This may, in 2022 sound as if to expect a listful of comments going “well duh’!” But this PRIDE month, as well as working hard to create our first PRIDE Wedding Fair, we’ve also been doing a lot of reflecting off the back of it.
It was truly a special day, and a significant one for us too; we’d never pulled off a Wedding Fair like it before. Yes fairs, but PRIDE was its own beast!
Back onto the main topic at hand, like I said, we have been doing a lot of reflecting and researching into working out why it meant so much, not just to a lot of people on the day, but to all the same-sex couples who got married here over the years.
So if you’ll allow Laurie to get his professor hat and PRIDE flag on, here we go.
When homosexuality was decriminalised in 1967 in England & Wales, even those supporting the bill weren’t exactly jubilant about it; the Huffington Post even claimed that those supporting it still called being gay “’a disability’ and ‘a great weight of shame’” Ouch.
Then add in Section 28, brought in by Margaret Thatcher’s government to prohibit the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities such as schools, sparking outrage across the LGBTQ+ community. It wasn’t scrapped until 2003 in England.
Just one year later, the then Labour government brought in the Civil Partnerships Act, which gave same-sex couples very similar rights to those of married couples, such as property rights.
However, here comes the problem. Even though if you physically compared the rights of married couples and civil partners as identical, the two were no perceived on a human level as the same.
Civil partners were referred to as “not-really married”; banks not understanding why civil partners would want a joint account; forms not including civil partnership status options alongside marital status on forms; and these are just a few discriminatory micro-aggressions that civil partner couples faced.
A culture came about comparing married and civil partners as a “them and us” attitude.
Segregation, is not equality, and so in effect, the Civil Partnership Act ended up as just a sticking plaster for true marital status for LGBTQ+ couples.
That’s why in 2013, when the Marriage Act passed, it was a game-changer. Not only did it allow same-sex couples to marry in civil ceremonies, it allowed civil partners to convert their partnership into a marriage if they so wished, enabled individuals to change their legal gender without having to end their marriage, and more.
Same-sex couples in England, Wales and Scotland would now have the same rights as a mixed-sex married couple, providing more stability for not just themselves, but for any children they have too (which an estimated 20% of same-sex couples do have).
The PRIDE festival is a festival of both celebration and protest. Celebration of being proud of who you are, and of how far LGBTQ+ rights have come. But also of protest, as there is still a long way to go.
It is still, shockingly in 2022, illegal to be gay in 71 countries across the world; the punishment in some, including Iran, Afghanistan and Qatar, being the death penalty.
With the shocking overturn of Roe vs Wade this month in the United States, many people worry that the mainly Conservative Republican Supreme Court will be after LGBTQ+ rights next.
And you don’t even have to look across the Atlantic. Though the Marriage Act was passed in 2013 in the rest of the UK (a country where support for same-sex marriage over the past couple of years has been at an all-time high), it wasn’t until 2019 until it was passed in Northern Ireland. And add in, just this year, the proposed legislation to ban conversion therapy not covering trans people.
So yeah… there’s a lot to unpack and reflect on here.
Same-sex couples still, in 2022, sadly get asked seemingly-harmless micro-aggressions when planning a wedding. The “Ooh, which one of you is getting married”, or the “Which of you is wearing the dress” and more is definitely going to be wearing them down.
At the end of the day, it’s sad that the LGBTQ+ community have had to, and still have to fight in some cases, for something so simple.
A marriage is a commitment between two people who want to spend the rest of their lives together. That’s it. Two people getting together with their family and friends and saying “I want to be with you”.
With that, who really gives a flying fig what gender the couple happen to be?!
And when it is that simple, of course we want to help those couples plan the best day of their lives – and to of course have a massive party at the end. Plus, truth be told, in all honesty, some of our most fun, lively, and joy-filled weddings have been with same-sex couples.
Which is why we wanted to create a safe and open, but fun, bright and colourful space for couples of any sex or gender, whether at the PRIDE fair, or during a wedding: to come and meet alternative suppliers: to network: to get excited about planning their wedding, whether they choose to get married with us or elsewhere: and also whether they decide to get married here or not, to have a great time.
What I truly loved about the PRIDE fair in particular, was that it was a show of solidarity for the LGBTQ+ community, as well as a complete and utter ball. The biggest and most PRIDE-full (hehe) moment of the day for me personally; it was seeing a whole family come through the door with their children with them. Two of them were wearing Progress PRIDE flags like superhero capes. It truly warmed my heart.

Vicky Dubois Wedding Photography

Vicky Dubois Wedding Photography

Vicky Dubois Wedding Photography

Vicky Dubois Wedding Photography
Read our interview with Glen, aka That Celebrant Guy, our collaborator on PRIDE Wedfest
Author: Charlotte Hutchesson, Office Manager at The Wellbeing Farm