Why some LGBTQ+ couples are rushing to get married before Trump takes office again

When singer and songwriter Morgxn woke up the morning after Donald Trump’s reelection, the first thing he did was apply for a marriage license.

Morgxn, who is gay, is based in Nashville, Tennessee—a state that voted staunchly in favor of Trump. He and his fiancé, Gabe, had been planning to get married on November 30, but the election results confirmed for him the importance of that decision.

“I already feel married to this man . . . I don’t feel like the government telling me I’m married is what makes me married,” he says. “But I did know that if Trump were to win, it was going to feel more important for me to have the same legal protection that straight people don’t ever have to worry about.”

Morgxn posted a TikTok sharing the couple’s experience applying for a marriage license. “We know that the Supreme Court has signaled wanting to ‘return marriage back to the states’ and we all know how Tennessee would respond,” the video’s caption says, referring to the concurring opinion that Justice Clarence Thomas wrote after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Thomas mentioned Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark case that legalized same-sex marriage at the federal level, by name, stating that the Court has “a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”

Amid the fear and confusion over whether Obergefell could be overturned under a second Trump term, many LGBTQ+ couples have posted videos—both joking and not—about getting married earlier than they had initially planned to. And with a conservative majority in the Supreme Court that only stands to grow, there’s fear that the right to same-sex marriage at the federal level could be challenged and repealed.

Currently, there are only a handful of states that have enshrined the right in their state constitutions. While ballot measures protecting same-sex marriage rights passed in California, Colorado, and Hawaii last Tuesday, there are 32 states that have constitutional amendments or statute bans that would take effect in the event Obergefell is overturned, affecting 61% of LGBTQ+ adults, according to the nonprofit think tank Movement Advancement Project.

Morgxn received an influx of comments and DMs from users voicing similar anxieties about their marriage plans in the days following his post. Three days later, he shared another video suggesting that he and his mother, who is a notary, could help marry couples in Tennessee. It went viral, garnering nearly 130,000 views.

“It’s not built for us. Let’s make it for ourselves”

“I think queer people and people who are marginalized, unfortunately, are used to looking at a system and being like, ‘It’s not built for us. Let’s make it for ourselves,’” he says. So he created a Google Form asking his followers whether they’d be interested in a Nashville-based community wedding sometime in December, which he’s hoping a city official like Olivia Hill—a member-at-large of Nashville’s Metropolitan Council and the first transgender person to hold an elected position in Tennessee—will officiate. Within the first 15 hours, the form had already received 21 responses.

Deirdre Alston, a photographer and owner of Deirdre Alston Photography, has seen similar interest in wedding services. After Trump’s reelection, “I was sitting at my kitchen table feeling helpless and worried about how I would personally be affected,” she told Fast Company in an email. “The first thing that came to my head was my marriage rights. I thought about all my couples getting married in 2025 who may be potentially affected by Obergefell being overturned.” (Disclosure: Alston is the daughter of Fast Company editor Lydia Dishman.)

Alston, who has been photographing weddings for nearly a decade, took to Instagram, posting that she will provide free, 15-minute photography sessions to queer couples looking to elope through the end of the year. The initiative took off, particularly after an industry friend of hers shared a TikTok offering the same service, which at the time of publication had amassed more than 144,000 views. The two of them have received inquiries from roughly 30 couples so far.

TikTok “seems to have been a great way to get the info out and the algorithm has been spreading it to the people it needs to,” Alston wrote. “Even if between the two of us we photograph around 30 elopements before the end of the year, that’s 60 humans who will have the privilege of getting married no matter what happens down the line.”

Alston also created a spreadsheet with the information for more than 200 other photographers, videographers, florists, and planners located across the country who have voiced interest in providing their own services for free.

For Morgxn, the community he’s seen come together in and outside of his comment section is bittersweet.

“I do think we were made for this—to come together, create community, and figure this out. But I don’t wish that. And just because we’re made for this, doesn’t mean we wanted [it],” he says. “We’re used to the government not giving us something and us having to figure out how to do it as a community.”