ABSTRACT
In 2014, same-sex marriage was legalised in the UK. Yet, for several years prior, gay and lesbian weddings had been a highly recognisable cultural phenomenon. This chapter explores the role of reality television in producing and consolidating the meanings of same-sex weddings in British popular culture. Through analysis of two episodes of the reality show Don’t Tell the Bride, I argue that the gay wedding trope is inextricably bound up with broader, shifting cultural understandings of gay and lesbian identities, the purposes of marriage and what binds the members of contemporary British society. Centrally, I argue, the mediated phenomenon of the gay wedding finds its conditions of possibility in a cultural zeitgeist of authenticity. Reality TV, as a form of media fixated with the promise of access to the supposedly authentic desires, emotions and selves of its participants, has provided an exemplary stage for the playing out of this cultural process.
