They headed to Village Station, a club once named the Old Plantation that still exists today as Station 4. One night in the '80s, Hunter and his partner traveled to Dallas for a night out on Cedar Springs with a lesbian couple. Hunter recalls just how bad racism in the Cedar Springs area could be.
One facet the press tours glossed over was the racism and transphobia that sometimes lurked in LGBTQ spaces in Dallas. “But the truth is, it’s not us as a community.” Michael Doughman, executive director of the guild, says the travel press explored the fantasies they had of Texas through a gay lens. It took writers out to cattle ranches and had them ride four-wheelers. Around 2004, the Dallas Tavern Guild, the group of gay bar owners who throw the annual Dallas Pride celebration and compose one of the city's most influential queer organizations, invited the gay travel press to tour Dallas. Before the mid-2000s, gay travel writers stuck to the usual queer haunts - Hollywood, San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C., South Beach, Florida. Life, he means, for a gay man and his partner in the 1980s - an active, vibrant community centered then as it is now on Cedar Springs Road, whose gay-friendly clubs offered a safe, lively space for gay people that he didn't find in Oklahoma City.ĭallas’ reputation as a national destination for LGBTQ life is actually relatively new. Glenn Hunter's reason for moving to Dallas from Oklahoma City was simple.
