Delaware’s First Same-Sex Marriage License
The marriage license issued to then-state Senator Karen Peterson and her partner Victoria "Vikki" Bandy was Delaware's first same-sex marriage certificate.
July 1, 2013,
Wilmington, DE
In 2013, Delaware became the eleventh state to legalize same-sex marriage. Then-state Senator Karen Peterson, who came out as a lesbian in an effort to sway her fellow lawmakers to support the marriage equality bill, and her longtime partner, Victoria “Vikki“ Bandy, became the first same-sex couple to be legally wed in Delaware.
Delaware’s legal acceptance of and protections for LGBTQ+ residents has been ongoing since the late 1960s, but it wasn’t until the late 1990s that lawmakers in Legislative Hall would begin passing laws protecting queer Delawareans.
By 2009, more than a decade after lobbying efforts first began to establish a sexual orientation non-discrimination law, Senate Bill 121 finally granted that right. Those efforts also paved the way for community leaders to form a statewide advocacy organization for equal protections for the queer community. The first order of business for the Equality Delaware Foundation, established in 2010, and its lobbying arm, Equality Delaware Inc. (formed in 2011), was drafting and raising support for legislation supporting civil unions in Delaware.
Around that same time, President Barack Obama repealed the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on a national level, allowing queer people to serve openly in the military. In April 2011, then-Delaware Governor Jack Markell signed Delaware’s Civil Union and Equality Act, which made civil unions legal as of January 2012 and gave same-sex couples the same marriage rights as heterosexual couples. More than 550 civil unions were performed the first year civil unions were deemed legal. The first couple to receive a civil union was Lisa Goodman, president of Equality Delaware, and her wife, Drew Fennell, former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware (ACLU-DE).
On the heels of the success of civil unions, Equality Delaware launched efforts to create a same-sex marriage bill. In addition to letter-writing campaigns and countless phone calls, many queer Delawareans traveled to the state’s capital to testify on the need for legal relationship recognition. At this point in Delaware history, there had been no openly queer legislators elected. During debates over the Marriage Equality Bill (also known as House Bill 75), state Senator Karen Peterson, a Democrat from Stanton, Delaware, came out publicly as a lesbian. By then, she had heard her fellow legislators make homophobic comments such as “being gay is a choice” and being gay is a “behavioral issue.” Following the testimony of a Catholic priest who described homosexuality as a sin and said the church is praying for “the sinners,” Peterson, a Catholic herself, knew she had to speak up.
She began her testimony on May 7, 2013, by saying:
She continued, speaking of her loving relationship with her partner of twenty-four years, Victoria “Vikki” Bandy:
At the end of the debates, the Civil Marriage Equality and Religious Freedom Act of 2013 passed the House of Representatives with a vote of 23-18. It passed the Delaware Senate with a vote of 12-9 and was signed into law on May 7, 2013, less than thirty minutes after votes were cast. Markell signed the bill on the landing of the stairway in Legislative Hall, surrounded by a crowd of people. That day, Peterson was unsure if she was going to come out so publicly. But after she did, she said she received emails from all over the world from people who had heard her speech. One man emailed to ask her permission to put a quote from her testimony, “If my happiness somehow diminishes your marriage, then you need to work on your marriage,” on a T-shirt. The supportive stranger made sure to send her a copy, as well.
In a 2023 oral history interview with the Delaware Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs, Peterson recalled how Equality Delaware then asked if she and Bandy would be the first couple married under the new law that took effect on July 1, 2013, just hours after the end of the state’s marathon-style final day of legislative session:
After filling out the paperwork and concluding the marriage ceremony, Peterson and Bandy walked out of the building to crowds of hundreds of people cheering.
On that first day of the new marriage equality law, Delaware saw 108 marriage ceremonies, with 53 in New Castle County, 16 in Kent County, and 39 in Sussex County. Although it was a joyous moment for many Delawareans, members of Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, protested the event. Peterson recalled that police closed the street in front of the city council building in Wilmington where they were wed to keep protestors away from the celebration.
Peterson, who was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, and moved to Delaware with her family as a preteen, was first elected to the Delaware State Senate in 2001. After graduating high school, she attended night classes at the University of Delaware while working full-time and later earned a paralegal certification from Widener University, and eventually a liberal arts bachelor’s degree from Neumann College. Prior to holding statewide office, she was elected as New Castle County’s first woman and one of the youngest council presidents in 1980, when she was just thirty years old.
