LGBTQ+ Love Quotes, Poems and Readings for Your Wedding Ceremony

Most ceremony reading lists on the internet were not written for you. This guide to LGBTQ+ wedding ceremony readings is organised by tone rather than category, and every writer in it is queer.

They were written for a hypothetical couple who wants something timeless and inoffensive – a Rumi excerpt, a Pablo Neruda poem, a passage from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin that everyone’s auntie recognizes. All beautiful, all fine, all utterly disconnected from the specific reality of what it means to stand up in front of the people you love and say, out loud, that this is the person you are choosing.

For queer couples, that moment carries weight that mainstream ceremony guides don’t account for. There’s the joy of it – the particular, specific joy of getting to do this at all, after decades of being told you couldn’t, after the votes and the legislation and the court cases and the long wait. But there’s also the history in the room. The people who didn’t make it to see this. The world outside that doesn’t always feel like it’s rooting for you. The fact that you’re here, doing this, in public, which is still, still, an act of some courage.

The words you choose for your ceremony should hold all of that. The joy and the weight. The particular and the universal. The love that is yours specifically, not the love that fits neatly into a card.

What follows is a collection of readings organised by tone, drawn entirely from queer writers. Every poet in this guide was LGBTQ+. Not because love poems require a badge of authenticity – they don’t – but because queer writers have had to carve out their own language for love. They’ve had to write around the assumptions, past the templates, against the silence. That work makes the language richer. More specific. More hard-won. Your ceremony deserves it.

Emotional – LGBTQ+ Ceremony Readings That Make the Room Go Quiet

These are the ones people talk about in the car on the way home. The readings that made the groom’s father actually cry. The ones that make the ceremony feel less like a performance and more like something true happening in real time.

Adrienne Rich — from Twenty-One Love Poems

If you’ve never read Adrienne Rich, this sequence is where to start. Twenty-One Love Poems was published in 1976 and written for a woman – an act of public lesbian declaration at a time when almost nothing in mainstream poetry existed to model it. The poems aren’t dramatic or political in tone. They’re domestic, careful, awake to small things. Which is what makes them devastating.

Poem II is the one that reads best at ceremonies. It opens with the speaker waking in her lover’s bed after a dream in which she wanted to show a poet friend “the poem of my life” – but hesitated, and woke instead. Her partner has kissed her awake. And then this: “I dreamed you were a poem, I say, a poem I wanted to show someone”- Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems II

The poem ends with “the desire to show you to everyone I love, / to move openly together / in the pull of gravity.” For queer couples in that room, “to move openly together” isn’t a metaphor. It’s a thing they have wanted, sometimes waited years for, sometimes fought for. When that line lands, it lands with the weight of everything behind it. Everyone present will know exactly what it means.

Rich is best read slowly, with deliberate pauses. Give the room time to arrive at each line. You can find the full text at the Academy of American Poets.

Mark Doty – The Embrace

Mark Doty is one of the great poets of queer love and queer grief – his collection My Alexandria, written in the shadow of the AIDS crisis, is among the most important American poetry of the twentieth century. The Embrace is different from much of his work. It’s tender without being sentimental, which is one of the hardest things to pull off in a love poem.

The poem depicts a recurring dream of a partner who has died — the lover appears, embraces him, and the speaker wakes changed by it. At a wedding, away from that specific biographical context, what the poem describes is the way love leaves a physical trace. The way a person can be present even in absence. The way being known by someone changes the shape of you.

“Whatever / he’d come to tell me, he was gone / when I woke, flushed and drenched, thankful”— Mark Doty, The Embrace

If you’re also thinking about how to write your own vows -the thing Doty does in this poem, the specificity of describing a single person rather than love in the abstract – is exactly the technique that makes vows feel real rather than recited.

Yrsa Daley-Ward – from the house on the hill

Yrsa Daley-Ward is a queer British-Nigerian poet and writer whose debut collection bone quietly became one of the most passed-around poetry books of the last decade. She writes about the body, about Blackness, about desire and domesticity with a directness that feels like someone saying out loud what most writers leave in the margin.

This piece – often shared under the title the house on the hill – describes imagining a future with someone. It’s a poem about the specific daydream of ordinary life together: the garden, the kitchen, the warmth of someone who makes you feel like yourself again. It ends with the line that makes it so frequently requested for ceremonies: “you make me feel like myself again. Myself before I had any solid reasons to be anything else.”- Yrsa Daley-Ward

For queer couples – many of whom spent years becoming something other than themselves, something smaller, something safer – that last line is not a small thing. It’s an exact description of what the right person does. Read it slowly. The room will know.

Daley-Ward’s full collection bone and her later work The Terrible are available widely. This piece circulates widely online and can be found through the Poetry Foundation’s queer love poems collection.

