Rebecca and I met five years ago, phonebanking with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) to protect marriage equality in Massachusetts (we won, by the way!). Our love story has been long and winding – and at some point this year, we realized we wanted to be married to eachother. By late spring of this year, Rebecca pretty much knew a proposal was on the way.

Rebecca’s family is very tight knit, and they take marriage pretty seriously. Taking that under consideration, we decided I should ask for her parents’ blessing before proposing. This proved to be even more difficult than the proposal itself. Sitting in a room alone with her parents, shaking like a leaf, saying the words, “I’d like to ask for your blessing in marrying your daughter” was tough. But I survived, and her mom and dad both hugged me and gave us their support.

With that, it was onto the proposal. The trick was to completely surprise Rebecca, so I set up an elaborate ruse about a Sunday night work dinner that I needed her to attend. The dinner would take place at the house of my organization’s president (which she has never seen), but the actual house belonged to a friend of a friend in an upscale DC neighborhood. Rebecca loathes being dragged to my work events, so I knew she’d be focused on the annoyance of this dinner and not on what was actually taking place.

Friends helped me every step of the way. My friend Kevin cooked an amazing dinner that would be waiting for us in the oven. Another friend lit luminaries all over the backyard. And Kevin and our friend Jax coordinated the surprise party crew.

When Rebecca and I arrived at the house, I pretended like I had just remembered it was a backyard dinner and we walked around to the back. Seeing no one, I asked Rebecca if we were at the wrong house, then told her to wait while I looked inside the screened-in patio for my coworkers. We planned it so that when you opened the patio door, music could be heard inside. I called for her to come over and I knelt down on one knee right inside the doorway. It’s there that I proposed, and she said “yesss!” and began crying, and then asked where my coworkers were. I explained the whole ruse – except the surprise party. For the next hour we enjoyed a nice romantic dinner on the screened-in porch.

At 8pm, the doorbell rang. Rebecca went to the door thinking it was a neighbor. Instead, she found a huge group of friends & family outside with bottles of champagne and homemade desserts. Now, I expected everyone to yell “surprise!” and then to come inside for a party. What I didn’t know is that our friends had planned to sing a song – “Wouldn’t it be Nice?” by the Beach Boys – and had been rehearsing it two blocks down the street so we wouldn’t hear it inside. The song brought Rebecca and I both to tears. It was such a great way to cap off the moment.

After that, we had an awesome party inside. We drank champagne, danced and retold the proposal story until 1am in the morning. It was a wonderful evening that couldn’t have been possible without the support and participation of our amazing community here in DC. Marriage, I think, is as much about the community surrounding a couple as it is about the romance and commitment of the couple itself. In that sense, we are truly blessed.

Wouldn’t It Be Nice – Jess and Rebecca’s engagement surprise!! from Jaime Lopez on Vimeo.

If you’re new to So You’re EnGAYged, we are a LGBT wedding blog and vendor resource.

Things you should check out:

• Meet all of our LGBT bloggers who are currently planning their own weddings and blogging about it every week.
• We have dozens of real wedding and engagement blog posts.
• We have hundreds of pro-gay vendors who go through an extensive screening process to make sure they have things like gender neutral language, 3rd party reviews and are actively involved in promoting equality.

I’d never done a text based invite before and wanted to try it out with these, I wanted them to be reminiscent of the birthday party invites you would get when you were a little kid, very celebratory and super exciting to receive. This is why I chose to have them fold up into 3 sections, that way, ‘Hooray!’ will be the first thing guests see when opening them.

As well as the illustrations, I also drew all the text by hand. I think this gives the invites a real crafty/folksy feel and because of this, I thought that screen printing would work really well, it gives each card a very special, unique quality that you don’t get with digital printing.

They were expertly printed by my good friends at the Badger Press in the South of England (www.badgerpress.org) onto 300gsm white card in one color. I thought because of the bold nature of the layout, more than one color would be a bit too much, and the navy works really well.
They were such fun to design, and working with such a creative and great couple made it all the better.

Miss Emma Ruth recently quit her job and made invitation design her full tim job. With a lo-fi and simple style, Miss Emma Ruth likes to do things a little different than your traditional wedding invite. All her invites are hand drawn and focused on the feel of the day and couple.

In our free time Christina and I love to play Scrabble, so I incorporated Scrabble in to the proposal. We had plans to go out to dinner at our favorite little cafe. I dropped off a Scrabble board to the cafe on my way home from work and slipped the ring in the tile bag. When we got to the cafe, I non-chalantly walked over to get the Scrabble board and suggested to Christina that we should play. She was hesitant and just wanted to order our food. I insisted.

