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The folks at the 651 that same summer night in Fort Worth probably had no idea what their Yankee brothers and sisters were starting several thousand miles away. Not that those melees meant much to the still-closeted queens in Cowtown.
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When police tried to raid the bar for the umpteenth time on the night of J(the night of my third birthday, by the way), this urban isle of misfit ladyboys fought back, and the ensuing series of riots over the next few days would give birth to the modern gay rights movement. A few months later that year, in a gay nightclub called the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s far-from-gentrified Greenwich Village neighborhood, the patrons – a motley crew of drag queens, transgender folks, rent boys, and other outcasts – were still in mourning over the loss of gay icon Judy Garland. Long before the Rainbow Lounge dropped its first beat, there was the 651 Club (named for its street address), which opened in February 1969.
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I had assembled a biblically thick dossier on the city’s nearly 50 years of open, gay nightlife, so here beginneth the lesson. I live to create timelines, alphabetize materials, and, most importantly, put scraps of paper ephemera into acid-free plastic sheet protectors. One thing about being an anal-retentive archivist is that you’re never happier than when doing research. To provide some perspective on where this place fits in our collective history – and I’m speaking in the gay “we” voice now – I turned to The Files.
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That morning, I had witnessed this mythical, self-conflated Shangri-La reduced to a giant, brick-walled ashtray and more than 30 years in the word business suddenly left me without access to a single one. It was a tobacco- and cologne-scented Neverland where free-flowing booze fueled some of my greatest memories … and also one of my worst. It was my home away from home, where I met some of my greatest friends, both long-term and sometimes only for a single night. I watched it go through multiple owners and three names. I had spent more nights there than I can count and even more than I can remember. How could the loss of a building compare to that, right?Īs the day wore on, the historical resonance of the tragedy began to drip, drip, drip into my thoughts, distracting me from work and drawing me back to a former preoccupation, bordering on obsession, with the history of Fort Worth’s gay nightlife.ĭid you know that since the late ’60s, Fort Worth was home to more than 70 LGBT clubs, nearly 90 if you include all of Tarrant County? I did, because I spent months counting every damned one of them.īut I knew one place better than any of them.
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Perhaps that emotional test had inoculated me for this shock. I sat alone in a hospital room in Dallas terrified and choking back sobs while worrying that the person with whom I had spent most of my adult life – my personal oasis – might not be there for me the next evening. My own perspective had been severely challenged weeks earlier. I’m sure that the patrons who, just the night before, had guzzled drinks, laughed at off-color jokes, and danced to pounding pop music at this place where they’d shared many nights of their young lives – a group oasis – did not consider it might not be there for them the next evening. It dawned on us only while we were picking up a chunk of masonry as a souvenir that our 24th anniversary was the next day. More than two weeks earlier, Doug had received a liver transplant, so this sudden intrusion of flaming reality was a seismic surprise after the exhausting monotony of hospital visits, medication scheduling, and sleep deprivation. My husband and I had just returned from a bloodwork appointment down the street. The previous few weeks had already been a dizzying nightmare. Oddly, my reaction was more subdued than I expected. And right there, at the top of my news feed, in a shared tweet from earlier that morning, was video footage of the Rainbow Lounge, Fort Worth’s legendary Near Southside gay nightspot and lightning rod for political controversy, engulfed in a blazing fireball while the shaky-handed bystander filming the inferno on his smartphone sputtered expletives of disbelief.Ī few hours later when I was standing outside the smoking wreckage of this once-famous (or infamous, depending on whom you asked) LGBT watering hole – the acrid smell of scorched wood burning my nostrils the constant drip, drip, drip off crumbling, water-drenched brick filling my ears – the reality of what had happened began to sink in. My brain was stuck in a buffering loop at that hour, so I reached for my laptop and did what any logical human being would do when faced with unthinkably impossible news: I opened Facebook.