Seattle gay rights pioneer reflects on activism

[ccharles000]

As the fight over Referendum 71 geared up this summer, I wrote a post looking back at the history of gay rights in Seattle. A couple weeks later, I got an e-mail from a reader.

"Was that me in the 1971 file photo with John (Faygele) Singer?" Paul Barwick asked.

Barwick, now 62, appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer when he and his partner, John Singer, applied for a marriage license at the King County Administration Building on Sept. 20, 1971.

The couple planned their request as a way to get visibility for a subject "no one would speak about," Barwick said.

"We knew they weren't going to give us one, but damn it, they were going to have to tell us no to escort us out the door," Barwick said this summer from his home in San Francisco, where he's lived for 25 years.

Their protest made national headlines.

"I don't think that we realized quite how big it was until later. I was getting letters for years, having people coming up to me saying, 'You wouldn't believe how much hope you gave me.'"

http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/archives/183982.asp