Two Grooms, Two Brides, or Something Beautifully Neither: How We Personalize LGBTQ+ Ceremonies in Puerto Vallarta

Writing this piece is bringing up some emotions, and I find myself grateful that it’s the last article in this Planning Guide series rather than the first, because it’s also the most personal.

One of the main reasons I started this agency was to create a completely safe space for LGBTQ+ couples to plan a destination wedding, to celebrate their love, and to be fully themselves without a single moment of discrimination or even a sideways glance. As someone who came of age during the AIDS crisis, I never take for granted how much ground our community has covered in the last forty years, or what a genuinely extraordinary thing it is that same-sex marriage is now legal — in the United States, here in Mexico, and in a growing number of countries around the world.

Even now, more than a decade after Obergefell in the U.S. and the legalization of same-sex marriage in Jalisco in 2016, I consider every couple we work with a pioneer. Not in a dramatic sense, but in the quiet, powerful, thoroughly ordinary sense. Just by living their lives, loving each other, and surrounding themselves with people who show up for them, they demonstrate simultaneously the strength it takes to be a minority in a still-changing world and the beautiful normalcy of being two people navigating life together.

I say all of this before getting to the practical advice because I think it matters. The context is the point. When you come here, you’re not just booking a venue and hiring a caterer. You’re claiming something. And our job is to make sure you can do it fully, loudly, and exactly as you want.

What we’ve noticed, looking back across the years

When I think back across all the LGBTQ+ weddings we’ve been part of, two things stand out.

The first is just how beautifully unremarkable most of them have been, in the best possible way. Ceremony, cocktail hour, dinner, dancing. Vows that made people cry. Toasts that made people laugh. Guests who stayed on the dance floor until the music had to stop. In other words: exactly what happens at the weddings of people who love each other, period. I choose to interpret that as the most meaningful kind of progress. We want what straight couples want. We express love the way humans express love.

The second thing is that a handful of our LGBTQ+ weddings have stood out not because they were different in structure but because they were SO MUCH FUN that guests still talk about them years later. That’s what this piece is really about: not a checklist of things you must do to make your wedding “gay enough,” but a collection of real stories about what happens when couples give themselves genuine creative permission and bring their full personalities into the process.

The stories

Kevin and JT: The night Adele came to Casa Karma

Kevin and JT began planning during the pandemic, looking specifically for something unconventional. They’d booked Casa Karma over New Year’s weekend — it was also going to be Kevin’s birthday in early January — and they were clear from the start about their priorities: no formal sit-down ceremony, no heavy decoration budget, maximum entertainment.

Instead of a traditional ceremony structure, they asked guests to simply pass a microphone and share stories and memories while standing together. It was warm, informal, and genuinely moving.

Then came the entertainment strategy.

During their menu tasting many months earlier, Yanina asked them, as she always does, how they met. They told her they’d met at an Adele concert in Nashville a few years before. I asked, not entirely innocently, “Would you like to see Adele at your wedding?”

Both their heads tilted sideways simultaneously, like dogs hearing a strange sound.

“What do you mean?”

“We can’t promise THE Adele,” I said. “But we could arrange AN Adele.”

And so it came to pass: after dinner, a drag “Adele” appeared and performed. Then “Cher” arrived and sang Love After Love. Then “Tina Turner” closed out a rousing Proud Mary. And just when guests thought the evening had peaked, “Adele” transformed herself into “Katy Perry” and returned to sing Firework — which ended, naturally, with a private fireworks show that most guests described afterward as an out-of-body experience.

But we weren’t done. As the last volley of fireworks faded over Banderas Bay, a troupe of fire dancers appeared and performed for twenty minutes to an audience that had long since run out of adequate reactions to what the evening kept delivering. Only after that did the DJ start. And of course, the night ended at midnight with the enormous fireworks displays that ring in the New Year across the entire bay.

It remains the most purely fun wedding we have ever been part of. It is the story we tell whenever any couple asks us how to make their guests feel taken care of.