Posts Tagged: Minnesota


20
May 10

DEAD UNEQUAL

 

Even in the grave it seems you’re still unequal.

Did you watch A Single Man, Tom Ford’s film starring Colin Firth about a gay professor widowed when his lover is killed in a car carsh?  He’s barred from the funeral by the homophobic family of his dead lover. 48 years after the film is set it’s still happening.

Anyways, the Governor Tim Pawlenty (Republican presidential candidate)  is screwing over gay couples again.  This time it is by rejecting the right of gays to claim dead domestic parnters’ bodies as proposed in a “Final Wishes” bill 

Yeah – cos indentifiying and collecting my dead domestic partner hurts your marriage? WTF!?

Says Pawlenty: it’s a “non-existent problem” (except when you get turned away from the morgue in the middle of your grief) and  “I oppose efforts to treat domestic relationships as the equivalent of traditional marriage. Accordingly, I am opposed to this bill.” (yeah, right on moron)

While this might be good news for lawyers and bigots, it’s a genuine travesty in the same US state where the first gay marraige happened 40 years ago this week (later overturned) and incidentally where the original book version of A Single Man, by Christopher Isherwood is published by University of Minnesota Press.


18
May 10

THE FIRST MODERN GAY MARRIAGE: 40 YEARS AGO TODAY

Photo by R. Bertrand Heine

Today I honour Jack Baker and James Michael McConnell who 40 years ago today applied to be married in Minnesota, USA and were denied the right. The US Supreme Court refused to hear their appeal, but they did manage to obtain a license from a different county, and found a Methodist minister to marry them in 1971.  The beat the Canadian couple Michel Girouard and Regeant Trembley to the punch by a year

Jack told LOOK magazine at the time: “Straight and gay people both asked us why we can’t live together quietly and not cause trouble, the answer is simple: we want equal rights – whatever heterosexuals have, we want too.” Continue reading →