Marriage Equality: justice delayed, justice denied

John Singer, top left, and Paul Barwick tried to get a King County, Washington marriage license on Sept. 20, 1971. They were turned down and lost subsequent court battles. Singer, who was 26 at the time, died of cancer in 2000. Barwick, who was 24, now lives in San Francisco. Forty-one years later, in the same building, Terry Miller, (bottom left) and Dan Savage were granted their marriage license.
     On May 18, 1970, Mike McConnell (center left) and Jack Baker were refused a Minnesota marriage license in Hennepin County. Both still live together in Minneapolis. Baker became the first gay student body president of a major American University and the first Minnesota Student Association president to be reelected. Baker, a lawyer, later arranged for his boyfriend to adopt him, establishing a legal relationship and decades of tax deductions. He also got a marriage license in a second attempt, but Minnesota refused to honor it, although it was never revoked. Baker and McConnell appeared at a "Time Out" conference on human sexuality at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in 1972, ruffling the feathers of several university regents and a state senator.
     They were good at tag teaming a crowd. AKSARBENT saw them in Lincoln and remembers Baker railing against the sexual stereotyping exemplified by icons like the Marlboro Man, at which point his boyfriend, on cue, pulled a pack of said brand out of his shirt pocket and waved them at the crowd, smiling broadly. This got a big laugh from more than a few future pig farmers in the student union who evidently had not considered the reality that such manly cigarettes were also smoked by homos.
     (In those days, you could light up in the Student Union. Lots of people even did so in class, despite "no smoking" signs because, hey, the professors did!)
     Photos: top, Tom Barlet, Seattle Post-Intelligencer; middle, R. Bertraine Heine/Associated Press, bottom, Nate Gowdy, Seattle Gay News