Southwest Journal: A pioneering couple

“Everybody else was trying to figure out how not to be arrested, how not to be fired, how not to be exposed, how not to be threatened or killed, all of those things, and somehow Jack and Michael said, you know, no, we don’t want a bite out of the sandwich, we want the whole loaf of bread.”

The Wedding Heard 'Round the World (Michael McConnell and Jack Baker)“This is my magic room,” Michael McConnell says as he leads me into his bungalow’s dining room in the Lyndale neighborhood.

The walls are painted with a floor-to-ceiling mural of trees, mountains and a swirling sky. McConnell tells me his friend painted the room decades ago when he and his husband Jack Baker moved into the house in 1971.

Magic indeed.

McConnell and Baker were the first known same-sex couple in the nation to apply for a marriage license. They were married on Sept. 3, 1971 — more than four decades before the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling declaring same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states.

Now, a few months after their 44th anniversary, McConnell and Baker are telling their full story.

Full article.

Published in: Southwest Journal
By: Madison Bloomquist