WYNN WAGNER now has an honest-to-gosh dad-gum mother-in-law named Rita. He and his hus­band — Rick Wag­ner — were mar­ried in Wash­ing­ton DC, after shack­ing up since the 1990s. Before the mar­riage, both their last names were Wag­ner. Nev­er­the­less, Wynn announced that he was tak­ing Rick’s last name.

Texas doesn’t rec­og­nize the civil mar­riage because it sanc­tions mar­riage apartheid at the expense of per­sonal rights.

He and Rick were also mar­ried in the Old Catholic Church. Texas doesn’t rec­og­nize their church mar­riage because its politi­cians can­not not accept reli­gious lib­erty and other pesky rights item­ized in the America’s constitution.

Dr. Wag­ner received a Th.D from St. Wol­bodo Sem­i­nary and else­where a Mas­ters of Lib­eral Arts and under­grad­u­ate degrees in Eng­lish and Phi­los­o­phy. “Ancient his­tory,” he said. “The earth has cooled sig­nif­i­cantly since all that.”

He is the son of Swedish nation­als but was adopted by an unsus­pect­ing and oth­er­wise inno­cent fam­ily in Fort Worth — has writ­ten numer­ous gay and spir­i­tual books, includ­ing the Vamp Camp series, influ­en­tial, Com­mit­ment Issues, A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Old Catholic Church, and Recov­er­ing Catholic (or “How to be Catholic With­out Being Roman Catholic”). He was the edi­tor of a hand full of litur­gi­cal texts cur­rently in use around the world.

Before that, he was a pro­gram­mer who helped write the tax soft­ware used by some of the world’s largest cor­po­ra­tions. He also wrote Opus-CBCS, a com­puter bul­letin board sys­tem that was wildly pop­u­lar in the 1980s. Opus gen­er­ated mil­lions of dol­lars for HIV and AIDS, back when almost nobody was help­ing fund research or car­ing for those suf­fer­ing from the disease.

He wrote an arti­cle called “HIV: Day One” for those who have just learned they have HIV. It is con­sid­ered one of the most widely read pieces for HIV patients and has been trans­lated into a dozen lan­guages, includ­ing Amer­i­can Sign Language.

Before pro­gram­ming and writ­ing, Wynn was a broad­caster in radio in Texas and New York. Before that, he was a pimply-faced kid who huffily ignored his adopted grand­mother when she told him to pay atten­tion to semi­colons and adverbs because he might need them someday.

He was awarded a key to the city by the mayor of Cor­pus Christi, Texas. It was a key to the city of Tulsa, Okla­homa, a town Wynn has never vis­ited. “No respect, I tell you,” he says.

He sang as a boy soprano in the Texas Boys Choir and appeared on such tele­vi­sion shows as Ed Sul­li­van and Perry Como. His singing took him to Carnegie Hall, to Europe, and to record dates like the last record­ing con­ducted by Igor Stravinsky.

Wynn Wag­ner is a mem­ber of The Authors Guild