Jack Baker and Michael McConnell got married on September 3, 1971.
Not 2015.
Not 2004.
1971.
Yesterday marked 55 years since their wedding, and the fact that the couple are still together makes an already remarkable piece of LGBTQ+ history feel even more extraordinary.
Their story began in the 1960s, when Jack and Michael met and fell in love.
By 1967, the relationship had become serious.
Michael wanted more than a private promise between two men.
He wanted marriage.
“Find a Way for Us to Get Married”
That challenge became part of the course of Jack’s life.
He went to law school and began looking closely at the rules that supposedly prevented two men from marrying.
Their first attempt to obtain a marriage license in Hennepin County, Minnesota, was denied.
The couple challenged that rejection in a case that became Baker v. Nelson.
But the legal fight did not end there.
Jack and Michael eventually found another path.
They applied for a license in Blue Earth County.
And on September 3, 1971, they married.
University of Minnesota sources describe their ceremony as the first legal same-sex wedding in the United States.
Two Grooms in 1971
The wedding itself contained details that would feel perfectly ordinary at a gay wedding today.
In 1971, they were anything but ordinary.
A Methodist minister named Roger Lynn performed the ceremony.
Friends helped create a wedding cake topped with two grooms.
Jack and Michael also had rings engraved with messages that could be read as “Jack loves Mike” and “Mike loves Jack.”
They were not waiting for the rest of the country to decide whether their relationship deserved to exist.
They had already decided for themselves.
A Marriage That Never Ended
The decades that followed would bring enormous legal and cultural changes for same-sex couples in the United States.
Marriage equality would not become the law nationwide until the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015.
By then, Jack and Michael had already been together for nearly half a century.
Their own marriage was never dissolved.
And in 2018, a Minnesota court declared their 1971 marriage valid.
That legal recognition mattered.
But by then, the couple had already spent decades proving something no court could create for them.
They had built a life together.
55 Years Later
It is easy to tell Jack and Michael’s story as legal history.
It is also easy to turn them into symbols of a movement.
Both are true.
But the most moving part of their story may be much simpler.
Two men fell in love when the idea of marrying another man was almost unimaginable to most Americans.
Michael wanted a lifelong commitment.
Jack helped find a way.
They stood together at a wedding ceremony in 1971.
They exchanged rings.
Their friends put two grooms on the cake.
And 55 years later, they are still together.
Long before same-sex marriage became a national reality, Jack Baker and Michael McConnell were already living one.
Two grooms.
1971.
Still side by side. ❤️🌈
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