Now that the legal marriage is taken care of, planning on the big fluffy wedding is underway! And one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is how to let people know what we’re up to. We quietly changed our facebook statuses (now it’s official!) and posted the pictures, but since the legal wedding was more of an elopement we didn’t want to make a big stir about it. Once we go ahead with the big wedding, though, we’re going to want to splash the news around.
We’ll send out announcements to anyone who can’t make it (or whom we can’t invite) to the wedding, but in terms of announcing our nuptials to the wider world there’s only really one option in the smallish town I come from: the local paper. Every time I go home to visit I check up on who got arrested, who had a baby, and who got married. So into the paper we go! If they’ll have us…
Luckily, there’s a way to check! If you are considering whether to announce your marriage in your local paper, go read up about it on GLAAD’s website. They make the point that this kind of visibility helps to normalize gay marriage. The more coworkers’ children, former classmates, and old babysitters people see getting married to their same-sex honeys the more they recognize that you, their neighbor, are just like them (or so the theory goes). Plus you get to show off how cute you are! The site has a sidebar over on the right-hand side with instructions, FAQs, and other handy things including a list of hundreds of newspapers and their stance on announcing lgbt unions. I find, to my amusement, that my local paper is willing to run such notices, but that they never have before. Which means that as long as no one in my part of northern Illinois beats me to it (my mother is a serious contender, but seems to have held off for some reason), Lynn and I will get to be the first lesbian wedding ever printed in the paper!
Now I just have to go read the New York Times’ Weddings/Celebrations section to get ideas for what to say in ours…
