M. Rhys Dotson
DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
Taffet@DallasVoice.com
The Dallas Way: Gay Rights in a Conservative City by M. Rhys Dotson, published by New York University Press. Available atAmazon.com
When I received M. Rhys Dotson’s new book, The Dallas Way: Gay Rights in a Conservative City, I wondered if Dallas Voice would be mentioned. I turned to page 1, and there I was, quoted by name:
“Bill Nelson famously noted that when members of Dallas’s gay community went to city hall, they always ‘put on a shirt and tie.’ According to David Taffet…” and he explains the quote from an interview I had done with the UNT LGBTQ+ archives.
The second thing I wondered about was that subtitle. Was Dallas still seen as a conservative city? A Republican hasn’t been elected to a county-wide office in two decades. And 10 of our 12 state legislators are Democrats as well.
Then I began reading the book. The story of Dallas’ gay community (with some lesbian help, mostly named Viv and Louise, Dotson explains) begins in the ’70s and goes about as far as Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court decision that declared the state’s sodomy law unconstitutional. That was also the year Dallas went from red to purple and in the next couple of election cycles turned blue.
Dotson is an associate professor of instruction at University of Texas at Tyler. His focus is on civil rights and LGBTQ+ communities, so hopefully he still has a job.
The Bill Nelson quote does set the stage for how we got things done in Dallas. It’s no accident Cathedral of Hope became the largest gay-identified church in the world. And it’s no accident that the first (of now 50) and largest Black Tie Dinner is held here.
And when we saw political opportunity, we grabbed it. In the early 1990s, the Dallas City Council changed to single member districts, and Oak Lawn was split down the middle.
Dallas Gay Alliance was told in no uncertain terms that was done purposely so we’d never get a gay or lesbian elected.
Instead, we elected Chris Luna and Craig McDaniel, both gay, to those two districts. Then, for good measure, we elected Paul Fielding to a North Dallas seat. Since then, we’ve had four gay mayors pro tem.
How did they and others continue to get elected? We did it the Dallas way. Once in office, our LGBTQ+ council members provided great neighborhood services.
But I’m getting away from the book. The Dallas Way included a number of lawsuits.
In his book, Dotson traces a crackdown on the gay community by Dallas Police Department’s Vice Squad after the Anita Bryant-led campaign to repeal Miami’s non-discrimination ordinance in the late 1970s.
When some gay men were arrested for dancing together at Village Station then saw charges dismissed by the judge who found that the DPD officers were lying, that was our first court victory.
Then Baker v. Wade led to Texas’ sodomy law being declared unconstitutional — at least until that ruling was overturned. But Baker led to Lawrence v. Texas which overturned anti-gay sodomy laws across the country.
And finally, Dotson discusses England v. The City of Dallas, which changed hiring practices at DPD. Mica England sued the city when she wasn’t hired by the police department because she was lesbian. How did they know? It was a question on the employment application.
And when it came to facing the AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s, we again tackled things The Dallas Way. In many cities, new organizations competed against each other to provide the same services. Here, agencies grew by looking for what was not being provided. And AIDS
Arms was established to coordinate care among the various organizations.
But the community didn’t always play nice. Dotson recounts some of the ugly demonstrations staged by GUT*S — Gay Urban Truth Squad. (Why not ACT UP? Because GUTS predated the New York organization that went national.)
GUTS fits into The Dallas Way mold. The same people who put on a suit and tie to go to city hall were out putting crosses in a field to make a point about the number of deaths from AIDS. In 1988, the city spent $500,000 filling in an excavation for a project that had gone bankrupt along what is now The Katy Trail. The amount spent on AIDS funding that year during the height of the AIDS crisis was just $55,000.
And a protest outside Parkland Hospital centered on the AIDS clinic not having the money to offer AZT, the only drug available at the time to treat HIV. John Thomas, who was among the organizers of the protest along with Bill Hunt and Bill Nelson, put on his suit and tie, went to city hall and negotiated an end to the protest and an increase in AIDS spending without anyone catching that he was one of the protesters.
And while a lot of women were instrumental in implementing The Dallas Way, their story is told mostly through the work of Louise Young and Vivienne Armstrong. No slight is meant. The book is well documented — the book includes 30 pages of footnotes. Young and Armstrong donated their papers to the University of North Texas LGBTQ+ archive, making them readily available to researchers, so their story was easy to access.
The book was both fun and sad to read — fun because I knew just about every name mentioned, and sad because so many of those people are gone. But it shows how valuable the work of the organization called The Dallas Way, which collects and archives the history of the LGBTQ+ community in Dallas, is.