Canada's gays lucrative new market for weddings

TORONTO - Suzanne Welstead is thinking about yellow and green, perfect colours for a spring wedding.

``Right?'' the 32-year-old therapist asks her partner Jennifer Tribe, 30, who answers with a smile and a nod.

Tribe, who runs a consulting firm in Toronto, and Welstead, from Kitchener, Ontario, 60 miles (100 km) west of Toronto, have been dating for just five months, but say they know they want to spend their lives together.

Seeking ideas and inspiration for the May 2005 wedding they're starting to plan, the couple came to Canada's first wedding show targeted directly at gays and lesbians, held at a convention centre in downtown Toronto.

They strolled among the 75 exhibitors, arms filled with glossy brochures hawking everything from funky, colourful cakes with two grooms or two brides as wedding toppers, to white doves, tuxedos and photograph exhibits.

Welstead and Tribe are part of a growing market of same-sex couples planning their now-legal weddings, a controversial clientele that businesses across North America are just starting to get used to.

``Gay people will raise the bar'' for weddings, said Mitchel Raphael, editor of fab, a Toronto-based gay men's magazine that helped organise the event. ``Gay people are going to be very particular about quality, style - all those stereotypes.''

The magazine joined forces with a company that puts on traditional wedding shows - exhibits of all wedding services like caterers, photographers and tux renters - in the Toronto area. But the organisers said there are some key differences.

``Stress levels are a lot lower for the couples, (and) mothers of the brides aren't here,'' said Brian Garrison, who sells advertising for fab magazine.

Hand-in-hand, couples checked out colourful booths that wouldn't have been out of place in a traditional wedding show. They peered into stretch limousines and watched as exhibitors, wrapped in rainbow-striped feather boas, danced in the aisles to techno music from a booth advertising deejay services.

Most of the exhibitors in the show are stalwarts of traditional wedding shows who said they're looking to branch out into the new market of legal same-sex weddings.

Walter Van Beek proudly showed off the figures designed for wedding cakes, one with two tiny, tuxedo-clad grooms and another with two little brides decked in white gowns.

``Right away we knew we wanted to sign up'' for the show, said the sales manager of Boaden Catering, in Mississauga, just outside Toronto. ``I think it's a market we're interested in learning more about.''

At the Looking Glass restaurant and banquet hall, same sex unions are nothing new. The company, in the heart of Toronto's downtown gay village, has been hosting the events for years, long before they became legal marriages.

Last month, their banquet hall hosted several US couples who came to Canada to get married, among a total of 20 couples who tied the knot there in February, said employee Jason Avila.

``They're more public now,'' he said. ``It's almost like a straight wedding.''

Canada became North America's leader in gay weddings last summer after courts in two provinces, Ontario and British Columbia, ruled it was unconstitutional to ban same-sex couples from getting married.

The rulings sparked a wave of weddings in those two provinces, with US couples flooding to places like Toronto, Vancouver and Niagara Falls to tie the knot.

Toronto, Canada's largest city, has issued licences for almost 1,200 same-sex marriages since last summer, including 400 where the couples came from the United States.

That's almost 10 percent of the 12,000-plus licences the city has issued in the period.

Some US jurisdictions are also marrying gay couples, with gay marriages taking place in parts of California, New York and Oregon states, to the admiration of some and the anger and resentment of others.

President George W. Bush, seeking conservative backing ahead of this November's election, wants to amend the constitution and redefine marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

In Canada the ruling Liberals responded to the provincial court rulings by pledging support for legalising gay marriage across the country, and the government is asking the supreme court to examine the issue.

Some activists say Prime Minister Paul Martin may be less eager to cement gay marriages into law than his predecessor, Jean Chretien, and the government wants the Supreme Court to examine if civil unions for gay couples would be enough to meet constitutional requirements.

Fab magazine's Raphael said the steady stream of visitors to the sold-out gay wedding show should be a message to politicians.

``This definitely sends a very strong, powerful message to Paul Martin ... that corporate Canada is ready for this,'' he said. - Reuters