Life

Celebrity “big gay wedding” rocked Palm Springs

Nico Santos and Zeke Smith were married in Palm Springs on Pride weekend - making it "extra gay."
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men exchanging wedding rings
Photo: Shutterstock

When Nico Santos and Zeke Smith started planning their wedding in Palm Springs, they didn’t realize it would be Pride weekend.

Santos, who starred in Crazy Rich Asians and currently appears in the NBC hit Superstore, and Smith, a former Survivor contestant outed by another contestant, tied the knot over the weekend.

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“It’s a big gay wedding,” Santos, 44, told People Magazine ahead of the nuptials. “A lot of our guests are queer as well, so we thought let’s just stick to the date and have it during Pride weekend. So it’ll be extra gay.”

The men were engaged at the GLAAD Media Awards ceremony in 2022. They met at the same event six years prior.

“For us, we’ve been together for almost six years,” Smith told ET. “We own a home together, have a joint bank account. We’re each other’s emergency contacts. By all sorts of usual metrics, we are married.”

“But actually having the ceremony, making it legal, it’s about becoming a family,” they continued. “We’re in it forever. Through thick and thin and easy and hard. We’re going to be the person that’s there for the other one.”

Santos is from the Philippines, and Smith is from Oklahoma. They tried to incorporate elements of their backgrounds into the ceremony. From woven elements to honor Santos’s Filipino heritage to leather and fringe as a nod to Smith’s the weekend-long festivities merged the men’s lives together.

“We come from very different places. And yet, despite our vastly different upbringings and life stories, we’ve found a home within each other,” they said.

“We’re not very serious people,” Santos added, “which is why we both work in comedy, so we’re calling it our silly bougie wedding.”

A drag queen impersonating Dolly Parton performed Nicole Kidman’s AMC Theaters “We Make Movies Better” speech and the three read iconic lines from romantic comedies as part of the ceremony. Santos wore a “sassified” Filipino barong; Smith sported black lizard cowboy boots.

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