Funny – Because Your Ceremony Should Actually Sound Like You

There is a particular kind of couple, and you may be one of them, who has scrolled straight past the emotional section, because that’s not what they need the reading to do. They need something that makes the room laugh. That makes the ceremony feel like them rather than like a ceremony.

This is not a lesser choice. A funny reading, well chosen, does something the emotional readings can’t: it breaks the solemnity for a moment and replaces it with recognition. The best laughs at weddings are the ones that feel true.

Frank O’Hara – Having a Coke with You

O’Hara was a gay New York poet, art critic and curator who wrote in the 1950s and 60s and died in 1966 at forty, struck by a vehicle on a beach. He wrote prolifically, often quickly, in what he called “personism” – poems addressed directly to a specific person rather than to an idea. This one was written for a man he loved.

The poem makes the argument – in the most delightfully overclaiming way – that watching this particular person drink a Coca-Cola is more interesting than any painting in any museum in the world. It works through a list of increasingly grand artworks, all of which are dismissed in favour of the person in front of him. It is completely absurd and completely accurate.

“I look / at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world”- Frank O’Hara, Having a Coke with You

What makes it work at weddings is the recognisability of the feeling – that the person you love has somehow made the rest of the world slightly less interesting by comparison. Every person in the room has experienced some version of this. The poem names it with the precision of someone who is not embarrassed to admit it.

The full text is available at the Poetry Foundation. It runs about two minutes at a comfortable reading pace – right on the shorter edge of what works in a ceremony.

Andrea Gibson – I Sing the Body Electric

Andrea Gibson, who passed away in July 2025 after four years of living with cancer, surrounded by their wife and chosen family, was for twenty years one of the most important voices in queer spoken word poetry. They were appointed Poet Laureate of Colorado in 2023. Their work is funny and devastating in equal measure, sometimes in the same sentence.

Gibson wrote about love as a specific, embodied, particular thing – the love you have for one person, in one life, with all the mess that involves. Their poems about partnership are consistently funny in the way that long intimate relationships are funny: not because the love is small, but because the person is known so completely that the comedy comes from accuracy.

For a ceremony reading, look at shorter pieces from their collection You Better Be Lightning or the earlier Take Me With You. Both are available through their publisher Button Poetry and widely via their website. The pieces that work best aloud are the ones that feel like letters – addressed directly to a person, with specificity and warmth and the occasional perfectly placed absurdity.

Gibson is a significant loss to queer literature and to the poetry community. Honouring them by reading their work at your ceremony is a meaningful act, and one they would have loved.

Feminist – For Ceremonies Where the Words Are Also a Kind of Record

Not everyone wants their ceremony to carry political weight. But for many queer couples, particularly those who have watched the legal right to marry feel uncertain, who have sat with the knowledge that the right to be here doing this was not given but fought for, the words they choose are a form of record. Something that says: we were here. We chose each other, in public, on this day, in this world. Here is the language we used.

These readings are for those couples.

Audre Lorde – Coal

Audre Lorde was a Black lesbian feminist poet who described herself, with precision, as “a Black woman warrior poet doing my work.” She died in 1992. Her work is foundational in social justice circles and in queer literary history, and Coal, published in 1976, is one of her most taught and most quoted poems.

The poem opens: “I / Is the total black, being spoken / From the earth’s inside.”— Audre Lorde, Coal

Coal is a poem about the self coming into being – about identity as something that emerges from pressure, from depth, from what is most interior. For queer people who have had to build themselves, often in opposition to what the world was offering, that emergence has a specific resonance at a wedding.

Lorde’s work is available through the Poetry Foundation and through her publisher W.W. Norton. If you read her at your ceremony, you are placing your marriage in a lineage – in the long chain of queer people who have insisted on the right to be fully themselves in public. That might feel like a lot. It might feel exactly right.

June Jordan – from Haruko/Love Poems

June Jordan was a poet, essayist, playwright, educator and activist who taught at UC Berkeley until her death in 2002. She was Black, bisexual, and one of the most politically engaged poets of the twentieth century. She is, as one of her editors wrote, “the greatest poet that ever lived” – a claim that probably goes slightly too far, but not by as much as you might expect.

Haruko/Love Poems, published in 1993, documents a passionate love affair with a woman named Haruko. The poems are urgent, sensual and specific. Update, one of the shorter pieces, ends with eight words that have appeared in ceremony after ceremony for exactly the reason you’d expect: “Still I am learning unconditional and true / Still I am burning unconditional for you.”- June Jordan, Update

The poem is about persisting in love, still learning, still burning. For couples who have been through something together before arriving at this moment, and for queer couples in particular who have had to fight to get here, those two parallel lines hit hard and true.

