claire lawrence celebrant

What do you offer?

I’m all about giving you a ceremony that balances the fun with the heart-felt, the

relaxed with the extra-ordinary, the personal with the universal and to bring your

ceremony vibe to life.

Why do you want to work with the LGBTQ+ community?

One of the main reasons I became a celebrant was because I felt that the diversity of the Queer experience just wasn’t being acknowledged or celebrated in the wedding industry images and language I saw. The actual ceremony was so often overlooked for couples who did not want a religious wedding and the offer for queer couples seemed to be a basic civil ceremony or nothing at all. I wanted to be involved in changing that and offering LGBTQ+ couples a wedding ceremony that celebrates and centres them and the love they have for each other.

Allyship

As a celebrant, I aim to make LGBTQ+ couples visible and represented on my social media. I am most active on TikTok where I have a specialised focus on LGBTQ+ wedding readings and tips. I try to carry this through in visual representations of my business (leaflets / wedding fair stands etc).

I spend time with the LGBTQ+ couples I work with to make sure they always feel comfortable with the way they are represented in their ceremony and in my interactions with them. The LGBTQ+ community is hugely diverse but almost everyone has had the experience of being excluded, or misgendered, or harassed or assumptions made about them, so I try very hard to start from a position of open curiosity about them as a couple and as individuals and the love they have for each other. That’s the centre of my compass really.

In my previous job (university academic) I was always keen to take up training and workshops specifically geared to supporting students and colleagues from the LGBTQ+ community, and especially individuals who are trans and non-binary, and as a Trades Union representative for the UCU, I represented colleagues who had been discriminated against on the grounds of sexuality.

I’ve always supported local and national LGBTQ+ campaigns and organisations including the Terence Higgins Trust, and more recently, Queerspace FC and I’ve worked actively with THT and Stonewall alongside Freedom to Donate as part of the team that successfully changed the law on blood donation restrictions for me who have sex with men.

In my own life, my daughter identifies as LGBTQ+ and her partner is a trans man, which has given me still more insight on the nature of sexual identity and the pressures that come from inside the LGBTQ+ community as well as the cis, heteronormative world.

While I am in a relationship with a cis man, I have never identified as straight, but rather my own sexuality has been relatively fluid especially as I have aged and felt less comp-het pressure.