Rainbow Wedding Expo: Wasn’t this supposed to be gay?

Well, we went to the Rainbow Wedding Expo, which…turned out to be a little bit of a bummer.

We have pretty much everything booked for our wedding, so we weren’t really looking to find vendors, but we were hoping to get to check out some local gay-owned businesses, and maybe even get to chat with some other couples. That was not how it turned out.

There seemed to be very little in the way of gay-owned businesses, and the rooms where everything was set up were very cramped, making it all very overwhelming. It’s one thing when you can browse from a bit of a distance, but another entirely when you have very aggressive sales people quite literally in your face, and there isn’t really anywhere to turn…

Mostly, I was disappointed by the lack of feeling of community. Legal gay marriage is still a very new reality, and I thought that an event like a gay wedding expo would want to focus (at least somewhat!) on a sense of community, and on the joy of being allowed to partake in all the privileges of marriage — but the celebration of being treated as equal citizens was alarmingly absent. For the most part it seemed like the local wedding industry just trying to snag a piece of the “gay dollar.”

Ah, well. We did walk away with a giant bag of information, a couple magazines and tons of business cards to dig through. Hopefully there’s some information in there from businesses that are gay-owned/-friendly that we could get some use out of.

To anyone who might be planning on attending an event like this, I would say, by all means go – but remember that “rainbow” or not, you are walking into one giant sales pitch.