Jordan’s full collection is available from Copper Canyon Press and widely in libraries. The Poem for Haruko is available at the Academy of American Poets – start there if you’re discovering her work for the first time, then read everything else.

Gender-Neutral – Queer Wedding Readings That Hold Any Kind of Relationship

Some couples want a reading that doesn’t specify gender – not because their love isn’t specific, but because they want the language to open outward. To include everyone in the room. To speak to love in its broadest, least conditional form. These readings do that.

Ocean Vuong – from Night Sky With Exit Wounds

Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese-American poet and novelist who published his debut collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds in 2016. It won the T.S. Eliot Prize. He is gay, and his work navigates the intersections of queerness, immigration, war, family and desire with a precision that feels almost unsettling, as though he is writing the exact thing you didn’t know someone could write.

For ceremony readings, look for the shorter lyrics in the collection rather than the longer narrative poems. Vuong’s language is luminous and careful, every word is load-bearing, and pieces of the right length read beautifully aloud. The poems are not about queer love specifically, but they are shot through with queer sensibility: the attention to the body, the awareness of precariousness, the particular tenderness of loving someone in a world that is not always kind.

A note on using Vuong: his work reads better when read slowly and with space. Brief the reader to resist the impulse to speed through. The silences are part of it.

Sappho – Fragment 31 (translated by Anne Carson)

Sappho was a poet on the Greek island of Lesbos in the seventh century BCE. She wrote love poems, to women. The etymology of “lesbian” is, in this case, not a coincidence, and reading Sappho at your wedding is a two-and-a-half-thousand-year act of reclamation.

Fragment 31 is her most complete surviving poem. It describes, in extraordinary detail, the physical experience of watching someone you love talk to someone else: the helpless, total, almost medical overwhelm of it. Racing pulse. Loss of voice. The sense of nearly dying from proximity.

“I think that man is equal to the gods, who sits across from you” – Sappho, Fragment 31 (Carson translation)

Use Anne Carson’s translation. Carson is a classicist and a queer writer, and her versions of Sappho, published in If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, feel contemporary without losing the original’s precision or strangeness. The fragment as Carson renders it is also the right length: brief enough to absorb in one sitting, substantial enough to mean something.

A word on what happens when you read Sappho at a lesbian or queer wedding: something shifts. People understand, suddenly, that this is ancient. That the desire, the recognition, the specific quality of queer love – that none of it is new. It has always existed. It has always been written about. You are part of something very long.

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How to Choose: The Practical Part

The single most useful question to ask is not “which reading is most beautiful” but “what do we want people to feel when this reading ends?”

Tender and quiet? Surprised into laughter? Moved in a way they didn’t expect? A little devastated in the best possible sense? Once you know the emotional destination, the reading tends to find itself.

On length

Readings work best between one and three minutes when read aloud at a comfortable pace. Test this by reading your chosen piece aloud, to a timer, at the speed you’d use in conversation. If it runs over three minutes, look for a natural cut. Almost every poem has one. Anything under sixty seconds tends to feel slight, unless it’s being used as a brief interlude between two other elements of the ceremony, in which case brevity is exactly right.

On briefing your reader

Give the full text to whoever is reading at least two weeks before the ceremony. Not the day before. Not the morning of. Two weeks, so they can read it aloud several times, understand where the pauses are, and arrive at the ceremony feeling prepared rather than nervous. A nervous reader rushes. A prepared reader gives the poem room to breathe.

Ask them to read it as a conversation – as if they’re telling the couple something true – rather than as a performance. The difference in how it lands is significant.

On placement

Most ceremonies place the reading after the welcome and before the vows – it becomes a bridge between the public occasion and the private declaration. Some couples place it after the vows, as a kind of punctuation. Either works. What rarely works is a reading before the welcome, before the room has settled; or more than two readings in a ceremony, which tends to create a pacing issue rather than doubling the impact.

If you’re working with a celebrant or officiant – and if you’re not, we’d strongly suggest one – talk to them about placement. They’ll have a feel for the rhythm of the ceremony and what the reading needs to do within it. You can find an affirming celebrant or officiant in our directory.

On choosing more than one

Two readings in a ceremony can work beautifully if they’re doing different things. One emotional, one lighter; one long, one brief; one from literature, one from somewhere more personal. The mistake is choosing two readings that hit the same note, which leaves the ceremony feeling repetitive rather than layered. If you want two, pick from different sections of this guide.

And if you’re looking for a complete ceremony framework; script, structure, language, vows. We have a full LGBTQ+ ceremony script, and a partner resource over at Dancing With Them for couples who want a non-religious script that works for any kind of relationship.

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