ATL lesbian takes on gay bar’s bachelorette ban

By Mike Fleming | Jun 1, 2012 | 4:42 PM

Opinions flow when it comes to straight girls in Atlanta’s gay bars. But one gay Atlantan has a warning for L.A.’s Abbey for banning bachelorette parties until gay marriage is legal: Choose your words.

The Abbey’s owner may have taken an admirable stand when he instituted his new policy, but his comments rubbed Equally Wed magazine editor Kirsten Palladino (photo, left) the wrong way. So much so, she had to write about it at length for Huffington Post’s “It’s Not Illegal to Have a Gay Wedding.”

“We love our straight girlfriends coming in to celebrate one of the happiest days of their life,” says Abbey owner David Cooley. “But it’s also a slap in the face to my customers and my life that we can’t have that same celebration.”

Really? Because the last time I checked, having a gay wedding isn’t illegal anywhere in the United States—and neither is having a within-the-legal-limits hell-raising gay bachelor or bachelorette party. While I appreciate Cooley’s sentiment and the statement he’s trying to make here, it sends a strange message to people—that you can’t get married or celebrate your wedding until your government says you may do so.

If you want to take a stand, do it, Palladino argues, but don’t throw gay weddings – which her publication has a vested interest in – under the bus in the process. Go ahead and have your gay wedding, and make it as fabulous and meaningful as you and yours deserve. Shoot the finger at the establishment as the slow wheels of justice turn, and don’t put your life on hold.

Is Palladino splitting hairs? Yes, she admits, and she takes a beating in the HuffPo comments section. But the editor justifies her argument with the case of her own romantic engagement and gay wedding right here in Atlanta, as well as the strange reactions she and her partner (photo, right) got to the news of their pending nuptials: “’Is that even legal?’ one person asked. “Um, yes, we were not arrested when Maria put a ring on my finger,” Palladino writes.

It indeed begs the question: Are we sending the right message by disrespecting marriage as a whole until everyone has legal recognition for it?

We know, we know! Some of you still don’t want bachelorettes in your gay bar for lots of real and imagined reasons. But if you’re going to make national headlines about it, make sure it’s about limited legal marriage and not about totally legal commitments. Or Palladino will have something to say about it.

Photo by Entwined Studio courtesy Equally Wed

ATL lesbian takes on gay bar’s bachelorette ban

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