When A Snake Says Forever: Why I Used My Pet Python In My Queer Wedding

 Featured Image: Sully the snake. Photo by Ryan Gauper Photography

My wife’s and my wedding was already causing lots of stares from our guests. The trees were our chapel. Witchy potions in apothecary bottles that dangled from branches were our décor. Irreverently arranged pews facing a tree-of-life bower were our guests’ seating.

But what caused actual gasps to echo around the audience was when my wife, Jess, and I began the handfasting portion of our ceremony—and instead of a ribbon or a rope, we produced a four-foot python, which tightly bound us together.

When we had been planning our wedding, Jess and I discussed the handfasting ritual as a possible alternative to the candle-lighting or sand-pouring that’s so popular, and Jess laughingly said, “How great would it be if we used a snake instead of a rope?”

My jaw fell open with shocked delight, and that was that. 

My little sister handcrafted a tiny fancy top hat for Sully and was designated “snake-bearer,” keeping him safely hidden and bringing him up when the officiant announced the snake’s part in the ceremony.

Sully dutifully wrapped around our hands while we read our vows and placed our rings on the other’s finger. And Sully was (begrudgingly) unwrapped and placed back in the snake-bearer’s hands as the ceremony concluded.

Few people in the audience knew our plans of using Sully in the handfasting–even some of our wedding party didn’t know. I was so excited to include such a unique element in my wedding—something I knew people would be talking about to their friends, and laughing at it being “so perfectly Chelsea.”

But Sully, my pet python, wasn’t just a prop at our wedding. Ever since I was a kid, I was obsessed with snakes and their powerful ties to paganism and (though I didn’t know it at the time) queerness. 

Snakes embody death, rebirth, and transformation. They are “othered” amongst the animals of the world, often cast as dangerous and sinful. 

In my wedding, a snake, already symbolic as a mythical creature throughout many cultures, became a living and breathing manifestation of chosen eternity—outside of the heteronormative “forever” vows of rings, white, and veils.

The perfect symbol of my love—misunderstood, unusual, wildly transformative. This moment brought my entire relationship with my wife Jessica full circle. 

I had been born into a fundamentalist Christian home, where I had explicitly been raised to marry a godly man and bear him many children. Going from that to standing at the altar with a witchy woman was a radical journey that took me through a crisis of faith, a failed engagement to a man, and cemented my rebellion against my family’s values by going to grad school, pursuing a career, and living in secular community homes.

Even as a young, indoctrinated Christian, I was obsessed with nature and obsessed with snakes. I caught garter snakes as pets every summer, and when I was an adult, I bought my very first python. People eww’ed and shuddered when I told them about my pet snakes, and this made me love them all the more. Maybe my resonance with snakes was a manifestation of the “othering” I felt from my family and friends toward my very obvious queer side (decades before I even knew it about myself).

To me, the snake represented someone who was misunderstood, cast out, and unloved by other people. 

But not by Jess. 

One of my very first dates with her actually entailed me rescuing a new snake, Cersei, while I visited her. Jess let me bring Cersei into her very bedroom and keep her there for the weekend!

Jess was the first woman I ever dated. She guided and co-created so many new habits, rituals, and identities with me. She followed the moon cycles, she used crystals in her spells, and she adored and understood why I collected feathers and bones.

As we fell in love, moved in together, got engaged, and began planning our wedding, we consciously went through many wedding traditions and decided which ones aligned with our values–and which ones did not. 

Neither of us wanted our fathers to give us away, as that was a tradition rooted in patriarchy, but both of us were open to our dads walking us down the aisle, since we knew that would be important to them. Both of us wanted to dance with our dads, but we wanted to dance with our moms too–so we did a switch dance and danced with everyone together!

I’m sure other people have used snakes as handfasting ropes before, and will again. But it was very much a ritual of Jess’s and my own design, representative of our lives.

In spending so much time crafting our own personal interpretations of the wedding traditions, I felt myself becoming liberated from the expectations of past selves and also past family members–expectations that I would marry a man, have a traditional wedding, and have a traditional life. 

And indeed, my untraditional wedding foreshadowed a very untraditional life. My wife and I decided to try to conceive at the same time for pseudo twins, and our plan worked too well. Despite eschewing fertility meds, I conceived actual twins, giving us pseudo triplets only a month apart. Not only do Jess and I have three babies the same age–we’re coparenting with their biological dad, Trow, who is excited to be an active member of their lives. 

In our society, despite many positive steps toward acceptance, queer relationships and families are still seen as different, untraditional, other. Us queer folk are accustomed to creating our own way, our own traditions, our own types of families. 
To me, this handfasting ceremony, bound for forever by a snake, was my wife and me personalizing the beginning of our family by creating our very own mythology as our origin story. (And so far, all my babies love the snakes. They’re off to a good queer start.)

A Montessori educator of ten years with her master’s in Children’s Literature, Chelsea delights in exploring the intersection between queerness, parenthood, and the wild things. She’d love to connect with fellow childhood liberators @motownmultiples