Love wins

LGBTQ+ civil rights pioneer and community activist George Harris, pictured here
on his wedding day in 2015, died Aug. 13 at the age of 92. A celebration of his life
is planned for this fall.

DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
Taffet@DallasVoice.com

George Harris and Jack Evans had been together more than 50 years when marriage equality came to Texas on June 26, 2015, in the form of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. A picture of them filing their marriage license at the Dallas County Clerk’s office appeared in newspapers around the world including London, Paris, Hong Kong and New Delhi.

They were featured in People magazine, and Harris said he got calls for interviews from even more newspapers, including the New York Times and the Jerusalem Post.

A little more than six months later, they were named Sweethearts Candy Valentine’s Day sweethearts. An ad for the candy featuring Harris and Evans was released on Jan. 19, 2016, which was their 55th anniversary.

Evans, 87, passed away a few months later, just short of the couple’s first legal wedding anniversary. Harris died last week at the age of 92.

Together Evans and Harris helped create many groups — including what is now known as Resource Center. After an arsonist set fire to the Dallas Gay Alliance’s storefront location on Cedar Springs, Harris and Evans approached DGA President William Waybourn to help them find a new home.

“DGA had used the old MCC Church, at 2701 Reagan St., as a meeting place for years. But I told them that the DGA could not afford to purchase it,” Waybourn said. “DGA was awash in the AIDS crisis and could barely afford to maintain its programs of educational and direct services, like the food bank and the nascent Nelson-Tebedo AIDS Clinic, that we had started after the fire, much less afford a mortgage.”

They said, “What if we could find a way?”

Waybourn said he should have known better than to misjudge their ability. Evans and Harris had already spoken to the Rev. Mike Piazza at Cathedral of Hope to finance the mortgage.

Soon, the deal was done.

The Dallas Way, the organization dedicated to preserving North aTexas’ LGBTQ history, grew out of an idea Evans had while sitting in the Dallas Voice’s office just before their 50th anniversary, telling stories from Harris’ and his past.

Evans sent out an email to community leaders asking, “Will it fly,” while Harris’ reaction to the idea was, “Oh, no. Not another damn group.”

But the damn group was created a few weeks later and has grown into one of the largest repositories of LGBTQ+ history in the country.

Among the stories Evans and Harris told were the stories about the discrimination they suffered through during the early 1950s. Evans was fired from Neiman Marcus for being gay. (He never did explain how someone can be too gay to work at Neiman Marcus.) And Harris told about being discharged from the Army and then arrested for being gay while working for the CIA.

At the time, it was illegal to enlist in the Army if you were gay. Under oath, Harris said, he had to certify he was not gay: “I had lied my way through getting into the army,” he said, adding that President Dwight Eisenhower was doing everything he could to rid the government of homosexuals.

Harris served in the Army for several years, training as a stenographer and becoming one of the best in the Army. He was transferred to Washington, D.C., where worked for the CIA.

But the lie finally caught up with him, and Harris was taken into custody, along with 26 other army stenographers. He was held for about six months, facing the threat of serving time in Leavenworth.

Instead of hard time, though, Harris was given a dishonorable discharge. Years later, that discharge was upgraded to honorable.

Harris had a friend in the State Department who had also recently lost his job for being gay.

The friend was from Seagoville and was heading back home to North Texas. He invited Harris to tag along.

Harris agreed, but after just one day in the suburbs, he headed for the city, renting a room at the Downtown Dallas YMCA for $12 a week. So many gay men lived there, Harris said, it was known in the LGBTQ+ community as “the French Embassy.”

One evening, a friend invited Harris out to a dinner party at a restaurant on Lomo Alto, off Lemmon Avenue. That’s where Harris met Evans, whom he described as the man of his dreams.

“We immediately hit it off,” Evans said, and they became a couple pretty quickly.

By the early 1960s there were a few gay bars in Dallas, but they closed by midnight. Harris told the story of how, one evening, young men invited everyone at one of the bars to a party in a house in East Dallas. They went to the party, then paddy wagons pulled up to the house.

The hosts who had invited everyone were vice cops, and they arrested 29 young men at the party.

Harris and Evans escaped by climbing out a window.

In the late 1970s, Evans and Harris were both unhappy with their jobs and decided to go into real estate. They rented as office on Lemmon Avenue in the same shopping center where they met. They were the first real estate agents that specialized in selling homes in Oak Lawn to the LGBTQ+ market.

After losing three agents to AIDS, and after their business had begun to grow with the addition of straight clientele, Evans and Harris merged their office with another agency, and that’s where the two men worked until they retired.

Despite their hectic business life, the two men they volunteered wherever they could. Harris was a notary, so during the AIDS crisis, after attorneys wrote wills for people living with AIDS, he would notarize them at no charge.

That became another organization: Legal Hospice of Texas.

In 1992, Harris and Evans were having lunch at Wyatt’s Cafeteria with a cadre of community leaders including John Thomas, Bruce Monroe and others, and Evans suggested that they schedule a monthly “power lunch” like that where LGBTQ+ professionals could network.

They first proposed naming their new group the Gay Chamber of Commerce, but when the Chamber of Commerce threatened to sue, they dubbed their group the Stonewall Business Association, Harris said.

For years, the Stonewall Business Association met in restaurants and at the new Community Center on the corner of Reagan and Brown, usually with a speaker scheduled for each luncheon.

Then the group reorganized into what is today the LGBTQ Chamber of Commerce.

In 2015, the Rev. Eric Folkerth, who was at the time pastor of Northaven United Methodist Church, urged Harris and Evans to have a church wedding. Folkerth asked his bishop for permission to perform the wedding at Northaven, but the bishop refused.

So, Evans and Harris began looking for another church. Midway Hills Christian Church welcomed the couple, and they had a religious ceremony there on March 1, 2015. In attendance were dozens of Methodist ministers from around the area and around the state who came in silent protest of the Methodist Church’s position on same-sex marriage.

Following the wedding, guests were invited to a reception held at Northaven. Harris commented at the time on how odd it was that you couldn’t marry at the church, but you could celebrate the wedding there.

When marriage equality became law almost four months later, Folkerth’s wife, Judge Dennise Garcia, performed the civil ceremony that was reported around the world.

“While Jack preferred a mild tone, George led with humor to avoid telling someone outright that they didn’t know what they were talking about,” Waybourn said. “As an example, if I spoke too long at an event, George would say, “Keep it shorter next time, I’m not getting any younger.”

“George was a truly remarkable man whose positive impact on our community is far reaching,” said his friend Steve Atkinson. “The legacy that he and Jack left will live on and continue to inspire many just as their lives always did.”

“Jack was everyone’s best friend, but George took a little longer to warm up,” Waybourn said.

“Once George accepted you, he became the best friend anyone could want.”

George Harris died Wednesday, Aug. 13, at the age of 92. His ashes will be interred with Evans’ in a private service in Olney, Texas. A celebration of life will be held in the fall. The headstone marking their grave is inscribed “Love Wins,” and on the back is their wedding date, “June 26, 2015.”