Adrian Cardwell with Badge of Pride is collecting old photos from Dallas bars to help preserve Dallas LGBTQ+ history.
DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
Taffet@DallasVoice.com
If you’ve ever wanted to become a part of history, here’s your chance: Badge of Pride wants your Dallas bar pictures from 1945 to the present to scan, archive and maybe even include in an upcoming exhibit.
This isn’t the first public project of Badge of Pride. About 3,000 people walked through the organization’s LGBTQ+ history exhibit at the Irving Archives and Museum last summer. For most people, it was their first visit to the museum.
“People were so emotional,” said organizer and Badge of Pride founder Adrian Cardwell.
Many exhibit-goers told Cardwell they felt they were seen for the first time … in Irving … without protesters (even though they had prepared for protesters with Irving police).
Cardwell has been collecting local LGBTQ+ memorabilia for years, but one poster gave him an idea for his upcoming project.
“A number of years ago, I responded to an ad on Facebook Marketplace,” he said, and while he doesn’t remember what he had intended to buy, he does remember that he began talking to the seller and mentioned he was a collector of LGBTQ+ artifacts.
“He showed me a poster from JR’s from 1982,” Cardwell said. “It had sun damage and was rough for wear,” but Cardwell said he’d take it.
And, the seller said, he had boxes of albums and loose photos, too, if Cardwell wanted those.
When Cardwell was putting the pieces of last summer’s exhibit into his storage unit, he came across that poster and the boxes of photos. The pictures were taken at Dallas gay bars maybe 25 to 40 years ago. Many were of drag queens performing at the old Rose Room and at other venues.
And some of the photos were exhibition quality.
Next, Cardwell reached out to The Dallas Way, whose mission is to collect and preserve Dallas LGBTQ+ history. What about focusing on how the bars were the center of the LGBTQ+ community, he suggested.
Dallas Way President, Steve Atkinson thought that was a terrific idea.
“These pictures were on their way to the garbage bin and randomly came into my hands” Cardwell said, explaining what sparked the idea of an exhibit. “I thought, let’s scan them, get details about them and make them part of the permanent record.”
Cardwell said when he was coming out, the bars were the only place to meet other LGBTQ+ people. There weren’t community centers, and the organizations created by the LGBTQ+ community were laser-focused on care of people with HIV/AIDS. The bars were the only social outlet.
So preserving that legacy is important, and the plan was made to scan the photos and make them available for people to look at and identify who’s in them, where they were taken and approximately when they were taken.
\Then Cardwell decided to expand the project: What about all those bar pictures other people in the community have? How about setting up a place for people to bring their bar photos, scan them and add in the meta data?
Before scanning larger collections, like a file drawer of Dallas Voice bar photos or pictures from bar managers and owners, Cardwell wants to build a system, build parameters and create steps as they scan, identify and load the pictures onto the online Portal to Texas History housed at University of North Texas.
Assuming most pictures will be 4×6 inches, Cardwell said he has equipment that can scan a deck of photos quickly. The time-consuming chore will be digitizing the odd-shaped pics and then typing in the metadata for each and every picture.
To do this, Badge of Pride — working with The Dallas Way, Dallas Social Queer Organization and Coalition for Aging LGBT — has scheduled two digitizing events this summer. On June 2, Sister Helen Holy will host the event, and on July 23, Jenna Skyy will entertain as individuals have their photos scanned and provide the basic who-what-when-where info about each one.
Individuals who have photos they want to include should take them to Oak Lawn Place, Resource Center’s senior housing facility on Sadler Drive across Inwood Road from Inwood/Love Field Station, to have them scanned. But don’t worry about losing treasured images, when you’re done, you’ll leave with pictures in hand.
Some of the pictures collected will be included in a new exhibit that Cardwell is preparing to be shown as a pop-up exhibit at the next Outrageous Oral event that will be held at one of the bars on Cedar Springs in September.
For his exhibit in Irving last summer, Cardwell just this week received The Museum Impact Award by the American Alliance of Museums. He was also notified this week that he has won an Award of Excellence for his exhibit in the 32nd Annual Communicator Awards by the Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts in the Immersive and Experiential category.
That’s on top of two previous awards he won for the Irving exhibition: International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, 2025 Anthem Awards, Silver, and Texas Association of Museums, Mitchell A.Wilder Publication Design Award, Gold.