. “And then, wow! I was shocked to find that the resources for queer and trans couples planning weddings were minuscule. Perhaps even worse was the challenge of finding vendors who were even willing to work with us, let alone celebrate and affirm us.”

With her wife’s career as a graphic designer and web developer, they decided to create Equally Wed, a wedding publication by and for LGBTQ+ couples, where she has worked as editor-in-chief for fifteen years. Palladino said that Equally Wed attempts to “affirm and celebrate our community with real LGBTQ+ love stories from engagements to weddings to honeymoons and beyond, as well as a marketplace of LGBTQ+ inclusive and affirming wedding vendors and suppliers.”

After Meyers’ realization, he also pivoted from event planning to focus on queer weddings. He had been involved in wedding planning for a couple of years at that point, but hadn’t fully grappled with working in an industry that was hostile to him. Meyers then changed his company motto to “for those who dare to be themselves.”

The issue was especially sensitive for Meyers, who grew up in a very conservative, Christian environment. “I spent most of my life denying who I was and hating who I was and trying to be someone else. And in the early years of my career, I did the same thing professionally,” he said. “And then I realized, actually, ‘I’m beautiful, I’m not broken, I’m not a sin, and weddings don’t have to look and feel like they always have. Those aren’t made for us. We need to make them our own way.’”

Meyer’s own identity as a gay man, and coming from a religious and anti-gay background, makes him well-equipped to help the queer couples that come to him from multi-cultural or interfaith backgrounds. 

“I find with queer couples, they’re already navigating between sort of a sensitivity. We [aqeer people] want everyone to feel comfortable, but we also want to be ourselves. And there’s this holding on to where we come from and who we are, and reconciling the differences,” he said. 

“Religion and culture and history haven’t been kind to queer people, generally speaking, we have not been welcomed or celebrated. Maybe we’ve been tolerated if we’re quiet and we act straight and we don’t love out loud or live out loud,” Meyer added.

This is something that Palladino relates to in her work as well, and incorporating tradition into queer wedding ceremonies is a privilege she noted not all couples experience, only “fortunate” ones who belong to accepting religious families. Some examples she has seen of how queer couples meld queerness, faith, and tradition in wedding ceremonies include henna designs in Indian weddings, which are typically applied to the bride’s hands and feet, but are instead applied to both marriers, regardless of their gender, or the use of a wedding lasso, which is a rosary or a garland draped around a couple typically in a Catholic Mexican or Filipino ceremony. 

“At Equally Wed, we’ve seen everything from Jewish and Christian weddings with a chuppah, a ketubah, and readings from the bible all in one wedding to Jewish and Hindu couples who decided to have two wedding ceremonies, each following the traditions of their religions,” Palladino said. 

There are commonalities in the struggles that queer couples face, the main one Palladino notes is that as queer people, “we don’t know who we can trust.  Today’s wedding vendors and venues are quick to slap a photo of a generic queer couple on their website from a marketing shoot, but they’ll still have a bridal suite or use forms that have spaces for one bride and one groom to fill out.”

She notes that “Despite the advances we’ve made with marriage equality, LGBTQ+ marriages are still not socially acceptable in many families, leading to absolute heartbreak for LGBTQ+ folks in love hoping for their families to attend their weddings or finding the courage to even get married in spite of their families’ wishes.”

In response, both tell their clients to rethink the boundaries of what weddings could be, and to celebrate what sets them apart.

An example of this that Meyer saw was working with a lesbian couple where one partner was Jewish and the other was Muslim. The ceremony incorporated Jewish marriage traditions such as the breaking of a glass (which both brides did, as opposed to the husband, as tradition mandates), and having their friends read seven blessings out loud, which the couple co-wrote.

“They kind of took part of the Jewish faith and culture that they both felt welcomed and celebrated and didn’t exclude others. And it was really beautiful,” Meyer said about the experience. “They didn’t have any parts of the other bride’s religion because she is not religious herself. But those were the Jewish traditions that they decided to put in there.”

Palladino says she tells her queer interfaith or multicultural couples to “see their differences as an opportunity to showcase and celebrate the parts of their heritage or faith that they’re proud of (and leave behind anything that doesn’t feel true for them).” 

Meyer’s mantra to clients is “as long as you have food and drink, everything else is flexible.” Because most queer weddings already come from a place of openness and subverting societal expectations, the interfaith or multicultural couples that Meyer works with are already prepared to blend tradition and their histories in a way that works for them. 

Meyers thinks that when couples interrogate what customs or traditions actually matter in their weddings and what they’ve simply grown up with, they view them as important. He walks couples through “what speaks to you, what makes you feel connected, what is authentically part of your life, or what are we doing for a family member, or for the community, or for the faith? Is that something we want to do, or is it something performative? There’s no right or wrong, but it’s really dissecting all the things that religion tells you to do at a wedding…going through piece by piece, without judgment or without any sort of pressure.”

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