50 years ago, Minneapolis redefined LGBTQ+ rights

It was likely one of the last pieces of city policy passed that winter, just before the New Year, a parting gift from a progressive city council.

On December 30, 1975, Minneapolis became the first city to adopt a trans-inclusive LGBTQ+ non-discrimination ordinance. Fifty years later, the United States still lacks similar protections on a federal level. 

Minneapolis was special in that the right people were there at the right time, said Seth Goodspeed, director of development and communications at OutFront Minnesota, the state’s largest LGBTQ+ rights organization.

 “Minneapolis, since the early ’70s, has really been a leader in the gay rights movement,” he said. “That comes out of a lot of the student organizing at the University of Minnesota in the late 60s.” 

It was home to Jack Baker and Michael McConnell, two men who, in 1971, figured out how to legally marry, the first recorded same-sex marriage in history. It was also the stomping ground of Steve Endean, who founded the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign.

Endean started lobbying a city alderman, Earl Netwal, in 1973 to pass a gay rights ordinance. His timing was just right. In 1974 progressives won the mayoral race and the city council. That year they voted 10-0 to ban discrimination on the basis of “sexual preference.” 

The next year, Tim Campbell, a local activist and publisher of the GLC Voice in Minneapolis, penned a trans-inclusive policy. 

The council passed the ordinance on December 30, right before their term ended and a more conservative council was sworn in — one that would unsuccessfully threaten the ordinance later. 

“I think it was a pendulum,” Goodspeed said. “The pendulum was sort of swinging back toward a more conservative mayor and a conservative city council.”

But despite that pendulum, Minneapolis changed minds, Goodspeed said, if only because it showed that non-discrimination protections actually didn’t change much for straight or cisgender people.

“You’re able to say, ‘We passed this two years ago, last year, in the past five years, and nothing’s really changed, there is no boogeyman under the bed,’” he said. “We’ve had these protections since the 1970s and all these fears that they might have … just never came to fruition.”