It was a provocative sign about racism that Adrian James Burrus was carrying that first caught Quinn Dipboye Sames’s eye at a Black Lives Matter protest on June 11, 2020, in downtown Lexington, Ky. The protest was in response to the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky.
Mr. Sames, who was there with friends, felt an instant connection when he spotted Mx. Burrus, who uses they/them pronouns, with his group of friends. “I was automatically drawn to them and knew I wanted to know more,” Mr. Sames said of Mx. Burrus. After the protest, the two messaged each other on the app Signal.
Mx. Burrus asked if Mr. Sames was going to another protest in Lexington two days later. Mr. Sames was. The two met there, and Mx. Burrus was arrested that night. The following day, after being released, Mx. Burrus invited Mr. Sames over to their place in Lexington.
“I felt a magical connection, so when they invited me to come to their house, it was an immediate yes for me,” Mr. Sames said. “I was nervous but I kept feeding off the energy of being with them.”
That first date lasted three days, which the two spent “sharing a lot of stories and queer experiences and watching movies,” Mr. Sames said. At the time, Mr. Sames lived at home with his parents. “So, after a couple of days, his mom was like, ‘When are you coming home?’” Mx. Burrus said.
But before he left on June 16, the two officially became a couple. “I wear a Claddagh ring, and I asked if he would be OK if I flipped it over,” Mx. Burrus said, a sign of no longer being single. Mr. Sames readily agreed. “It just felt right,” he said.
They texted daily and went on their second date on June 19 to a local Juneteenth celebration. After that, the two were in touch constantly. “Texting all the time,” Mx. Burrus said. “We would see each other and sleep over when we could.”
In October 2020, the two found an apartment in Lexington and moved in together. They have since moved to a townhouse nearby, where they now live.
In the months that followed, the pair experienced many changes, including Mr. Sames’s diagnosis of fibromyalgia in 2023. Mx. Burrus underwent top surgery and formally changed their legal name after graduating from college and Mr. Sames changed his gender marker.
Mx. Burrus also got their first cat shortly after the two met. “Slowly, we’ve gone from us each having one cat to us having six,” Mr. Sames said.
After dating for a year, the subject of marriage began coming up. “It was just a discussion we started having,” Mr. Sames said. They happily discovered they were both on the same page.
“The only thing that was stopping us from being officially engaged and married was money,” Mx. Burrus said, adding that they initially wanted special rings and a big celebration. But when the presidential election results were announced, the two decided they better not wait.
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“We knew that after Roe v. Wade was overturned and the Republican Party being so against queerness in general, they might try to overturn same-sex marriage,” Mx. Burrus said. “Being married while we still could was more important to us than having the ideal ceremony and reception. We can do that at a later date.”
The pair decided to sign up for “a queer wedding pop-up,” Mr. Sames said. The Stone House at Silver Creek in Richmond, Ky, a queer-owned events space, invited queer couples to get married for free at its venue on Dec. 7.
Mr. Sames, 28, works at the National Youth Advocate Program’s Kentucky branch as a licensing coordinator and intake specialist. He received a dual bachelor’s degree in peace and global studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies from Earlham College. Mr. Sames was born in Knoxville, Ky.
Mx. Burrus, 27, who is from Lexington, also works at the National Youth Advocate Program’s Kentucky branch as a continuous quality improvement coordinator and a treatment coordinator. Mx. Burrus has a bachelor’s degree in social work from the University of Kentucky.
The two were wed on Dec. 7 as one of 27 ceremonies that took place at the Stone House at Silver Creek that day. Mr. Sames’s father, Jeffrey Sames, a minister ordained through the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), officiated.
The pair will both be changing their last names to Burrus-Sames. “We chose to hyphenate our names because we both felt a sense of attachment to our last names and a feeling that they represented us individually,” Mr. Sames said. “By combining them, we’ll be representing us as a unit.”
The couple invited six guests, including Mx. Burrus’s younger sister, Alexis, and Mr. Sames’s older brother, Nathan, who served as the ring bearers, and the couple’s mothers, Phyllis Burrus and Michelle D. Sames, also attended.
It may not have been the wedding of their dreams. But, “There was this sense of ‘this is my person, there’s no reason to wait,’” Mr. Sames said.
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