When Matty Bulger set out to create a wedding magazine for gay men, he encountered some resistance.
Not from those opposed to same-sex marriage but from people concerned that a magazine celebrating the fact that gay weddings already occur in Australia, despite those marriages not being recognised under law, would set back the campaign for marriage equality.
“I had a few people suggest that this was going to be really harmful for the community because it’s going to show to the government that people are already doing this, so why make it legal?” he told Guardian Australia. “But I take the opposite view: it shows that because this is happening anyway there is no reason not to make it legal.”
Bulger, a 25-year-old designer from Melbourne, started work on the concept more than 12 months ago in response to a number of weddings in his own circle.
The impetus was not politics but business: wedding magazines are an intensely gendered space, filed away under “women’s interest” or “bridal” in most newsagents, so there was a gap in the market for a magazine that catered specifically to men.
His response was to create Groom + Guy, the first wedding magazine in Australia and New Zealand specifically for LGBTI couples.
The first issue of the quarterly style magazine will hit the stands on Thursday. It reads much like any wedding magazine: there are eight “real weddings”, a mix of weddings in Australia and couples who travelled to jurisdictions where marriage equality is already legal; as well as style ideas, venue suggestions and tips on things such as wedding beard styling.
Pre-orders have been strong but Bulger said some have contacted him to say they were deliberately waiting for it to arrive at their local newsagent.
“There are a lot of people who say that they want to be able to walk into the store and buy it as sort of an act or statement, saying ‘I’m proud to buy this’,” he said.
“We have also had heterosexual men who want to buy the magazine purely for the suiting and styling.”
Bulger, whose partner, Tony Smith, also works on the magazine, said that marriage equality in Australia was now a matter of “waiting for the law to catch up”.
“People are already having weddings and getting married, even though we don’t have any means of making it legal but for a lot of people that’s just paperwork,” he said. “At the end of the day, when it does become legal they will just go in and sign the forms.”
Labor has pledged to bring a conscience vote on same-sex marriage into parliament within its first 100 days, if elected, but the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, remains committed to a plebiscite, which he said this week would happen before the end of the year.
Bulger said he was torn between the two, because if Labor’s parliamentary vote failed: “There goes the plebiscite and there goes the vote, and then we are back to square one.
“[A plebiscite] is a huge waste of money to spend on something that I think is a no-brainer but then maybe it’s just me that thinks it’s a no-brainer.”
