Scott & Kevin: Blending Queer Community & Tradition

On a cold, blustery, November day in 2021, two people, incredibly important to me, were married. I’ve known Scott since I was 13— I sat next to him on my first day of Theater Camp. I met Kevin in 2013 — early in their relationship. Scott and I grew up together. We took public transportation for over an hour and a half every single day to and from our homes in Northeast Philadelphia to our high school in Northwest Philadelphia. Scott and Kevin are family.

And what was even more exciting was that this wedding was in November of 2021, meaning, we had spent all of our Covid time scheming, and planning and talking about when we would be together for Scott and Kevin’s wedding. Even several years later as I look back on this day, it still stands as one of the best days of life.

This wedding was really the wedding that started it all—it was the first wedding I officiated and was the privilege of a life time to represent their love and lives. While in draft mode, I realized that the camp of “not weird or pandering gay wedding materials” was pretty thin. As I researched for structures and wording that I thought captured the two of them, I came up empty.

This was first and foremost a wedding. They were in love. I knew that I wanted the headline to be — yes, they are gay. But more importantly they found each other and are now more uniquely themselves because they found each other. For Scott’s large Irish Catholic family and Kevin’s Puetro Rican one, I wanted to communicate the simplicity in their love— it actually isn’t this brave big thing, nor it is a scary one.

So instead of using pre-existing internet scripts, I enlisted the help of our friends. I conducted several interviews in order to gain more perspective on the early stages of their relationship and to ensure there wasn’t anything I was missing about the two of them. As I spoke to our extended friends, themes clearly began to emerge. We all described Scott as a fun loving, loyal friend and Kevin, a hardworking, fabulous listener. We all echoed similar sentiments that together, both of them had passed along their strengths to the other.

So, I set to work building a ceremony that I knew would not only represent them but would represent how I knew their community, including myself, saw them. I wanted it to be funny and tease them but also be honest about the growth we had all seen. My invocation (the beginning introductory part of the ceremony) was long and storied and quoted RuPaul and Steven Sondheim’s Into the Woods. But I was focused on this idea that we are better people when we have our community. I wrote:

And as cosmic and effortless as this relationship seems, when I think about the time that I have known Kevin and Scott as Kevin and Scott, I only think about growth. Every single day that we are here on this earth, is a day where we grow. Throughout our lives we outgrow trivial things like shoes and shirts, homes or cars. But at the same time we also outgrow things that take much more work to outgrow. Feelings, convictions, ideas, parts of ourselves that we don’t like, people that don’t align with our values…

…And together, they have passions that they have encouraged each other to pursue, relationships that they prioritize, and values that align. Together they are serious planners of their future and fun-loving goofballs in their present. The growth we have witnessed between them has revealed the most beautiful and vulnerable parts of themselves born only from compromise, from sacrifices, from hard truths and harder work. They have encouraged each other to flourish, keeping what is important and shedding what is not.

It makes me so proud to stand here before two men that are so ready to live the rest of their lives together, because they know that they have become the best versions of themselves, with the help of one another.

And then of course, we included the other parts of a ceremony— a ring exchange, they exchanged vows, and we did a declaration of intent and they said “I Do”. They also chose to do a hand-fasting ceremony while a choir of friends sang I Love You/What a Wonderful World arranged by Craig Hella Johnson. It was beautiful. And it represented exactly who they were.

I think often about this dichotomy when it comes to queer weddings. We want it to be unique, we want our love stories to feel different because they are different— they have often overcome more than straight ones. But, at the same time we want it to be authentic and we want our family to understand it and we want to have weddings that we’ve dreamed about since we were little and watched Bride Wars on repeat. We want it to be different but not too different because at the end of the day, we did the work for marriage equality.

Every time I write a ceremony or I think about the planning stages of a wedding, I am brought back to this duality. This idea that we are both special and normal. This idea that we have traditional families and queer found ones. This idea that we want the wedding of our dreams but need to signal to the world that it’s going to look a little different.

My community was able to do it by drawing a clear line for the guests of Scott and Kevin’s wedding how right this marriage was. We were able to say— this is different but not so different that you don’t recognize it. Scott and Kevin’s wedding taught me that if you are ever unsure how to make the celebrations of your life feel like accurate celebrations of your lives— enlist the help of your friends and you might start to see the the patterns and stories that matter begin to emerge. It’s important to to tell those stories. They are normal and different and common and beautiful.