Tammye Nash
Tammye Nash is the new senior editor of Dallas Voice. If the name sounds familiar, that’s because she’s also our old editor.
Tammye began writing for Dallas Voice in 1988. Then she left and came back, then she left, and this week she came back … to stay.
On her first day back in the office, she remembered some of the stories she worked on early in her career. She said she wrote a story called “The L Word” long before the Showtime TV series. Her story centered on Deb Elder and Kay Vinson’s fight to get the L into Dallas Gay Alliance.
Another first-year story centered on the old Crazy Crab on Oak Lawn Avenue. The building now houses Cyclone Anaya’s and Green Papaya. At the time, the building had been empty for more than a decade. A developer was working on renovating the building, but ran into some trouble — the building was haunted. Tammye said she participated in a séance the building owners performed. She said the evening was a lot of fun, but the club never opened and it was several more years before the building was occupied.
Over the years, Tammye covered a number of stories that were important to Dallas’ LGBT community. She covered Micah England’s quest to become a Dallas police officer at a time gays and lesbians were banned from the department. She covered the demonstrations against Judge Jack Hampton, who said he gave a murderer a lesser sentence because the victim was gay.
“And every week was about AIDS,” Tammye said.
She remembered two of her “starstruck” interviews — author Anne Rice and entertainer Eartha Kitt, whom she spoke to before an appearance at the Kalita Humphreys Theater.
In 2001, Tammye left Dallas Voice to work for The Cleburne Times-Review daily newspaper and then moved on to become editor of the Red Oak Chronicle. When original Dallas Voice editor Dennis Vercher’s health began to suffer from his long battle with AIDS, she returned in 2004 and became editor after Dennis’ death.
She left again in 2012 to do some freelance work and again write for the Cleburne newspaper. But now she’s back and everything at Dallas Voice seems just right.
Tammye lives in Fort Worth with her wife, Sandra, and their two teenage sons. They also share their home with a Chihuahua named Tinkerbell, an 8-month-old German shepherd named Akasha and a weird weird cat called Wilford Brimley.
