Let Queer AF Engagement Party Help with the Gay Wedding of Your Dreams
Love is in the air this month, and we are especially excited to celebrate queer love and joy with you all! OFM got a chance to connect with the folks behind this event to learn more about who they are, what it is like for folks in the LGBTQ+ community who are in the wedding planning process, and the upcoming Queer AF Engagement Party at the Town Hall Collaborative in April.
We got the opportunity to sit down with Jennie Crate, Jennifer Benson, and Tirzah Stein, three incredible business owners in the wedding industry who wanted to bring more resources and accessibility to the LGBTQ+ community during the wedding planning process, and create a sense of community and enjoyment to what normally can be a really stressful time for folks.
Can you each tell me a little bit about your individual businesses and services and the inspiration behind them?
Jennie Crate with Jennie Crate Photography
I’m a wedding photographer primarily, and I’ve been in business for 11 years now, since 2012. About five or six years ago, I started doing photography full time, and about that time, I started to really try to focus a little bit more on serving the queer community. It’s something I’ve always been really passionate about, providing a really inclusive, safe, celebratory experience for queer couples who are getting married. But I think when I started it, it wasn’t as widespread. It was a lot harder to feel like you could run a business that you know would support you financially if you were really specific to your clients. And I think that has changed for the better in the last few years.
I started to also realize that I really liked working with the queer community and serving those clients, so I kind of just rewrote my copy and decided to really lean into serving the community that I am also a part of. And that’s been really awesome through the transition to just kind of grow my base clientele to be focused on queer couples.
I obviously still will photograph any wedding that comes across that feels like a good fit, but I really love that I can bring value to queer couples getting married and encouraging them and celebrating them in a way that feels really good on their side too. It’s awesome to connect with couples who also feel like working with other queer vendors just makes their own experience a lot better for their wedding planning. So that’s kind of like the basis of my photography business. And then, four years ago, I took over a resource called “LGBTQ I Do,” which is a vendor resource for couples getting married, but it highlights vendors who are queer, inclusive, and openly accepting and celebratory of being part of the community.
Jennifer Benson with Hitched AF Wedding Planning
I am a wedding planner, and I really just started my business a little less than two years ago. But I had worked with some wedding planners for a couple of years prior to that. I kind of launched into wedding planning after planning my own wedding, which is a common story for wedding planners. Both my husband and I had been married before and just the big traditional wedding didn’t feel like a fit for us. I continually kind of felt pushed into this traditional planning box, and so I decided that planning was something I wanted to do. I knew that I wanted to work with couples who, you know, the traditional wedding didn’t speak to them either and wanted to make sure that they did not feel pushed into that box, kind of take away any expectations and give permission to plan your wedding the way that you want it to be. So I’m marketing myself very much as a non-traditional or unconventional wedding planner, and find that that often attracts members of the queer community, which I love.
Well, so I connected with Tirzah and Jennie shortly after. And, you know, I think we’ve just all kind of shared an interest in taking the things in the wedding industry that don’t serve everyone or that we don’t love about the wedding industry and trying to figure out a way to make that better. I think eventually, as we kind of thought of ways that we could better serve, you know, non traditional couples, people in the queer community, people who maybe have trouble navigating the wedding wedding industry, historically we came up with a couple of projects, including the Queer AF Engagement Party.
Tirzah Stein with Nearly Wed Coaching
I started my business in 2021, and I am a wedding coach, a premarital coach, and an officiant. Wedding coaching is something that I felt like I wish I had when I was getting married in 2019. I had my wedding planner with all the logistics and all of that, which was amazing, but just navigating everything else that a lot of newlyweds are having to navigate when they’re planning their weddings, people don’t talk about much. The stress, the overwhelm, the expectations of other people, the pressure, we feel the societal idea of what a wedding should look like.
Sometimes conflict can arise with you and your partner; sometimes you’re maybe not really feeling good about the planning process, and you are just going through the motions and checking things off the list. Coaching really helps folks connect to each other and really process through things like what’s the wedding we want to have, how to be intentional, how to be authentic to ourselves, and not just kind of do things to do things. But explore the options. Think outside the box, and then support other, navigating challenges. A lot of the time there is family dynamics, it could be a parent who’s maybe kind of trying to steamroll things or has really strong opinions, or there’s financial strings attached, how they’re navigating, setting boundaries, just all of the different things that might be coming up.
Specifically supporting queer couples that are navigating in the wedding industry is extremely important to me because they can experience harm, whether it’s with other vendors or just their experience overall dealing with family, perhaps, who doesn’t support them. So different kinds of things might be coming up for them specifically that heterosexual couples might not be navigating. Like if a parent decides they don’t want to come to the wedding. How are they processing that kind of stuff? Those kinds of topics, and then premarital coaching I added on as well. Because I felt like there was a need to support folks who don’t fit within a religious institution or space. Because commonly, there’s premarital counseling that’s offered through a church.
