‘We’re just fortunate to have each other’
Despite the pandemic, their wedding was just as special as they’d hoped
Days before Suneel Khanna and Carl Wolter were supposed to have their socially distanced wedding of five people at the Fairmont Royal York, Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced that groups of 10 people could now gather. That meant Khanna’s parents were now able to see their son get married.
“When I came out 20 years ago, gay marriage just wasn’t legal,” Khanna said. “I remember my mom not even looking at me in the eyes for six months. But she went from that person to wanting to be at her gay son’s wedding.
“In South Asian culture, your parents are everything. We were fighting for the legalization of marriage and the journey of acceptance my parents went through. The cruelty of them not being able to attend their son’s wedding would have been terrible, but, in the end, it was a dream come true.”
The couple’s original plans to have a ceremony incorporating Hindu and Christian traditions at a church, followed by a reception dinner at the Chefs’ House on King Street East with 100 guests were scrapped, as venues shut down and gatherings of more than five (now 10) people were forbidden amid the pandemic. But Khanna, 45, and Wolter, 65, say it was vital that they wed during Pride month.
The two met in April 2018 through a dating app. Khanna was vacationing in Palm Springs, where Wolter lived and worked in the non-profit sector. They shared common ground in their advocacy work for the
LGBTQ community and, on a more trivial note, the fact neither really cared for baseball.
The two maintained a longdistance relationship and, at last year’s Pride in Toronto, Khanna marched in his first parade alongside Wolter to support Casey House, a hospital specializing in caring for people with HIV/AIDS. Both of them are board committee members there.
“As a kid during the AIDS crisis, I remember they used to bring in patients in haz-mat suits,” Khanna said. “During the parade, I remember turning off Bloor and onto Yonge and the crowd went off while Madonna’s “Express Yourself ” came on. We both looked at each other and cried. It was such a Toronto moment.”
The two got engaged in Palm Springs on New Year’s Eve 2019. Months later, the pandemic led to borders being shut down. Wolter was unable to go back to the U.S., nor could his family and friends come to Toronto.
Still, this month meant too much for the couple to postpone their wedding. It was the one-year anniversary of Wolter coming to Canada and Khanna’s first time marching in a Pride parade.
It’s a month of celebration, but the two say it’s also a reminder that there is still much to be done to improve the lives of marginalized communities, and to not take existing freedoms and privileges for granted. Their original wedding ceremony involved a tribute to pioneers in LGBTQ activism.
“Society should just be happy that two people want to take care of each other,” says Wolter. “Pride is about affirming ourselves, who we are, and letting the world know we have value and dignity.”
The couple was able to get a wedding licence from city hall and Khanna’s sister heard about the Fairmont Royal York starting to offer socially distanced weddings for up to five people at the end of May.
The grooms’ tailored sherwanis and pagris, ordered through Ethnic Collections in Etobicoke, also arrived from New Delhi before COVID-related shipping delays. A new wedding came together in two weeks.
Khanna and Wolter got married on Sunday, June 14, in the empty ballroom of the Fairmont Royal York.
The officiant, along with Khanna’s sister, Anshu, and the couple’s friend, Linda Ing-Gilbert, made up the original party of five. Under the new social gathering guidelines, Khanna’s parents, Jyoti and Chander, were added to the guest list, along with his brother-in-law Brendan Dolan.
Also in attendance were Eri Yamada, the hotel’s director of convention services and catering, who ensured Khanna’s parents were able to arrive and leave the hotel without coming into contact with anyone else and Peter Bregg, former chief photographer at Maclean’s, who captured the wedding.
The ceremony started with lit diyas being placed on the officiant’s table, followed by the groomsmen touching Khanna’s parents’ feet for blessing. Wolter did a reading from the first Corinthians and Khanna’s father surprised everyone by singing the Gayatri Mantra hymn and reciting the Shanti Path, a peace prayer.
“He sang my whole life and you really had to be there to hear the acoustics in the whole room,” Khanna said. “I don’t think we missed out on anything. Our whole relationship was a gift and there are no ‘I wished’ or ‘should haves’ with the wedding. The fact that I could hug my father and kiss my mother, that’s just the basics I wanted.”
“We’re just fortunate to have each other to get through COVID-19,” Wolter added.
When it was made official and the men kissed, “Nagada Sang Dhol,”,a celebratory song from the 2013 Bollywood blockbuster “Goliyon Ki Rasleela RamLeela” played. Their first dance as a married couple was to Frank Sinatra’s “Young At Heart” (a tribute to Palm Springs where they met and Sinatra called home).
As the hour-long ceremony wound down, Khanna’s parents were ushered out of the hotel and the celebration continued in a hotel room, where the groomsmen video-chatted with friends and family abroad and toasted with champagne and a raspberry and lemon buttercream cake made by Khanna’s childhood friend, Monika Singh of Cali’s Creations bakery.
The couple doesn’t have a honeymoon planned (they say they were already too tired from planning the original wedding that was cancelled and the last-minute one). Instead they are getting ready to move from their current home in Leslieville to Old Town Toronto.
“Part of why we wanted to get our story out is because there’s a kid stuck at home, just looking for someone or a community to feel connected to,” Khanna said. “We’re hoping that it will give some hope to people who don’t feel a lot of hope right now.”