My dirty little secret is that Section 9 is my favorite section of the Sunday New York Times. I feel bad skipping past the “Week in Review” section and the forty-inch story about water quality in Bahrain. But really, the most important section of the Sunday Times is waiting: the ”Weddings & Celebrations” spread at the end of the Sunday Styles section.
When the Times started printing same-sex announcements more than a year ago I got myself a Sunday subscription and found joy not only in jealously coveting the lives, marriages and pedigrees of the heterosexuals, but also the lives, marriages and pedigrees of the homosexuals.
But, alas, I pose an important question: Why are the gay couples almost never the featured couple in the wedding section? Every week some lucky straight couple gets selected by the Times to have a longer story written about them and a much larger picture printed. On the web site the picture becomes the banner photo for the entire wedding section.
Perhaps the Times is just playing it safe, thinking that the gays still don’t make good business sense. Heterosexuality still sells better than homosexuality. And that means that, sadly, gay couples are rarely featured items for celebration, even in the pages of the New York Times.
