The Essential Guide to Gay and Lesbian Weddings (63 page)

Trinity and Desiree and twenty-six friends made a thousand gold paper cranes, origami style. (They started early; they figured it took them 150 hours all together.) The cranes were strung up at the ceremony, assuring the couple of good luck always.

If you're not getting married in a church or temple, make an altar anyway. It can be like the ones in many homes in Latin America—covered with colorful cloth, flowers, and a tree-of-life candelabra. Or go for an Eastern look, with crystals, Tibetan chimes, and a bowl of fruit.

At their union ceremony, Joanne and Jodie had a table set up with paper hearts on which people could write messages; the hearts were then hung from a nearby apple tree, to blow about in the afternoon breeze.

In Jewish ceremonies, the couple stand under a chuppah (a canopy made of flowers or richly decorated cloth), which is held up by members of the wedding party and symbolizes the home. Nicholas and Joshua had a chuppah that was made entirely from pieces of fabric given to them by friends and family members. They received cloth ranging from baby blankets to old wedding dresses to pieces of fabric designed especially for the chuppah.

Some people arrange to have doves released at the end of the ceremony. Done properly, it can be a beautiful thing; just be respectful of the animals. Along with the birds, hire a trainer who knows what he's doing. Doves should be used indoors only; for an outdoor wedding, the bird of choice is a homing pigeon.

“It's very dear to me, the issue of gay marriage. Or, as I like to call it: ‘Marriage.' You know, because I had lunch this afternoon, not gay lunch. I parked my car; I didn't gay park it.”

—
LIZ FELDMAN

The circle is the symbol of the sun and the earth and the universe. It is the symbol of wholeness and of perfection and of peace. The ring is a symbol of unity into which your two lives are now joined in an unbroken circle, in which, wherever you go, you will return unto one another.

—from
Handbook for Commitment Ceremonies,
Unitarian Universalist Church of Canton, New York

T
HE RING
is one of humankind's oldest forms of jewelry, worn as far back as the time of the pharaohs in Egypt. Made of straw, leather, bone, stone, or even plaited rushes (which seem to have dipped ever so slightly in popularity in the twenty-first century), rings symbolized eternity—a sign that life, happiness, and love have no beginning and no end. Later, the early Romans chose durable iron to make their wedding rings, representing the strength of the union. As different metals became more accessible, people used silver, copper, or brass, with gold becoming numero uno in wedding-ring materials just as soon as it was readily available to the masses.

Although at the beginning of this millennium you're likely to find a ring encircling or piercing almost every conceivable part of some person's body, the third finger of the left hand remains the primo location for a wedding ring today. Why? Well, sometime after the Middle Ages, folks began to believe that a vein ran from that finger directly to the heart. That's the romantic interpretation, anyway; the more pragmatic one goes like this: the third finger is the least active finger of the hand (no snickering please, we mean that it's hard to lift independently) and is therefore the best place for a ring to be displayed and not get worn out.

There are two things about wedding rings that are or can be highly political: buying them, and wearing them. Let's start with the wearing part.

Maybe you're thinking that you won't want to wear rings after you're married. After all, didn't the Puritans believe that a ring was “a diabolic circle for the devil to dance in”? And didn't a ring on a woman's finger once symbolize that she was the property of her husband? The answer to the first question is yes; to the second, no.

Throughout history, rings have actually indicated a positive side of relationships. Egyptians used rings as a monetary unit, and when the Egyptian husband placed one on his wife's finger, it was a demonstration that he trusted her with his property. And what was attached to the wedding ring of an Anglo-Saxon wife? The keys to all the couple's worldly goods.

Rings are one part of the straight relationship world that many gays adopted from the get-go. It isn't uncommon for lesbian and gay couples who live together in monogamous relationships to wear wedding rings, even if they've never had any kind of a formal ceremony. This shouldn't come as any surprise, because for a long time wearing a wedding ring was seen as one of the few ways for gays to “get married.” Many chose to exchange rings to symbolize their commitment to each other—just the same as any married heterosexual couple would—because there were no legal options.

Joe and I began to wear wedding rings after being together only a few months; I guess that's because we treated our relationship as a marriage almost from the beginning. When we decided to have a wedding on our five-year anniversary, we took the rings off just before the ceremony, put each other's in our
pockets, then placed them on each other's fingers during the vows. And that was the last time they ever came off.

—Randy

Rings are a way for anyone, gay or straight, to make a public statement proclaiming love and devotion. When you wear a band on your ring finger, you're saying, “Hey, I share a life with someone, so if you're interested in me, tough luck. I'm not available.”

Because wearing a wedding ring says to the world that you are in a committed relationship, at some point someone—it may be the hardware store cashier or it may be the mailroom boy at your office—will notice your ring and make a reference to your spouse. It is at that moment that you get to make a choice as to whether to avoid using gender in your response or just throw caution to the wind and let ‘er rip. For example, Victoria told us that she loves it when somebody admires her engagement diamond and wedding ring set and asks about her husband. “I say, ‘No, it's a woman,' and then I sit back and watch them process it.”

You may or may not be up to the challenge of this kind of unabashed honesty, and, in fact, it isn't always necessary to tell your entire story to each person you encounter. (Mark Twain said, “Only tell the truth to people who deserve it.”) But we're here to tell you that wearing a wedding ring will put you in a position of having to decide. Joe told us that his mother is trying to accept his being gay, but asked him not to wear his wedding ring around relatives who don't know. “It's a big conflict between us. I told her she'd never take
her
wedding ring off, and neither will I.”