San Diego LGBT pioneer Robert Lynn passes away at 82
San Diego — Robert Lynn, a civil rights attorney who founded key business and political organizations in support of San Diego’s LGBTQ communities, died Sept. 14. He was 82.
Starting in the 1970s, Lynn forged relationships with organizations representing minorities and women, helping establish the LGBTQ community as a political force in the city, his colleagues and family members said.
In 1975, Lynn served as founding president of the San Diego Democrats for Equality, an influential LGBTQ organization originally known as the San Diego Democratic Club. Lynn chose the innocuous name for the group, without reference to sexual identity, to forestall opposition as the organization established itself. And in 1979, he launched the San Diego Equality Business Association, which was then called the Greater San Diego Business Association, to support LGBTQ businesses.
Lynn was born in Oklahoma City in 1938. He graduated from the University of Kansas in 1960 and entered the Navy as an officer, where he served in Vietnam. He left the Navy after nearly a decade of service and earned a law degree from California Western School of Law in San Diego, his husband, Kleon Howe, said. In 1975, the year California decriminalized same-sex relationships, Lynn founded what was then the San Diego Democratic Club, colleagues said. “Up until 1975, it was a felony in California for people of the same sex to engage in sexual relations,” Case said. “Bob had the foresight to say that the community needed to create some clout.”
Lynn died at home in his husband’s arms of complications from frontotemporal dementia after several years of illness, Howe said. Lynn is survived by his husband and numerous nieces and nephews.
“When we knew he was dying, we talked together about what he wanted in the end,”
Howe said. “He looked at me and held my hand and said, ‘no regrets.’”
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/obituaries/story/2021-09-22/civil-rights-attorney-robert-lynn-allied-minorities-women-lgbtq-community
San Diego Civil rights attorney and LGBTQ activist Robert Lynn, (left) with his husband Kleon Howe.
(Courtesy of Kleon Howe)