We drew letters to see who would go first. Alas, we both drew the same letter. So she stuck her hand in the bag to draw again, but peaked in to the bag, hoping to snag a good letter. She saw the ring, pulled it out and gasped…that’s when I got down on my knee and asked her “Will you grow old with me?”

Our family and friends mean the world to Christina and I. We want our wedding to be a celebration of our love for those that play an integral role in each of our lives and in our love. We are planning a September 2011 wedding in Maine!

Christina and I met during the summer of my senior year of college in Ogunquit, Maine. I was living in Boston with a friend for the summer and hitched rides and hopped the Greyhound any opportunity I could get to go north to see her. After a year and a half of weekend road-trips up and down the coast of New England, we decided that it was time to stop pumping the gas and paying the tolls and hitch up together- and what better place than Boston? After graduating from Colby College, I moved to Allston and went to Boston University for my Masters. I recently graduated with Master’s in Mass Communication (and have the debt to prove it).

I currently work as a strategic analyst at Mullen Advertising in Boston (but today is actually my last day- I will be doing my PhD at
the University of Oregon) and Christina works at Metro Credit Union in Chelsea as an Assistant Manager. We are moving cross-country this weekend with our 2 cats Oliver and Phoebe and our newly rescued dog Charley.

All images by Dias Photography

With every vendor I asked things like how many LGBT weddings they had been hired for, if their contracts and promotional material were gender neutral, and why they decided to participate in a wedding fair specifically for LGBT couples. Depending on the vendor, I went more into depth with their particular issues that pop up in their area of weddings. There were definite stars at this wedding fair, who had amazing and interesting responses to my questions and were obviously well informed and excited to engage in conversation about these topics. After talking to Paperfinger about wording of invitations for gay couples, I felt like doing a little dance because I was thinking the whole time “Wow, she really knows what she’s talking about. I love her work. This is just awesome.” I honestly wanted every little piece of paper and all the stamps at her booth. When I was looking at Rony Tennenbaum‘s ring designs, my heart went aflutter. Recycled gold and conflict free diamonds? And it was an LGBT owned and operated company? Booyah.

There was a bridal shop and a suit shop that I just got so excited about. Lovely bridal shop carries wedding dresses from designers you typically can only purchase online. And I know tons of couples fall in love with wedding attire on Etsy only to hate the fact they can’t see it on their body so they go from shop to shop trying to find something but really love that dress they found on etsy. And Any Old Iron was the suit shop. OMG. For reals. I was trying not to get drool on the tweed jackets and custom made suits for both men and women. The designer actually lives in the UK and comes over for fittings at different times of the year. I will be emailing them to see if we could do an interview about the process of buying a custom suit.

There was plenty of food to eat from Stuart & Welch, a catering company that doesn’t just do weddings and takes a local, organic approach to catering. The food looked just amazing (I couldn’t eat it as it was bread and I have celiac disease) and they were very friendly. The whole booth felt very much like an intimate picnic with food taken up a notch. Atelier Isabey had me at laser cut invitations. They had a wide variety of invites, from custom enclosures with letterpress to a standard line of invitations. But besides their invitations, both designers were just out and out nice. They were excited to answer my questions and made me feel really good after talking with them. And our very own Pro-Gay vendor, The Enchanted Cupboard, was there displaying her cake toppers. I tried not to laugh when I saw the cats and dogs you could include for your cake topper because I couldn’t help but think of how crowded our cake top would have been had we included our pets. They were so fun.

I really got to meet a lot of vendors who really were trying to actively engage in the LGBT community and were invested in promoting marriage equality and equality period. But I’m not going to lie; I was disappointed with a number of vendors who obviously were there because it was just another wedding fair for them. They really had no idea what I was talking about and didn’t really understand why saying “I’m doing this wedding fair because…well…gay people are just another market *blank look*” would piss me off. It’s like they never thought about WHY this kind of event is important or the reasons behind it. I wish I could have skipped those kind of vendors because there are way too many of them out there in the world at large. I didn’t want them at a gay wedding fair. I really hope that events like these in the future reach out to vendors before even accepting them to ensure they are well informed and understand the whole point of participating in events like these.

But aside from a few bad apples, it felt really really good to be at a wedding fair geared towards gay couples. I never once got asked if Natalie, my wife, was my sister or bridesmaid which seemed to happen constantly when we were planning our wedding. I saw all kinds of happy couples, holding hands, looking excited by it all. And I think that was the main attraction for me to this wedding fair. The excited energy coming from both the vendors and couples was just impossible to ignore. And of course, there are a lot more pictures of the Illegal Wedding Fair on our Facebook page. So go on over, enjoy the photos, and like us of course ;)