Folks in Texas often have their own way of doing things, even when it comes to keeping track of history. And in Dallas' LGBTQ community that means preserving their history "The Dallas Way."
It is the name of a nonprofit whose mission is "to gather, organize, store and present the complete LGBTQ history of Dallas, Texas," its website states. The Dallas Way organization does that by collecting and preserving historical archives, by making and preserving video and audio recordings of people who helped make that history talking about it, by collecting and preserving written accounts of organizations and individuals, and by sharing that history through oral presentations and exhibits.
The Dallas Way traces its roots back to a conversation held more than a decade ago at the offices of Dallas Voice, the North Texas LGBTQ newspaper that will celebrate its 40th anniversary in May 2024. This reporter, an activist and pioneer in the community since the late 1970s — was interviewing community leaders Jack Evans and George Harris for an article marking their 50th anniversary.
As the two men recounted their stories, which included being arrested in the military for being gay and being fired from a sales job at Neiman Marcus for being gay, respectively, this reporter told them that their stories need to be preserved.
Evans and Harris had quite different reactions to that suggestion.
Evans, who has since died, went home and sent an email to more than 50 Dallas community leaders, describing his vision for a group that would preserve the stories of individuals and organizations through the decades. He headed the email, "Will it fly?"
Harris read the email and said, "Not another damn group."
Dallas, by the way, is known for forming groups for everything, and Harris and Evans helped start many of those organizations, including the Resource Center — originally known as the AIDS Resource Center that now includes the LGBTQ community center — and the North Texas LGBT Chamber of Commerce.
Evans' "Will it fly?" email sparked an interest in preserving North Texas' LGBTQ history, prompting a group of about 20 people to attend the first meeting with the idea of preserving and passing along stories that tell who the community is and how they got to the area.
The group decided it needed an archive to preserve documents, photos, and artifacts. After meeting with several local universities, The Dallas Way formed an alliance with the University of North Texas in Denton, about 30 miles north of Dallas.
UNT had recently built a cold-storage facility outfitted with the latest equipment to transfer photographs into JPGs and printed documents into searchable PDFs and to store artifacts including posters, T-shirts, buttons, and more. Dallas Voice donated the original typewriter used by the newspaper's longtime editor, the late Dennis Vercher, through the 1980s.
The LGBTQ Archive is just one of many collections at UNT preserving Texas history, but it's the most accessed collection. A number of graduate students have used the archive for their theses. Writers have used the collection in creating a variety of books and papers. And when screenwriters were researching what the AIDS crisis looked like in Dallas for the film "The Dallas Buyers Club," they replicated T-shirts and other paraphernalia stored in the archive for the movie.
The archives, which house a number of special collections including searchable PDFs of nearly every issue of the Dallas Voice, can be found online here.
For information on The Dallas Way, go to thedallasway.org.
David Taffet is a reporter for the Dallas Voice and can be reached at [email protected]
This article is part of the LGBTQ Media History Month Project coordinated by Philadelphia Gay News.
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