Some queer couples are rushing to marry before Donald Trump’s inauguration—and they’re coming together in group wedding ceremonies as the LGBTQIA+ community has done before.
Pop-up elopement events for queer couples are happening in states across the country, including Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York in January. Hundreds of wedding vendors, from photographers to officiants, are offering free or discounted services to couples marrying before Jan. 20, and some vendors are coming together to take it a step further, offering free, fully planned, all-in-one mass weddings for couples willing to share their day with others.
E.R. Anderson is helping to organize a two-hour elopement event at the feminist queer and trans bookstore Charis Books & More in Decatur, Georgia. Seven couples have signed up so far to marry at the store’s “Matrimony for the People” event on Jan. 19.
“After Trump’s first election in 2016, I had community members who knew that I was ordained as a minister who texted me that morning and were like, ‘Hey, can you marry us because we’re afraid about what’s going to happen?’” Anderson said. “I wasn’t scheduled to work that morning, but I put on a suit and went to Charis and married two different couples that morning who were worried specifically about queer marriage and protecting their rights as lesbian couples.”
After Trump’s 2024 election, Anderson’s co-workers asked if he thought anyone would text him this time. Anderson thought the bookstore should be more proactive and offer its space and resources.
The conservative policy blueprint Project 2025 does not go as far as to call for undoing same-sex marriage rights, and the GOP removed opposition to same-sex marriage from its official platform in 2024. Trump also said he was “fine” with same-sex marriage after his 2016 election, changing his previous position.
The Respect for Marriage Act, passed in 2022 with about two-thirds of the vote in Congress, requires all states and the federal government to recognize same-sex and interracial marriages as long as they were valid in the state where they were performed. That law would remain in place even if the Supreme Court reversed its decisions in United States v. Windsor (2013) or Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) that legalized same-sex marriage nationally. On Jan. 9, Republican lawmakers in Idaho introduced a measure to overturn marriage equality, a case that could come before the court.
Chris Stoll, a senior staff attorney at the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), said that only the Supreme Court can overturn marriage equality and that there would be months of advance warning if the court were to take on such a case.
“Unless the court does something, there’s nothing that Congress or the incoming administration could do to prevent same-sex couples from marrying,” Stoll said. “There’s a very strong presumption that the Supreme Court will uphold precedents that it has previously handed down.” He recommended that all couples have paperwork in place like wills and second-parent adoptions, as the NCLR has recommended for years.
Couples like Quintin Marcus and Marcelo Castro-Alpízar are rushing to get legal recognition of their unions not only out of the fear that marriage equality could be overturned, but also because immigrant rights are a key target of the incoming Trump administration. Castro-Alpízar came from Costa Rica to the U.S. two years ago and lives on a temporary visa. The pair, who live in Somerville, Massachusetts, married on Jan. 5 at the Queerly Beloved group wedding event in nearby Cambridge.
“As of today, it is not a pressure that I’m not going to be able to stay in the country for the full duration of my current visa,” Castro-Alpízar said. “We don’t know what we’re going to have in the future, but considering in our context and with politics that is happening, the uncertainty, for us, it was like, ‘OK, this makes sense just to have an additional layer of protection if something changes in the future, let’s have this on the record.’”
Castro-Alpízar and Marcus had already planned to get married in a year or so, but Trump’s election accelerated the process. “Both of us were kind of like, ‘It’s been two years, and maybe it’s a little quicker than we would have naturally done, but it’s something that has been on our roadmap anyway,’” Marcus said. “I came across the Queerly Beloved posting, I was kind of like, ‘Should we just do this?’”
The Queerly Beloved event held seven “micro-weddings” and provided couples with a free venue, officiant, photographer, flowers, planning, and a dance party open to the public in the evening. Couples, who had two weeks to plan once they found out their applications to participate were approved, brought their marriage licenses, outfits, rings, and up to 30 guests.
Marcus said that weddings always felt heteronormative to the pair, a sentiment Anderson said many queer couples hold. Being among queer community in a less traditional ceremony made Marcus and Castro-Alpízar feel at ease.
“I think both of us really appreciate Somerville for what it is, in terms of being a safe space for queer people, making us feel good and like we belong here. So it felt like a nice way to be a part of the community in a greater sense,” Marcus said. The pair plan to have a larger celebration in Costa Rica in the future.
Mass weddings are not new in the LGBTQIA+ community. In fact, the first legal same-sex wedding in modern history was four couples marrying in one ceremony in Amsterdam in 2000. Group ceremonies happened often throughout the U.S. in the 2000s and 2010s when a state would first allow same-sex marriage. Couples also stage public wedding ceremonies as a form of protest in jurisdictions where their union is not legally recognized. Mexico City holds a celebratory mass same-sex wedding every June; 147 couples participated in 2024.
“For the folks who are getting married, it’s like wanting to think about themselves as part of a larger community of care, particularly in this moment,” Anderson said. “It’s important for our community members to have a place where we know that we are the people that are going to be there for each other, that are going to have each other’s backs.”
Anderson said that despite the nervousness around Republicans taking control of the government, this moment presents an opportunity to build community in new and exciting ways.
“Come together, celebrate, eat good food, have a party, let people make commitments to each other,” he said, “because that is part of how we’re going to survive.”
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