Jack Baker (activist)

Michael McConnell and Jack Baker are pioneering advocates of marriage rights for gay couples. Jack Baker was a stage name used by Richard John Baker in the 1970s to promote full equality for gay men and women. He and Michael McConnell applied in Hennepin County for a license to marry, then appealed its denial to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which dismissed the claim. "Under the law at the time (since repealed) governing the [U.S.] Supreme Court’s jurisdiction over appeals from state-court decisions, Baker v. Nelson reached the justices as a mandatory appeal." The State argued that the marriage license issued previously in Blue Earth County proved that the "Questions Raised by This Appeal Are Moot."

Before the Minnesota court halted marriage licenses to same-sex couples, which were not forbidden by existing statutes, Baker and McConnell re-applied, this time in Blue Earth County, succeeded and became the “first same-sex couple in history to be legally married”. The 1972 decision "does not reach back to Baker and McConnell" since the two obtained their license and were married "a full six weeks" previously. The National Archives came to the same conclusion.

Baker and McConnell were gay activists in the U.S. state of Minnesota from 1969 to 1980. They were invited often to appear publicly in the U.S.A. and Canada at college events, schools, businesses, churches, etc.

Gay activists from Minnesota Free University created a campus organization at the University of Minnesota to be run by and for gay students. They called it Fight Repression of Erotic Expression (FREE), which the University recognized in 1969, shortly before the Stonewall riots, and elected first-year law student Jack Baker as president. It was the second such organization in the United States, following the Student Homophile League recognized by Columbia University in 1967.

"FREE is the first student gay organization to gain recognition in the upper mid-west," the organization's news release proclaimed. "Its leaders believe it to be the first such organization on a Big Ten campus."

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Wikipedia