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Popular Culture Review
Having a formal ceremony served as a way to strengthen these couples’
relationships and to attain the public recognition that they felt gave thenrelationship elevated status as a “married” couple. In that the couples featured in
this program all wanted a wedding/commitment ceremony attests to the status
society gives to heterosexual marriages. By agreeing to appear in the program,
the couples obviously share the same view, and their wedding ceremonies
clearly strengthened their relationships, as the following comments illustrate:
Eve (married to Dale): “I think that if we hadn’t had a
ceremony and we hadn’t gone through the whole process, you
know, then there wouldn’t have been any milestone or major
moment to signify the change in our relationship.”
Sonja (married to Lupe): “ . . . it w the whole hoopla. It is, you
know, getting everything together and just the planning
everything and have the whole ceremony. Definitely a
different feeling. I feel so differently about Lupe now.”
Dan (married to Gregg): “I think the ceremony has created a
shift in our relationship and I feel like it’s given people that
know us to see how special our union is.”
Harley (married to Scott): “It’s not ‘I’ or ‘me’ anymore. It’s
an ‘us.’”
Conclusion
“As it is, ‘Gay Weddings’ is a sweet, enjoyable program, but it could
have made more of a statement,” writes Alter (2002) in his critique of the show.
Alter asserts that rather than approaching the subject as reality TV, the
producers could have used a traditional documentary format to give viewers a
history behind gay weddings and background on current marriage laws in the
U.S. Padget (2002), in a review of the program, criticized the series for its
production values (which Padget claimed mimicked MTV’s The Real World)
and focus on materialistic concerns of wedding planning that reflect the
“money-sucking straight marriage-industrial complex” wedding norm.
Similarly, my reading of the major themes present in Gay Weddings
demonstrates the importance the couples placed on familiar, traditional wedding
elements and details in their relationships that counter the hegemony of
heterosexuality. However, unlike the more “mainstream” version of wedding
reality shows, this particular program provides more insight into the dynamics of
romantic relationships by including the second thoughts, arguments, and doubts
absent from those programs that purport to give viewers a realistic view of love
and romance as culminated in the wedding ceremony.