Honoring Local LGBTQ+ History With an Interpretive Marker

On Friday, October 25, 2024, Niagara Pride, Inc. and the Niagara Falls State Park will be unveiling to the public a new interpretive marker commemorating a significant event in LGBTQ+ history that occurred on Luna Island inside the State Park on July 24, 2011.

On that day, Kitty and Cheryle Lambert-Rudd became the first LGBTQ+ couple to marry in New York State. A month prior, then Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the Marriage Equality Act in June 2011, making New York the 6th State in the United States to legalize same-sex marriage. The law took effect on July 24, 2011 and at the stroke of midnight, that day, Kitty and Cheryle Lambert-Rudd married, becoming the first legally married LGBTQ+ couple in the State of New York. Four years later, in June 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, made same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states.

“People…