At this year's Rose Parade, attendees can expect to enjoy the usual array of flowers, floats and marching bands, as well as an unexpected surprise to ring in 2014: a same-sex wedding ceremony.
With this Rose Parade the first since marriage equality passed in the Golden State, one Los Angeles gay couple will celebrate by marrying each other on top of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation's wedding cake-shaped float. This will reportedly be the third year the AIDS Healthcare Foundation has taken part in the parade.
“One of the things we’re really excited about is we’re standing on the shoulders of thousands of men and women who came before us in this fight for marriage equality,” Danny Leclair, who will marry Aubrey Loots, said in a statement. “We’re excited to be part of that story, to be able to do this because of them. We’re looking forward to honor that.”
Sharon Raphael and Mina Meyer, a lesbian couple together for 42 years, will also join Leclair and Loots on the float. Raphael and Meyer were legally married in California in 2008 prior to the passage of Proposition 8.
This will not be the first live wedding to take place in the Rose Parade. A couple tied the knot during the celebration in 1989, with their wedding being dubbed the “most widely witnessed wedding in American history,” according to the Pasadena Star-News.
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