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TOM CRANN: These last few years, it has been hard to escape the issue of same-sex marriage. But there was a time back in the early 1970s, where it was on the radar of very few people, gay or straight. One Minnesota couple was focused on it for their relationship and as a legal battle.

Jack Baker and Michael McConnell applied for and were ultimately granted a marriage license and were married in 1971. Their marriage was at issue when the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in 1971 that denying same-sex marriage did not violate the Constitution. Well, last month's decision by the US Supreme Court overturned that Minnesota ruling from over 40 years ago. Jack Baker and Michael McConnell live in Minneapolis and they joined me in the studio earlier this week. I asked Jack where he was and what he thought when he heard the news about the Supreme Court's decision.

JACK BAKER: I got a call 8 o'clock in the morning from somebody who keeps track of that and told me that the ruling had come through. And so I didn't react until I had a chance to actually read the opinion. But it was one of those things that I kind of expected 40 years ago, actually.

TOM CRANN: Michael?

MICHAEL MCCONNELL: I was still in bed and Jack came in. I heard the phone ring and Jack came in and said, I just got a call and they made the ruling now. And like Jack, we knew that this was inevitable. We knew that ultimately what we began in 1970 was going to happen. So it was not really a surprise. But I would say--

TOM CRANN: But what feeling did you have or what went through your mind?

MICHAEL MCCONNELL: Yeah.

TOM CRANN: Relief or completion or--

MICHAEL MCCONNELL: Well, I kind of felt like perhaps the word for me would be a vindication that we were right, that what we had raised in 1970 was now affirmed, and that we had been right.

TOM CRANN: Jack?

JACK BAKER: What concerned me all along is why did it take 40-something years for something that-- when I was a second year law student, one of the first courses I took was constitutional law in which they talk about equal protection under law. And so to me, this whole thing was intuitively obvious. And so if it's intuitively obvious to a second year law student, why did it take the judges of the Supreme Court and all the courts to take 43 years to figure out that equal means equal.

TOM CRANN: That's a long time.

JACK BAKER: That's a very long time.

TOM CRANN: Was there any sense of hopelessness or frustration or did you ever say to yourself, this just isn't going to happen in our lifetimes?

JACK BAKER: No, never. I was shocked when it became an issue in the election of the President of the United States with Clinton, Bill Clinton. And then it went on for--

TOM CRANN: Defense of Marriage.

JACK BAKER: Right. Marriage is marriage.

TOM CRANN: And then in 2004, a proposed constitutional amendment.

JACK BAKER: Yeah, all that stuff. And I thought, my god, this issue is quite something. It's got everybody talking and then it spread around the world.

MICHAEL MCCONNELL: The real truth of the issue comes from a very simple thing that we also spoke a great deal about in our early years as activists and those 10 years when we were highly active and all over the country and in Canada. And that was gay people need to come out and be honest and be who they are. Because what that does is it creates a discussion. And once the discussion begins to take place, the truth becomes reality.

It's your brother, it's your cousin, it's your best friend, it's the colleague that you work with. And these are all people. Some are really great, really nice people. Some people are kind of I really wouldn't want to associate with that person.

But what it does is it tells the truth. And once that happens, the issue of marriage, love, and commitment of two people becomes the reality for any loving relationship, whether it's same gender or opposite gender.

TOM CRANN: I want to ask about your marriage license.

JACK BAKER: OK.

TOM CRANN: There's one that was reproduced in The New York Times it says Hennepin County, but the one at the time of your marriage was issued by Blue Earth County? Do I have that correctly?

JACK BAKER: Yes.

TOM CRANN: And is that one valid today, given the change in law in the state of Minnesota on August 1, 2013?

JACK BAKER: Yeah. Nobody has ever challenged that in court. Only a court has the power to invalidate a valid marriage contract. And the county attorney in Blue Earth County did not go to court. So as of now, there has never been a court who has declared that marriage contract to be invalid. So as far as we're concerned, under the law, it is a valid marriage and a valid marriage contract.

TOM CRANN: And I imagine in 1971, that idea of gay people getting married wasn't even in popular consciousness in the gay community, right?

MICHAEL MCCONNELL: That's absolutely right. That is absolutely right.

TOM CRANN: Was it an extraordinary idea to both of you? Obviously not to you, Mike.

JACK BAKER: When Mike proposed, I laughed because I had not even heard of-- those were thoughts that I hadn't thought before. And so I kind of laughed. But since I wanted him to be my lover, I figured, well, OK, I will do it. Then I'll find a way to make it happen.

And I said that that means I'll have to go to law school. I was an engineer at the time and practicing engineer, later become licensed. But I said, well, OK, we'll just do it. And that became our agenda that we would work a way to get me into law school and to figure out how to make it happen.

TOM CRANN: So, Michael, you proposed. And Jack, you took up the challenge of making it happen.

MICHAEL MCCONNELL: Right.

TOM CRANN: Is that--

MICHAEL MCCONNELL: Well, I basically said to him, if I'm going to be committed to you, you've got to find a way for us to be legally married. Otherwise, I'm not committing to you. And he took me seriously, as he should have.

TOM CRANN: And what did your other gay friends at the time say about that?

MICHAEL MCCONNELL: It was interesting because during those times, longevity in gay relationships was not the sort of thing that people thought of as the norm, though certainly, I knew couples who had been together 20 years, so I knew that it was possible. But the norm was not for people to stay together. So if you were together as a couple for three years or two years or four years, people kind of looked up to you as a role model for something that could happen.

And I think that by the time we hit 1970, and by the time we were applying for the marriage license here in Minnesota, we had been together four years so people saw us clearly as a couple. And like you said a little earlier, a lot of gay people didn't buy this. Many women, many gay women, for example, saw marriage as a male-dominated patriarchal institution that oppressed women. And they didn't want anything to do with that.

And many gay men of those times saw it as an affront to a more free sexual environment. Because what they were doing was modeling this on the heterosexual norm of a monogamous, faithful, no varying off the path kind of relationship, which is maybe an ideal, but not always reality. We had our own interpretation of what marriage should be. It was more toward perhaps the traditional with our own twist on that to meet our particular needs. But it was nonetheless the idea of marriage.

TOM CRANN: Jack Baker, Michael McConnell, thank you both for coming in and sharing your story. I appreciate it.

MICHAEL MCCONNELL: Thank you.

JACK BAKER: Thank you for inviting us.

TOM CRANN: There's more about Jack Baker and Michael McConnell on our website now, mprnews.org. And if you follow me on Twitter Tom Crann, I just tweeted a link to an interview, a television interview on The David Susskind Show 1973, in which they predict that gay marriage would prevail more than 40 years ago, saying many of the same things they said in our interview just a couple of days ago.