By Beth Hawkins, Photo: Kay Tobin/Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, The 74, June 29, 2022
In May 2021, as efforts to ban books on LGBTQ topics from school libraries were gaining political steam, “Two Grooms on a Cake: The Story of America’s First Gay Wedding” was published. It is a children’s story about Michael McConnell’s 1971 marriage to a man, which was upheld as legal by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015.
But McConnell isn’t just a protagonist in a book; as a librarian, he was instrumental in transforming libraries into the kind of welcoming places for LGBTQ kids that he craved as a boy.
It’s largely because of him and a handful of colleagues that library shelves today have space for books like “Two Grooms” — a historic accomplishment that McConnell, now 80 and enjoying a quiet retirement in Minneapolis with his husband, worries is endangered.
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