Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyPosts Tagged As: Paul Varnell
December 11th, 2011
Paul Varnell (Photo by Rex Wockner)
I learned of his death Friday evening, but wanted to wait until there was a more complete obituary available, appropriately at Windy City Times where he was a columnist in the 1990s. He left WCT in 1999 to start Chicago Free Press, and remained there until 2009, just before the paper folded.
Journalist Rex Wockner remembers trying to marry Paul at one point:
“He and I, as a journalistic exercise, tried to get a marriage license in Cook County in 1989. And when rebuffed, we filed human-rights complaints with the city and the state. We lost. We claimed sex discrimination but they told us it was sexual-orientation discrimination and that that wasn’t illegal at that time in Illinois. The Sun-Times made a big story of our little effort. We turned down an invite to appear on Oprah. I suppose everyone is unique, but Paul was unlike anyone I’ve ever known. I think it was the degree of his independence and the degree of his self-sufficiency that stood out. He had very specific ideas about how he wanted to live his life—and that is exactly how he lived it, each day and without compromise.”
Paul’s interests were many:
“Paul was a man of many and varied interests. He could discourse with equal facility about the philosophy of Friedrich Hayek or the latest superhero comic books. He could review a book of art photography, describe an opera recording or analyze the latest public-opinion data about issues of concern to the gay community.
“I always appreciated his annual articles about the survey of entering freshmen into U.S. colleges and universities. Nobody but Paul was able to discern sometimes subtle trends in those polls, often portending monumental changes in attitudes toward gay men and lesbians. Today’s greater acceptance of ideas about equal marriage rights and the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell were visible to Paul years ago in those freshmen surveys, but other researchers and journalists, looking at other questions and concerned about other issues, didn’t see the trends.”
I never met Paul, having only gotten to know him via a listserve. He was, as described in the obituary, a curmudgeon, but he also had a quiet generosity about him. When I was just getting this web site off the ground, he mentioned that he enjoyed this satire I had written and contributed one of his own for me to publish, “Origins of Heterosexuality”.
Paul had been ill for the past three years following a stroke and pneumonia. There are no plans for a memorial, but donations can be made in his name to the Howard Brown Health Center.
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