RainbowWeddingNetwork
The RainbowWeddingNetwork
Story
RainbowWeddingNetwork began with something personal: Cindy and I were planning our own commitment ceremony, and the wedding world offered few places where our relationship was welcomed without hesitation or explanation. Even the simple wording of a gift registry assumed “Bride & Groom.” Where was the space for us—and for the many other couples whose lives and hopes fell outside that expectation?
In 1999, we began imagining a resource that would help answer that question. RainbowWeddingNetwork.com launched the following year, becoming the nation’s first LGBTQ+ wedding platform. We had little money, no investors, and no blueprint for the industry we were helping to create. We did have a shared conviction that our love, and the love of other LGBTQ+ couples, deserved recognition, respect, and room to celebrate.
The work grew from an online gift registry and directory into a national tour of LGBTQ+ Wedding Expos, a print magazine, and an ongoing network of connections among couples, wedding professionals, families, and allies. Our first expo took place in Minneapolis in 2003. Since then, we have produced more than 365 events in 37 states and the District of Columbia, meeting tens of thousands of people along the way.
Behind those numbers are moments I carry with me: a couple entering a ballroom and realizing they could speak openly about their wedding plans; a vendor discovering how much a welcoming gesture could mean; a conversation in which an old assumption began to loosen. Before marriage equality became a legal reality nationwide, these gatherings offered people a place to envision it together. They could sample the cake, discuss the flowers, hold hands, and find their own future reflected in the ordinary details of a wedding celebration.
Our phrase, Same Love, Same Rights™, expressed what we believed. The daily work gave that belief form.
A piece of our history
Photo by John Fletcher
For me, this has always had a connection to the creative life. As a writer, I’m fascinated by the stories we inherit and the meanings we create together—how they shape our expectations, our relationships, and our sense of what is possible. Through RainbowWeddingNetwork, I have witnessed those processes unfolding beyond the page. I have watched people reconsider a familiar narrative, make room for someone else’s experience, and discover that the world could be larger than they had previously understood.
Cindy and I have lived our own story within that work, building a family and a business through celebration, uncertainty, loss, and perseverance. My memoir, Commitment, gathers those intertwined experiences into a personal account of cultural change, tracing how it takes shape through the everyday encounters that help make it possible: conversations that reach across unfamiliar perspectives, exchanges at household dinner tables, casual business meetings over coffee, and gatherings in wedding ballrooms across America.
RainbowWeddingNetwork remains part of our daily lives. It continues to remind me that imagination can carry a practical responsibility: once we glimpse a possibility, we can choose to help bring it into being.
One couple, one vendor, one changed mind at a time.
Photo by Cynthia Viola