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After hours you could see the drag shows move from the bars to the diner. (in the current location of the Pappadeaux’s parking lot). Today I am an active member of Legacy, the COH group for those over fifty years of age, as well as Coat of Colors, the COH African-American group.ĭuring these early years I remember several diversions. One was late nights at the Lucas B&B diner at Oak Lawn and Bowser. I have attended the MCC and its successor, Cathedral of Hope, off and on over the ensuing 42 years. Other than a few bars, Union Jack Clothing Store, and Crossroads Market, there was not much in the way of a gay community. That same summer I first visited the Metropolitan Community Church (“MCC”) at Reagan and Brown, which at that time was only six years old. In the fall of ’76, I joined OLTA – Oak Lawn Tennis Association - which played at Samuell Grand Park. I don’t recall an organized theme, merely a procession of speakers. I can still hear the newly-released Frampton Comes Alive blaring from the loudspeakers on stage. It was in Exall Park near Baylor Hospital – also near two early bars, the Villa Fontana (oldest operating gay bar in the US until it closed years later) and the Fontainebleau. In the summer of 1976 I attended what I believe to be the first ever gay rally in Dallas.
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I then moved into my own efficiency in the Saracen Apartments at Hall and Carlisle Streets.
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In March,’76, I packed up my car and moved back to Dallas, where I spent my first ten days in a rented room in the Downtown YMCA on Elm Street. (by the time I returned to Dallas permanently, the “ OP” had moved to Denton Drive Cutoff near Maple and Inwood, and later moved to Harwood Street near downtown). During this trip I twice visited the original Old Plantation on Rawlins Street in Oak Lawn, before it burned to the ground. In the fall of 1975, two college roommates, Ronald Harris and Frank Stotts, invited me to come down to Dallas by train and spend a month with them for a ‘trial run’ of my moving back to Dallas.
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We were instructed to park our cars by backing tightly against the building so that sheriff deputies could not record our license plates (Kansas doesn’t have front license plates). There was also one gay bar in North Topeka, near the river, called The Other Side. I still remember slouching down in the dark Jayhawk Theatre in 1974 to see Boys in the Band. I would occasionally take a bus to Kansas City for a weekend of ‘coming out’ in the bars. I moved back into my parents’ home in Topeka, Kansas and continued at Washburn University Law School. After graduating from SMU in 1973, I enrolled in law school at SMU, but after the first year could not afford to stay.