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Estimate: One Quarter Of All NYC Marriages Last Month Were Same-Sex

22 August 2011
by Bridgette P. LaVictoire

It has been almost a month since New York legalized same-sex marriage, and around 1,400 lesbian and gay couples have been wed in New York City alone. For NYC, this means that one quarter of all the marriages since 24 July have been for lesbian and gay couples. Only 4.5% of the city’s population is lesbian or gay according to the 2006 estimates. Still, some licenses were from out-of-state residents or out-of-town residents.

The Atlantic Wire notes that this is an estimate since the marriage license application no longer asks if those getting married are male or female. There were, though, some 5,597 marriages in the last month, and according to the Wire, the process to determine how many were for lesbian and gay couples went something like this: “New York City saw a 33 percent jump in the number of marriage applications this past month from the same period last year, so it’s reasonable to attribute almost all of that influx to the legalization of gay marriage.”

A full statewide number will be impossible to calculate.