I was in the middle of an unrelated archive search involving Candlestick Park late last year, when I ran across this editorial from July 16, 1970.

I’m used to discovering the unexpected on every trip to The Chronicle’s basement archive, but it was still a surprising find. My impression of The Chronicle during this era was that it still leaned a bit stodgy. Just three years earlier, my newspaper slotted Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech in front of 10,000 at U.C. Berkeley on page A8, then covered the top quarter of the front page with a headline about Hippie parenting run amok. Look at any Datebook section from the late 1960s, and you’re much more likely to see a feature on Engelbert Humperdinck than The Rolling Stones.

But the Chronicle was ahead of its time when it came to gay marriage. Take a look …

The editorial falls just short of an outright endorsement of gay marriage, but I’m still shocked by the forward thinking. This was 44 years ago — 43 years before the state finally legalized gay marriage. Keep in mind that Gavin Newsom was 2 years old in 1970, the city was still two years away from the first San Francisco Pride parade, and almost eight years away from Harvey Milk’s election as supervisor. (I was born the following month.)

The editorial came on the last day of a series of thoughtful front-page articles, profiling gay and lesbian families in San Francisco. If there’s interest, I’ll post those here or on The Big Event Facebook page in the next few days. I was thrilled/proud to see the editorial, but sad reading some of the articles. Some of the families and supporters in 1970 spoke of rights they wouldn’t get for decades, like they might happen in the next few years. I suspect many didn’t see a legal gay marriage in their lifetime.

The entire editorial page is below. The gay marriage editorial is on the bottom left. Note that not everything in the paper was super-progressive that day. One respondent in “Question Man” suggested psychiatry wasn’t necessary because people have priests to talk to.

And the “A Smile A Day” feature read: “The way some men get worked up about marriage, you’d think it was their idea.”

Thanks, Archie Bunker …

PETER HARTLAUB is the pop culture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and founder/editor of The Big Event. He takes requests. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/peterhartlaub. Follow The Big Event on Facebook.