GayWeddings.com

Hello,
I am a PFLAG Mom from Texas. (I have an amazing gay son who is no where near to committment.) My husband and I have a DJ business that we run on the side. While we have been able to provide music for a number of functions for the LGBT community, we have not been able to do a gay wedding until now. The ceremony will be taking place in May and our friends who will be getting married would like for us to provide the music for dinner and dancing. I am just so tickled that we will be able to do this for them. I guess my only concern is while I am very familar with traditions, I am not sure what events my two friends would like to participate in and what songs to suggest for those events. Can anyone give me some insight into what will be taking place at their reception in regards to first dance, tossing of bouquets or garters...i want to do the best job I can for them and others if given the opprotuninty. What are LGBT couples doing at their reception. Thanks for your input!
Crissy

Hi Crissy!

Welcome aboard! I have forwarded your comment to my straight mom (the founder of our company) as I know she'll get a kick out of reading about you.

We have found that each couple wants to do something different. Some folks like to go 'whole hog' and do the full-range of traditional practices and some folks like to modify the traditions to suit their wishes.

My partner and I decided what we wanted to do and submitted a play list of songs we'd like to hear though the evening, songs we did NOT want to hear, and then we specified which songs we wanted at certain times. For example, finishing strong with 'Last Dance' followed by our favorite love song, 'Ice Cream' (S. McLachlan), which we had asked musicians to play instrumentally at our ceremony.

I find that many couples have a great sense of humor about these things and will often bring in a little irony and some playful ideas. You may have some fun recommendations for the couple, too, since you have so much experience with working weddings. So, my advice: don't be afraid to make recommendations, but be sure to begin by asking the couple if they have anything in particular in mind in terms of music and flow of the reception.

Anyone else have suggestions or creative ideas?

In the discussion about dances on this forum, I was in a quandary over parent dances- that would be an important question for a DJ to clear up with a same-sex couple before the wedding. If I had my way, I would dance to "Unforgettable" by Natalie and Nat King Cole with my father, and "Have I Told You Lately (That I Love You)" by Rod Stewart with my mother (I know, I know, but it goes way back with us). If there's going to be a father-daughter dance, I think "Unforgettable" is perfect because Natalie recorded her version of that song mixed with the voice of her father (now deceased) singing it on his old recordings- it's a beautiful father-daughter bonding song. Also from the "dances" discussion, I love the idea of having mother-daughter dances- that's a moment that may not be all that traditional, but I would never pass up an opportunity to dance with my mom!

Parent dances can require a bit of translation from the bride-father, groom-mother parameters, and finding the right song can be hard!

We both danced with our fathers to My Girl, and then because our mothers had strongly voiced the opinion that they didn't want to get left out, we had a mother-daughter dance as well, to Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong.

We had straight friends who were guests at our wedding do a mother-daughter dance at their wedding, too, to the same song.

The bouquet/garter toss thing can also be handled in many different ways for same-sex couples. We both tossed bouquets, and my brother who complained of reverse sexism had a garter thrown at him in an unofficial, secret way.

Other than that, I think same-sex weddings, like straight weddings, vary hugely in how much DJ involvement the couple wants in running the event, how much talk, what kind of music, etc... I think that varies more by couple than by the gender of the people.

Okay, so here's an interesting questions...we are about to spend a lot of money on our ceremony. And not that we are cheap, but we were thinking of having all of our favorite music that we want at our reception recorded onto CDs and just having continuous music played corresponding to events at our reception (such as soft music for the dinner and dance music for the dance portion.) Most DJs want to be "entertainers" and they seem to want to play their own music, and always want to suggest playing stuff that will "entertain" the guests. My partner and I want music that is fun and meaningful to us. Is that being cheap? Has anyone else done this type of thing? Thanks for any and all advice!

That's exactly what we did. We chose a theme, wrote down as many songs as we could think of that we wanted, and then had my bro-in-law (computer whiz) find all our favorites online, plus enough in the same genre (we did jazz) to make about 6 hours of music, and then mix them onto CDs. He did a great job, splitting the music into soft dinner music, traditional jazz vocals to start the dancing, and then transitioning to more modern dance music toward the end of the night. He also used a computer program to fade the songs in and out, and overlap them slightly, as if a DJ were playing them. It worked out perfectly and now we have an awesome keepsake- I play the CDs all the time. It took him innumerable hours to do all that though. We couldn't afford a band, so we're lucky we've got such a dedicated brother-in-law- the last night before the wedding, he'd finished the CDs and gone to bed, but kept waking himself up every hour afraid that he'd fallen asleep at the computer and the music wouldn't be finished! If you've got enough cash, you might consider what a couple of friends of ours did- they had a live band for the dinner and the first hour or two of dancing, and then hooked up their laptop to the speakers and played a pre-made playlist of their favorite dance songs.