Colorado Gov. Jared Polis marries long-time partner in first same-sex marriage of sitting governor

Wedding bells rang for Colorado’s first family this week in a historic first.

Gov. Jared Polis married his long-time partner Marlon Reis Wednesday at the University of Colorado in Boulder on the 18th anniversary of their first date. The couple’s 7-year-old daughter served as the flower girl, while their 9-year-old son was the ring bearer.

The now-husband and husband tied the knot in a small and intimate ceremony, a traditional Jewish wedding, which marked the first same-sex marriage of a sitting U.S. governor.

“We just thought we would have a small gathering: family, a few close friends, just keep it very intimate, but still have something that was meaningful to us and our nuclear families,” the 46-year-old Democratic governor told Colorado Public Radio.

Polis made history in 2011, when the then-lawmaker became the first gay parent in Congress. In January 2019 he made history again, when he was sworn in as the nation’s first openly gay governor. (The openly bisexual governor of Oregon, Kate Brown, became the first out-and-proud member of the LGBTQ community elected as governor in the U.S. in 2016.)

In this photo provided by Jocelyn Augustino, Rabbi Tirzah Firestone, center, officiates a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony attended by family and friends for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, left, and his partner, Marlon Reis, in Boulder, Colo. on Wednesday Sept. 15, 2021. Polis, who became the first openly gay man in the United States to be elected governor in 2018, married his longtime partner and first gentleman Reis, a writer and animal welfare advocate. (Jocelyn Augustino/)

Same-sex marriages were prohibited in Colorado as recently as 2014. That only changed in July of that year when a state constitutional ban was struck down in state district court. The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court made same-sex unions legal across the country.

“As I was growing up, marriage was not even in the realm of possibility,” Reis said earlier this week. “There was a lot of misinformation out there about what could potentially happen if you came out — what opportunities would you lose? How it would negatively impact you. So for a long time, the idea of getting married, we didn’t talk about it,” he told CPR.

The couple got engaged in December 2019, during a delicate time for the family.

Reis, who’s in his 40s, had been battling COVID-19 for about a week. The proposal came as he was getting ready to go to the hospital after his oxygen saturation levels dropped to a concerning level.

“I was getting my things ready. My daughter was crying in the corner — she didn’t want me to go,” he told The Colorado Sun. “My son was asking me a lot of technical questions: ‘When are you coming back? Do they know exactly what’s wrong?’ It was a very tense moment.”

As Polis assured him that everything was going to be fine, he got down on one knee and asked Reis to marry him.