If you are planning a same-sex wedding in Greenwich, CT Weddings by Designs, LLC and Cos Cob based Events will not take your business

  FROM THE GREENWICH TIME NEWSPAPER

With its proximity to New York and quiet sophistication, Greenwich is emerging as the apparent state epicenter for gay marriage, one month after it became legal here.

“It’s amazing, the requests for same-sex marriage,” said local Justice of the Peace Betty Bonsal, who has married four gay couples in the last 30 days. “It’s really quite wonderful.”

Since Nov. 12, when a state judge gave the final go-ahead for gay marriage, 26 same-sex couples have been married in Greenwich. That is more than the number married in any of the state’s four largest cities, according to data obtained from vital records officials. Seven gay marriages have taken place in Bridgeport; 16 in Hartford, 17 in Stamford and 20 in New Haven. Of the couples married in Greenwich, all but two were from out of state. Fifteen came from the New York City area; three from Long Island; two from Westchester County; one from New Jersey; and one each from Chicago, North Carolina and Kentucky.

The Connecticut couples married here reside in Greenwich and Stamford.

The couples’ genders are a near-even split – 13 male and 12 female.

The vast majority have been married at Town Hall by a justice of the peace, such as Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., residents Diane Flood-Taylor, 48, and Jane Shanky-Pollack, 52. The couple was wed by Justice Sandra Benfeldt at 10 a.m. Friday, the one-month anniversary of the legalization of gay marriage almost to the minute.

Only Connecticut and Massachusetts allow same-sex marriages.

Paul McDermott, a Greenwich photographer, said he’s already shot a wedding between two men and was glad for the new business. He probably won’t put something like “Gay-friendly” on his Web site, however.

“I wouldn’t want to single them out as a group,” he said of gays and lesbians getting married here, “not that they’re not a viable market.”

But such information could prove helpful, as some local vendors, like Sharon Reekstin of Cos Cob-based Events and Weddings by Designs, LLC, won’t serve gays. “I totally disapprove of gay marriage,” said Reekstin, who recently refused a gay caller. “I won’t do it.”

This is not the first time that Greenwich’s status as the first town over the state line has helped it become a destination for nuptials.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the town was known as “Gretna Greenwich,” after the Scottish border town Gretna Green, to which British historically fled to skirt England’s notoriously strict marriage requirements. Greenwich justices of the peace, after their own kind of green, became skilled at finding ways to eliminate the waiting period for out-of-state visitors wanting a “quickie” marriage, even after the state government cracked down with a uniform five-day waiting period for residents and non-residents alike. The empire of Gretna Greenwich fell, however, after the state introduced blood test requirements in 1935, slowing down the process for prospective newlyweds.

Those requirements have since been revoked.