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Oh! My God!

What in the hell is wrong with you guys (and gals) here in the Dallas area.

I have lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Los Angeles and San Francisco, California in my 60 years and have never seen a more disorganized, ill-equipped and unmotivated group of Gay men and women in my life.

I lived in S.F. when Harvey Milk was assassinated and lived through the AIDS epidemic when the President of the U.S. wouldn’t even admit that AIDS existed. It was terrifying and the work to change things was hard and costly – but it was worth it.

I was unfortunately forced to move to the Dallas area for personal reasons and am sickened by the attitudes of many of the the Gay people of this area.

Just to bring you up to date, the very idea of a “Gay Bar Raid” went out of the American vernacular over 40 years ago after an event you may (or may not) be aware of we call “Stonewall”. A bar filled with several Drag Queens was “raided” and instead of taking it, much to the surprise of the police, they fought back. Instead of letting it go as just another raid, these brave wonderful sophisticated individuals used everything at their disposal, including the New York City government, and the media to insure that these “Fag Bashing Raids” would never ever happened again. They embarrassed New York so badly that the behavior was suspended everywhere in the United States and was never again accepted as normal policing, anywhere!

But here in Dallas, Fort Worth, the Rainbow Lounge was just another Saturday night of fun for the police and believe me, it wasn’t a coincidence that it happened on the anniversary of the Stonewall incident. And it will happend again, I assure you!

The police did what they did at the Rainbow Lounge because they could! They wanted to demonstrate that here, the DFW area, the Gay community is so ashamed of itself that they could freely get away with the raid and they knew it and they did it to make a point. For God’s sake, where is the outrage? Where is the supportive media? Where is the Government? Has anyone even read the Constitution of the United States?How do you live with yourselves with these conditions?

Without castigation it WILL happend again and I’m afraid that the Gay community will do next to nothing, again! All anyone ever seems to do is plain old Saber Rattling. There are Consitutional laws in play with regard to how the police and the rest of the government (suburbs included) treat Gays here. There must be at must be at least one State Government official who’s not afraid to govern on behalf of the Gay Community. If so, use them, use them, use them!

Whatever terrorizing the public is allowed to put upon the Gay community here is outrageous and would never be tolerated anywhere else in the U.S. without great repercussions to the police and the City. Litigation would flow like water at Niagra Falls. Sure there would be backlashes, freedom is not easy to obtain. Ah! but once you’re free and proud, there is nothing sweeter.

When I first moved here to the South, I wondered why Dallas didn’t have a “Gay Pride Parade”. Now I realize Dallas has little if anything to be proud of. Let’s change that. It CAN be done. We all know it can. Let make Dallas/Fort Worth a truly “freedom to pursue happiness” area. Let’s stand the South on it’s ear!

My generation has done it’s part and now I’m old and sick; it’s the next generation’s responsibility to move our rights forward. It doesn’t take a Harvey Milk to get our due respect into the Twenty-first century or even just to the end of the Twentieth century. It just takes some balls and letting go of this out dated (mixing church and government) mentality so many of you seem to accept as what life should be like in the United States. Like it or not, the Constitution calls for each to be independent of the other.

Please don’t let all of you elders work go wasted here in DFW.

Please!