It was also in the early ’80s that Peterson first met other LGBTQ+ people and began attending conferences of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in Washington, D.C.
She had first realized she had romantic feelings for women when she was 19, and while she publicly attended NOW meetings and supported legal remedies for addressing gender disparities, she said she “had to stay under the radar” in terms of her sexuality.
Peterson met Bandy, who was friends with one of her coworkers, in 1989 when the three of them went out to lunch after an event. After lunch, Bandy and Peterson walked to Rodney Square and talked for hours, sharing personal stories with each other. They said there was an instant connection through shared interests in woodworking, rescuing animals, and being homebodies. Bandy then asked Peterson to go see a movie, and they went out to see Dead Poets Society (Peterson worked on the child labor contracts for the movie in her role at the Department of Labor). They still have the ticket stubs, and said they’ve been together since that day.
Though the coworker who introduced them knew Peterson was gay, she continued to keep her sexuality a secret in the office. In 1997, Peterson was inducted into the Delaware Women’s Hall of Fame for her impactful years of public service. Bandy and Peterson moved in together in 1990. Bandy described their relationship, which the couple said always felt like a marriage, as a “really gentle relationship.”
Bandy was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1950. She studied physical education at Ohio University, leaving her junior year to become a flight attendant out of the Philadelphia International Airport. She moved to Wilmington, Delaware, in 1971. A decade later, she began working for an independent company conducting property assessments for New Castle County’s 1983 reassessment. She then obtained a real estate appraisal license, working as an appraiser before founding her own company so that she could work from home and care for their dog, which suffered from an autoimmune disease. In Fall 2009, Bandy was diagnosed with Stage 3 ovarian cancer. During treatment, she continued to work, and decided to retire once the treatment had been completed. Despite the five-year life expectancy after diagnosis, as of 2023, she has survived the cancer diagnosis for thirteen years.
Just weeks before Delaware’s momentous step toward equality, the federal government also made impactful progress when, on June 26, 2013, the Defense of Marriage Act was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. Goodman noted in a 2023 oral history interview that Delaware’s same-sex marriage bill was cited in that case, which tossed out the narrow view that marriage was defined only by the union of one man and one woman.
A year later on June 30, at another marathon-style final day of the legislative session, some of Peterson’s colleagues prepared a large cake to celebrate Peterson and Bandy’s first wedding anniversary. “Interestingly enough, there were some Republican senators who would not take a piece of cake,” Peterson recalled. Kenneth Boldon, the Clerk of the Peace who married Peterson and Bandy, attended the early-morning anniversary celebration before presenting his copy of their marriage certificate to the Delaware Historical Society’s Collection.
In addition to being part of the first couple to be legally wed in Delaware, Peterson’s long career in public service also included being the primary sponsor of New Castle County’s impactful pay equity study and local legislation requiring New Castle County to include the wife’s name on property records. Peterson also spent twenty-seven years working for the Delaware Department of Labor as an inspector and then director of industrial affairs. She retired from the department in 2001, ran for state Senate in 2002 and retired from public office in 2016. As of June 2023, Peterson and Bandy have been together for 34 years and live in a home they renovated together, still tackling home improvement projects and enjoying their pet dogs.
Photo Courtesy: “Discover Delaware” permanent exhibition at the Delaware Historical Society, The News Journal, May 9, 2013, accessed via Newspapers.com, and Karen Peterson,
Sources:
- Cohen, Celia, “Sen. Karen Peterson’s Gay Marriage Speech,” Delaware Today, July 11, 2013
- Denison, Doug, “Gay marriage wins in Delaware,” The News Journal, May 2, 2013
- Eichmann, Mark, “Delaware State Sen. Karen Peterson to retire,” WHYY, June 14, 2016
- “Governor Signs Marriage Equality Bill Into Law,” State of Delaware press release, posted May 7, 2013
- “Karen E. Peterson,” The Delaware Women’s Hall of Fame website
- Karen Peterson oral history interview with the Delaware Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs, 2023
- Lavers, Michael K., “Delaware same-sex marriage law takes effect,” The Washington Blade, July 1, 2013
- O’Sullivan, Sean, “Cheers greet Delaware’s first same-sex marriage,” Delaware Online/The News Journal and USA Today, July 1, 2013
- O’Sullivan, Sean, Fisher, James, and Romse, Chandler, “Matrimony stirs history, passion,” The News Journal, July 2013
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