My background is as a social worker. I was a social worker for 10 years. And so I wanted to kind of go from the trauma work I was doing in domestic violence into, like, the happiest part of people’s lives. So it’s been really rewarding and really beautiful and special for me to connect with folks around just how they can strengthen their relationship. It’s really focused on this time before they enter into marriage together and what they want to just, you know, fine tune in their communication and their conflict resolution and their differences and their family dynamics, whatever might be coming up. Eventually I decided at some point throughout my business evolving that I also wanted to officiate. So I started doing that too. I officiate weddings, and they all kind of connect to each other. So sometimes I work with people who do some wedding coaching and some premarital coaching and have me as an officiant as well.
Tirzah: Three years ago, Jennie and I met through “LGBTQ I Do” and got to know each other that way. Then we started chatting more, and I really felt the need to also bring inclusivity consulting into the wedding industry just because when I was going through the process myself of planning my wedding, I had some negative experiences as well as positive ones. I became a vendor myself. I was like, okay, now I’m in a position where I can really maybe make a change in this way as well. So I started doing inclusivity consulting with other wedding vendors just to help support them and how they can really show up more for the queer community who’s navigating the wedding industry and doing, like a review of their website and social media and just supporting them through different action steps they can take to be actively more inclusive from like an authentic place for them and providing education to teams.
I partnered up with “LGBTQ+ I do” so that any folks that are coming through the platform that want to be listed as an allied vendor, but maybe aren’t really showing that in their work, are being suggested to have the inclusivity consulting piece, and so we are offering a free year listing on “LGBTQ+ I do” once they do inclusivity consulting with me.
There was a day we were at an event with mostly queer vendors. We were having the best time ever. It just felt so fun, so comfortable, such a lovely time. I met a couple, one of them was a wedding photographer, and we decided to do something together. That’s kind of when the idea was like, let’s get queer vendors together. Let’s create space for queer vendors. Because there are a lot of queer vendors in the wedding industry, but again, like, we are in a heteronormative industry, and so sometimes it feels like we’re not really having the space we need or the safety to come together. So that’s when we decided to start doing more queer vendor meetups, which have been pretty successful so far.
Tell me more about the “Queer AF Engagement Party.” Why was reaching the community with something like this important?
Jennie: So when we first started brainstorming the event, we decided to reach out and connect with Town Hall Collaborative, who is also a queer-owned business and they are trying to get more connected to the wedding industry. In the process of talking to them and about what they do and kind of what we all hope for the industry, we landed on a couple of different projects that we thought would be really cool. One of which was this idea of a wedding showcase. Currently, there are a handful of wedding showcases where vendors will come together. They’ll be in a space, and then couples who are engaged can come and walk around and talk to vendors and maybe try to find some of the vendors for their own wedding. And there’s been a couple, I think, geared towards queer couples, but they are usually not local. So we felt like this was in need in the Denver wedding communities to create a showcase that really highlights queer vendors and also is really there for queer couples and their friends and their family and their communities to to come and have that space, that shared sense of community.
We’re all looking to have an exceptional wedding experience, and we want to have an experience that feels inclusive and right and exciting without having to walk around and out yourself to every vendor that you might meet or wonder are they going to be accepting.
Something we really thought about was how to make this event feel a little different, a little more celebratory then other wedding expos we all have been to. So we came up with this idea of throwing an engagement party for couples. The majority of engagements actually happen throughout this time of year, Thanksgiving through Valentine’s Day, and we wanted to create an event where we are inviting them to celebrate that engagement. We want people to kick off their wedding planning journey with us with more of a party atmosphere than a vendor tabling event or a more traditional showcase kind of thing.
What can we expect from the first expo, and what are future goals?
Jennifer: So to play off the name Hitched AF and Queer AF, you can tell with that branding that we play in kind of unconventional celebrations of love. But one of the services that we provide is what we call pop-up weddings. Chapels, kind of inspired by Las Vegas wedding chapels, are kind of an alternative to eloping in the mountains or eloping at city hall. It is something that is affordable and still special, fun, and a meaningful wedding celebration. So we set up venues across Denver, basically like a Vegas chapel but a really beautiful classy wedding setup. And then couples can pay a set fee all inclusive, to have a time slot in the chapel. It includes their flowers, food and drinks, music, and officiating by Tirzah. As part of our “Queer AF Engagement Party,” we are setting up a mock pop-up chapel so people can see what that’s like if that is an alternative that they may like.
Tirzah: In addition to the pop-up chapel, we will have space for other vendors, teams of vendors to create an immersive wedding experience where they can be super creative and put together a little mini wedding set-up. We were focused on how we create this more immersive experience instead of just having people go table to table. Misfits Entertainment will be there as well as some fabulous drag performers, and we have some cool merch and stickers that are genderfluid and inclusive to hopefully encourage folks to become excited about the planning process instead of overwhelmed.
The Queer AF Engagement Party is from 12:00 to 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, April 21 at the Town Hall Collaborative. Tickets are $10 and all of the proceeds from this event will go towards One Colorado, a local LGBTQ+ nonprofit organization.
