It started with an instant message.

That’s what set off the events that led to Tim and Sean McQuillan to eventually become Iowa’s only legally married same sex couple.

Tim, senior in linguistics, and Sean were part of a panel Tuesday in the Ames City Auditorium on marriage equality. The event was put on by One Iowa and Lambda Legal.

Tim and Sean told the story about how they raced to the alter the day after Judge Robert Hanson handed down his ruling, which briefly allowed same sex couples to marry in Polk County.

After the ruling was reported by the Des Moines Register, Sean got a message from a friend.

“My good friend [instant messaged] to tell me that marriage was legal in the state of Iowa,” Sean said. “I don’t think he had any idea that I was going to run out and get married the next day.”

Sean called Tim’s mother to ask for her permission to marry her son. After he received her blessing, he bought two rings and a white rose and went, with his neighbor, to pick up Tim from work.

“It was a bit of a shock to him,” Sean said.

But Tim reminded Sean, and the audience, that in addition to Sean greeting him, his neighbor had popped out of the car, video camera in hand.

The two spent the night gathering the necessary documents and information in order to be ready to marry in Des Moines the next morning. After receiving the wave of the three-day waiting period from a judge, the couple set out to find someone to marry them. However, all the judges were busy, so they attempted to find a person of faith to marry them.

After being turned down by a rabbi, not because the two are gay, but because they are not Jewish, Tim and Sean eventually ended up on the lawn of Rev. Mark Stringer, press corps and all, to have their ceremony.

They turned in all the necessary documents and forms to be legally married with 30 minutes to spare before Hanson stayed his ruling.

The feedback the couple received after their marriage, which at one point included 1,000 Facebook and e-mail messages, Sean said, was all positive.

The most overwhelming message Sean received was from a gay man in a country in the Middle East. The man had seen a story about the couple’s marriage, and in his e-mail he explained how he could not be publicly gay in his country because of fear of persecution and threat of physical harm.

“It was really at that moment when I realized how amazing the American promise of equality is,” he said.

Both said how supportive their families were of the couple’s relationship. Tim said he got more flack for the fact that some in his extended family found out he was gay on the news.

“I was not completely out to my extended family the day that I got married … Actually, I wasn’t out to any of my extended family,” he said.

Tim said he learned how powerful marriage was after he became married himself.

“Realizing that you’re not … so different from everyone else and you don’t have to be,” he said.

With marriage comes clarity.

“When you tell someone you’re married, there’s no ambiguity,” Tim said.

More from the forum

Panelists included Tim and Sean McQuillan; Camilla Taylor, senior staff attorney from Lambda Legal; Linda Trudeau, president of Ames Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbian and Gays; and Rev. Brian Eslinger of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 105 N. Hyland Ave.

Taylor made mention of stories of the six couples being represented in the lawsuit that challenges the same-sex marriage ban, which will be heard in the Iowa Supreme Court on Dec. 9. She told stories of some of the legal difficulties same-sex marriages face without the protection of legal marriage.

She told the story of one woman who had to “beg” the doctors to let her partner be bedside during a medical procedure. Normally, for this type of procedure, a woman’s husband would have no problem being bedside.

Taylor told the story of another lesbian couple represented in the lawsuit. When searching for a grade school to send one of their daughters to, the school informed the couple that their daughter would not be allowed the opportunity to give a presentation about her family in school during a unit when the rest of the students were able to tell about their families.

“Because the school did not want to offend the parents of the other children,” she said.