Karen Clark, the first lesbian to serve in the Minnesota House, has died at 80

Karen Clark, a trailblazing Minnesota state representative who was key in legalizing gay marriage and the first openly lesbian member of the Legislature, died on Tuesday. She was 80.

Clark, a DFLer, represented several neighborhoods in Minneapolis in the Minnesota House from 1981 to 2019.

She helped to ban LGBTQ+ discrimination from housing, employment and education in Minnesota in 2013. Under the Obama administration, she was honored as a “champion of change” for her work and served on former Gov. Rudy Perpich’s Task Force on Lesbian and Gay Minnesotans in 1990. Clark was born in Oklahoma and grew up on a sharecropping farm in Rock County.

In an MPR News documentary about the debate for marriage rights, Clark said “I was elected in 1980, the same day as Ronald Reagan. And that's where our similarities begin and end.”




https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/06/30/karen-clark-the-first-lesbian-to-serve-in-the-minnesota-has-died-at-80-years-old