Other openly gay office holders have included DISD School Board member Jose Plata (1995), Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez (2005), Dallas County District Clerk Gary Fitzsimmons (2006), and Dallas County Judge Jim Foster (2006). More openly gay people were elected to the city council in the next twenty-five years. The first openly gay man to be elected to the city council was Craig McDaniel in 1993. (“Bill”) Nelson, who was president of the Dallas Gay Alliance from 1984 to 1987, ran and lost in both 19. In 1977 Reverend James Harris became the first openly gay person to run for Dallas City Council, although he lost his race and came in fourth out of five candidates. In June 1978 Dallas hosted the Texas Gay Conference and invited San Francisco Board of Supervisors member and nationally-known gay rights activist Harvey Milk to speak, an indicator of the local community’s stature nationally. Supreme Court struck down all such anti-sodomy laws across the nation ( Lawrence vs. The law remained in place until 2003, when the U. Although United States District Court Judge Jerry Buchmeyer ruled in favor of Baker, his ruling was overturned in 1985 after an appeal by the state. Its president, Don Baker, a Dallas schoolteacher, had been fired for being gay, and in 1979 he sued, challenging the state’s sodomy law again ( Baker v. In 1975 the Dallas Gay Political Caucus (renamed the Dallas Gay & Lesbian Alliance in 1992), the first LGBT political organization in Dallas and the primary membership organization for the LGBT community, was organized. Political organization of the Dallas LGBT community grew at a rapid pace, spurred in part by media attention to the Buchanan case and to the 1969 Stonewall uprising. Supreme Court, the case was remanded to the lower courts. District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled the state’s sodomy law was unconstitutional ( Buchanan v. That same year, Alvin Buchanan filed a federal suit against the Dallas Police Department and claimed the police harassed and targeted gay men and women for arrest. Initially a social group, it began to publicly take on political issues, particularly after the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969. In 1965 the state’s first gay organization, The Circle of Friends, was established in Dallas. Police arrested forty-seven people in a single raid at an unnamed club on the edge of downtown Dallas early that year after undercover officers claimed to have observed “morals offenses.” Police reported they “found some women dressed as men and men clad in female attire.” In 1964 the Dallas Police Department’s Special Services Bureau arrested 460 persons for being “perverts,” the common term for describing gay people at the time. The locations of these gay bars were shared on a “need-to-know basis” to protect patrons from being “outed” and bar owners from police raids.
In the early 1950s several interior decorator shops, many gay-owned, opened along Cedar Springs Road in the Oak Lawn section of the city.ĭuring the next two decades, LGBT bars and gathering places remained concentrated primarily in the central business district, though a few began to open in the Oak Lawn area. Phil Johnson, whose recorded oral history recalls early gay social life in the city, stated that in the 1940s gay men in Dallas frequently met at the corner of Commerce and Akard streets, a spot referred to as “Maggie’s Corner,” due to its location at the base of the Magnolia Petroleum Building. A review of the musical burlesque 1492 said Stuart “works with graceful ease and without apparent effort.” A subsequent article reported that Stuart, who started as a chili stand operator in Dallas, had become a headliner “in the East and went to Europe, where he made a triumphal tour” and was described as “the best in the world.” Newspapers of the day rarely wrote about the subject, although in 1891, the Dallas Morning News frequently noted the performances of female impersonators, and one, Elliott Stuart, was frequently praised in the newspaper. There is little scholarly work on LGBT history in Dallas and few primary sources are known to exist.
Early documentation of gay and lesbian people in Dallas is virtually nonexistent.