Ann Brown, left, was volunteer coordinator for Bill Nelson, right, in Nelson’s 1987 campaign
for Dallas City Council. Also pictured is Nelson’s partner, Terry Tebedo, center.
(Photo courtesy of Mike Anglin)
DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
Taffet@DallasVoice.com
Longtime LGBTQ+ activist Ann Brown died last week after an extended illness. She was a resident of Oak Lawn Place, Resource Center’s senior housing facility, where she was surrounded by friends.
“How many people get to be part of a miracle?” Brown said of the senior living facility. “Oak Lawn Place is the answer to many prayers.”
Brown’s days as an activist date back to the 1970s. She was an early Dallas Gay Alliance board member and was an organizer of the 1979 March on Washington. Bill Nelson was the first openly gay person to run for public office in Dallas, and Brown worked on his city council campaigns in1985 and 1987.
William Waybourn, Nelson’s campaign manager, said Brown was a volunteer in Nelson’s first campaign and volunteer coordinator on his city-wide 1987 campaign. Campaign headquarters, he said, were in the back of Crossroads Market, a shop at the corner of Cedar Springs Road and Throckmorton Street, where Hunky’s Hamburgers now stands, that Waybourn, Nelson and Terry Tebedo owned and operated.
In an email to Mike Anglin earlier this year, Brown said, “Such challenging, yet productive times we had then. A piece of my heart still mourns for Terry [Tebedo], Bill [Nelson], John [Thomas], Don [Baker], and many more.
“People often speak of ‘the good ole days’ with such high regard,” she added. “I have come to believe the ‘good ole days’ are the days when you are loved and get to love.”
When she spoke at an Outrageous Oral presentation for The Dallas Way in 2013, Brown admitted that was her first visit to S4, where the event was held She was amazed at what she saw, she said, asking, “Who ever heard of a gay bar with an elevator? And a stage with lights that the performers didn’t drag from home?”
“Oh, my God this is marvelous,” she declared of the club.
As a community, we’d come a long way from days that Brown remembered when people of color had to show three picture IDs to get into the bars on Cedar Springs, and women couldn’t wear open-toed shoes into those bars. It was a rule intended to keep women out of what were thought of as bars for men.
In her presentation, Brown talked about coming out to her mother. She said organizers of the first March on Washington for LGBTQ+ rights had warned everyone that they should come out to their families because the march was likely to be covered on the news, and they might possibly appear on TV.
When she did come out to her family, she said her mother’s reaction was to tell her that she only wanted Ann to be happy.
Brown called herself a child of the ’50s, someone who wrote her thesis on a typewriter with carbon paper. She also said she could talk about what it was like in a world before AIDS, comparing that world to the current day when a whole generation of her friends are gone.
“Driving down Cedar Springs, those aren’t just names,” she said referring to the Nelson Tebedo Clinic. “Harvey Milk isn’t just a movie to me. Those are my friends.”
Brown said she was often asked why they worked so hard to stage the first March on Washington. In response, she explained, “We worked to create a community that would be a safer place to be who we were.”
Brown served for a number of years on the board of what was then known as the Dallas Gay Alliance. The board debated whether “gay” included everybody or if “lesbian” needed to be included in the name. But Brown said some men said the word “lesbian” as if it was a dirty word — but “not in the good way.”
“Lesbian” was added to the organization’s name in 1993.
At the beginning of the AIDS crisis, Brown said the North Texas LGBTQ community had seen already what was going on in other cities.
“We saw things were happening around the country in a different way than they were happening here,” she said. “People were dying every day just because they were gay.”
But, she said, “The Dallas way was very different from other places.
“Dallas wasn’t San Francisco. Dallas wasn’t even Houston. There was a Dallas way,” Brown said. “We went to so many city council meeting and meetings behind the scenes and board meetings. But we didn’t go in throwing Molotov cocktails. We went in dressed the Dallas way to make things happen.”
Brown was a recipient of the Extra Mile Award and the National Leather Association’s Woman of the Year award, and she was one of the original co-hosts of KNON’s LGBTQ+ talk show Lambda Weekly.
Brown concluded her Outrageous Oral presentation by telling a story from her childhood.
She said that when she was four years old, someone asked her, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Without missing a beat, she looked up at the man and said, “I just want to make a difference in the world.”
She said it was something her parents always said, and she took it to heart from a young age.
“I hope that I have made a difference in my community, because there were so many times I was the only woman there or the only person of color there,” Brown said.
Ann, on behalf of your community, we know that you certainly did make a difference in the world. n
Dallas Voice will publish Ann Brown’s complete obituary when it is available. A memorial service is pending at Oak Lawn Place where she lived.
Rest in Power, Ann. You are missed.