In January, Julie Schanke Lyford called the executive director of Pride Twin Cities and asked whether she could operate the annual commitment ceremony “booth” at this year’s LGBT celebration.
Her event-planning company, Fabulous Functions, has a long history of planning same-sex ceremonies and weddings, legal and not, and Lyford was well known to Pride’s Dot Belstler. The two began planning the June 29-30 event.
About a month later, Lyford called back. “You know what?” Belstler recalls her saying, “Let’s not have commitment ceremonies. Let’s have a wedding showcase.”
Retelling the story, Belstler draws the same big breath she likely drew during the call. Minnesota had just defeated a proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, but legal gay weddings still seemed iffy.
“I said, ‘Are you kidding?’” Belstler laughs. “But you’ve talked to Julie” — who is very persuasive.
Trust an event planner to have a creative contingency plan in her back pocket. If marriage equality became law in Minnesota, vendors and couples would be clamoring to find one another, Lyford said. If it didn’t, they’d call it a “save the date” showcase and look to the U.S. Supreme Court and to the 2014 legislative session.
“We decided not to have commitment ceremonies until we can hold weddings,” Belstler says. They hoped it was the right call.
Inquiries pouring in
Fast forward four months and the two are scrambling to keep up with inquiries from couples testing the water and from wedding and event vendors who were taken by surprise and want help becoming LGBT-friendly.
The first same-sex weddings will take place almost exactly a month after Pride. And while there will, of course, be couples who line up to tie the knot at 12:01 Aug. 1, the vast majority of the couples Lyford has heard from over the last three weeks want more conventional weddings.
Taking place in the middle of the Pride festival on the north shore of the Loring Park pond, commitment ceremonies have been part of the event since 2007. For several years, there was one big group ceremony at which a minister blessed all of the couples in attendance.
A few years later, organizers shifted to individual ceremonies booked in advance. Demand was so high during the last two years the clergy in attendance performed a ceremony every half hour throughout both of the celebration’s weekend days.
Lyford has long been a regular fixture in the Pride commitment space. During the 10 years she has been been a full-time event planner, LGBT weddings and ceremonies have come to make up half her business.
The daughter of a gay college professor from Pella, Iowa, she fell into event planning as a natural extension of her background in theater. “Basically, I just boss people around for a living,” she quips.
Iowa beckoned
When the Iowa Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in April 2009, Lyford started getting requests to take her business on the road. There weren’t a lot of LGBT-friendly event planners there, and there were a lot of couples who were closeted or not very public about their relationships.
And there were a lot of people prepared to travel to Iowa to take advantage of the law. Of the nearly 20,000 weddings performed in Iowa from April 2009 and March 2010, 10 percent involved same-sex couples.
Only 815 of them were of Iowa residents. Another 468 came from Illinois, Nebraska and Missouri.
Others came from far further. Fabulous Functions was tapped to plan a wedding for a couple from Singapore.
“Reports are same-sex marriage added $14 million in wedding business in one year in Iowa,” Lyford says. “I think it was a lot more. Seventy-five percent of the weddings I did are not in that number. Lots of mine were in people’s backyards or restaurants.”
She predicts the Twin Cities will become a popular wedding destination. It’s much more affordable than, say, New York, and more cosmopolitan than Iowa.
An economic boost
Economists have tracked the size of the market since Massachusetts legalized same sex-marriage in 2004. During the first four years of marriage equality there, the Williams Institute, an LGBT think tank at the University of California Los Angeles Law School, estimated the economic boost to be $111 million.
Seemingly within moments of the state Senate’s deciding vote in May to recognize same-sex marriage in Minnesota, the St. Paul Convention and Visitors Bureau revised the website promoting its “I Do St. Paul” wedding planning service.
The organization also reallocated some ad dollars to spend with LGBT publications, according to Adam Johnson, vice president of marketing. It added a marriage equality page and images of same-sex couples.
“Weddings are good business in the tourist industry,” Johnson says. “They come with extra guests.”
Interested, but not prepared
Never mind the size of the new market; Lyford says she’s convinced the larger wedding-services community has been taken by surprise. Her phone is ringing off the hook with calls from Minnesota vendors who want help figuring out how to broaden their market appeal.
“Most are interested but not prepared,” she says. “Look at the imagery on their websites, it’s all boy-girl. And the lingo!
“ 'Minnesota Bride'— what gay man is going to look at that?”
Screening vendors is something Lyford has always done for her clients. She asks about things that haven’t occurred to businesses new to serving the LGBT community. Does the florist’s staff automatically assume the two women they are greeting are a bride and her maid of honor and begin asking questions about the groom?
“Ninety-nine percent of the time they don’t mean to be offensive,” she says.
Vendor conversations
With the Pride showcase announced, Belstler has been having similar conversations with vendors hoping to exhibit. Last year, she asked businesses and groups that applied for booths whether they were members of the coalition Minnesotans United for All Families.
This year, Belstler has had similar conversations with businesses that want to participate in the showcase. Has the vendor created a second, LGBT-friendly website, suggesting they perceive it as a different kind of marriage, or have they modified their existing site to suggest all are welcome?
So will Pride weddings replace Pride commitment ceremonies? Belstler hopes Lyford will do a little recon during this year’s showcase.
As a venue, Pride may still hold a unique appeal for some.
“Sometimes people have met at Pride,” says Belstler. “The first Pride you go to is so emotional. There’s so much attached to it.”