You may not know that there was a liberal priest in San Francisco who was performing same-sex marriages as far back as 1968. But there was, and he was a much beloved and sometimes controversial figure in the local Episcopal diocese.

Reverend Robert Warren Cromey passed away last week at the age of 93, and he's remembered as a principled, compassionate, progressive clergyman who dedicated his life to celebrating inclusion and advocating for equality.

On his Facebook page, Cromey's header image is a quote: "I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace."

As the Bay Area Reporter explains, Cromey was injured in a fall in his home last month, and while getting ready to come home from a rehabilitation facility, he died in his sleep on January 14, one month shy of his 94th birthday.

While Cromey was straight, and married to his wife of many years, Ann Cromey, he moved from New York to San Francisco in 1962 and immediately became an outspoken advocate for homosexual equality and civil rights. He gave a guest sermon at Grace Cathedral in 1963, as the Chronicle reports, the same year he attended the March on Selma, advocating for the equal treatment of gay people — a sermon that got him "banished" to St. Aidan’s Episcopal in Diamond Heights.

"The Gospel lesson for the day spoke of the Christian concern for the outcasts," Cromey himself recalled.

As Ann Cromey tells the paper, "[That sermon] was so radical that most people thought he was completely crazy. That was the last time he was invited to preach at Grace Cathedral."

Reverend Cromey would go on to stand with Rev. Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial at a 1965 press conference protesting the arrest of drag queens at a New Year's Eve ball — a pivotal moment in the LGBTQ civil rights moment in San Francisco. And when he later became rector of Trinity Church on Gough Street, the oldest Episcopal parish in the West, he became known for radical inclusion.

He performed his first lesbian wedding in 1968, and in 1982 he allowed a gay wedding to take place at Trinity Church. In 1996, a gay wedding at Trinity was broadcast on ABC's news magazine "Turning Points." As the BAR recounts, he also presided over 72 funerals at Trinity Church in the 1980s for gay men who died of AIDS.

Cromey wrote his own brief memoir about his involvement in the LGBTQ civil rights movement, explaining that this was purely an issue of equal rights for him, for a persecuted minority. But, he says, he believes his own father was a closeted bisexual.

"The Bible appears to say some negative things about homosexual activity. I am not a Biblical literalist," Cromey writes. "Those passages must be looked at in light of the date, the context in which they were uttered and the prejudices of people at the time they were written. None of them are the inspired word of God."

"He was very brave," Ann Cromey tells the BAR. "People really did think he was crazy... I think he was highly principled and not afraid of opposition."