On July 24, 2011, Niagara Falls was lit in rainbow as Kitty Lambert and Cheryle Rudd became the first same-sex couple in the state to wed under New York’s Marriage Equality Act. A new interpretive sign at Niagara Falls State Park commemorates this watershed moment.
Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the Marriage Equality Act in June 2011. When the Act went into effect on July 24th, New York became the sixth state to recognize same-sex marriage.
At the stroke of midnight, Lambert and Rudd married on Luna Island, making Niagara Falls State Park the site of the first same-sex marriage in New York State. Honoring Niagara Falls’s heritage as a wedding destination since the 1830s, Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster was the officiant.
At the time of their union, Kitty Lambert (54) and Cheryle Rudd (53) were grandmothers who had been together for more than a decade. In 2004, they had founded OUTSpoken for Equality, a Buffalo-based LGBTQ+ rights group, which focused on marriage equality.
Hard-fought advocacy and lobbying paid off in 2011 when State Senator Mark Grisanti changed his stance on same-sex marriage, paving the way for the New York State Senate to pass the Marriage Equality Act.
Four years later, in June 2015, the Unites States Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision made same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states. Recently a conservative backlash against LGBTQ+ people has led to actions designed to overturn the Obergefell decision.
New York State has often played an important role in the history of LGBTQ+ individuals in the United States, sometimes positive, and other times negative.
Gay, trans and lesbian activism, advocating for rights in New York, began in the 1950s and 60s. The 1969 Stonewall Riots, a response to police raids of gay
establishments in New York City, have been recognized by many as the birth of the modern LGBTQ+ civil rights movement.
In NYS, same-sex sexual relations were illegal for most of New York’s history. In 1980, the NYS Court of Appeals eliminated many of the state’s remaining anti-sodomy laws in New York v. Onofre.
In 2002, the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act passed the State Legislature, going into effect the following year. In 2003, the Gender Expression
Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) was introduced in the NYS Legislature, which would have added gender identity and expression as protected classes against discrimination and hate crimes. GENDA finally passed the State Legislature and was signed into law in 2019.
Kitty and Cheryle Lambert-Rudd were on hand for the grand unveiling of the new interpretative sign. You can read more about their journey and the see the text of the new interpretive panel here.
Photo: Kitty Lambert and Cheryle Rudd (center) at the unveiling of the new interpretive sign (provided by State Parks).
Source link
