The date of the Pride Parade—Sunday, June 26—will also mark precisely one year since marriage equality became the law of the land in the United States.
A February 2015 press release from the Cook County clerk’s office showed that more than 6,500 same-sex couples were married in the county in the first year of marriage equality. On Feb. 21, 2014, a federal judge cleared the way for Clerk Orr to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples who planned to marry in Cook County—more than three months before marriage equality took effect throughout Illinois, and more than a year before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that state bans on same-sex marriage were unconstitutional.
By 2015, at least one license was issued to a couple residing in every Chicago zip code, except for two zip codes (60707 and 60827).
Currently, Cook County has issued approximately 9,600 marriage licenses to same-sex couples, according to James Scalzitti of the clerk’s office. The proportion of male to female marriages have been 52 percent to 48 percent. The top zip code is 60640 (in Lake View), with 554 couples.