‘Time for all of us to Walk into the Sunshine Together’: Glee, the same-sex wedding spectacle and the imagining of queer futures

On 26th June 2015, a Supreme Court ruling made same-sex marriage legal across the United States. The previous decade had seen the campaign for same-sex marriage legislation become a defining issue for contemporary LGBTQ+ politics, and the introduction of this legislation marked a significant social shift. Four months earlier, on 20th February 2015, US television network Fox’s hit teen musical comedy-drama, Glee, included in its final season a double same-sex wedding. This spectacular televisual imagining of a queer wedding is one example of the increasing visibility of LGBTQ+ wedding imagery within popular culture, and the shifting mediations of gender and sexuality of this era. In Glee and other examples, same-sex marriage is mobilised as symbol of queer progress, in ways that both open up and close down possibilities of queer futurity. This chapter develops a queer feminist analysis of Glee’s multiple evocations of same-sex marriage: from the show’s romantic resolve to the more unruly spectacle of a same-self wedding, to the re-mediations of fan media.