The Democratic-led Assembly had easily passed the measure for several years. The Democratic governor was able to persuade four Republican senators to vote in favor of the bill, giving it the 33 votes to pass the 62-seat chamber controlled by the GOP. The bill initially failed in 2009 in the Senate. Andrew Cuomo’s signature moments of his six-year tenure as governor so far. New York was the sixth state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage, and many others soon followed.īut getting New York there was a fight, and it remains one of Gov. New York marriage licenses do not require people to write down their sex, so the same-sex marriage figures aren’t exact. There were 2,796 in 2012, the records showed. The number of gay marriages spiked at 4,031 in 2013 and dropped to 3,193 in 2014. Outside New York City, at least 10,000 same-sex couples were married between 20, records from the state Health Department showed, representing nearly 6 percent of the total marriages in the state over those three years. June is also Gay Pride Month, and the PrideFest parade is Sunday in Manhattan. “We need to keep safety issues in our mind, because the work isn’t all done.”
