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That emergence intensified in 1972, when three days after the Stonewall Riots, 300 activists took to the streets in the name of equality. In 1947, one of the first gay bars in Texas, Club Reno, opened in Dallas, heralding the city’s LGBTQ community as one of the earliest to form in the state.
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Their one-of-a-kind restaurants, vivacious nightclubs, and lovable locals crown these gayborhoods as attractive destinations-no matter where you fall on the sexuality spectrum. For decades, all types of people from cowboys to drag queens have lived, worked, and played harmoniously in these charming meccas of queer life. Texas’ “gayborhoods” aren’t just neighborhoods with rainbow-painted crosswalks at their intersections they’re historic communities where Texas pride and gay pride intersect in ever-fascinating unison.
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screening of Hap Veltman’s San Antonio Country is free, though donations will be accepted for the Happy Foundation, which maintains an archive of local LGBTQIA history housed at the Bonham Exchange.One of Oak Lawn’s two gateway signs sits at the intersection of Douglas Avenue and Cedar Springs Road, in Dallas, right in front of Kroger. “I think on one level it’s just an interesting story about San Antonio itself,” he said. I always told them it’s a great story, an interesting story, and gay rights is human rights,” he said.
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“A lot of people I interviewed for the movie were surprised that a straight person would be interested in this subject. Mahoney’s sensibility echoes Veltman’s inclusive vision for his pioneering nightclub. “Obviously if you’re into gay rights or human rights this is a story you’d be into, but this also just a fun story. “One of the reasons I made this documentary is just to show a part of San Antonio that a lot of people aren’t familiar with,” he said.
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Now, he hopes his own interest will translate to a potentially wide audience. Four years, 10,000 out-of-pocket dollars, and many hours of interviews later, the San Antonio native has his hourlong documentary. “A gay man in the article mentioned that the best gay club in Texas, and maybe all of the U.S., was the San Antonio Country. Mahoney’s interest in making the film was sparked by an article he’d read in an Austin newspaper chronicling the two city’s gay histories. At the time, military police could arrest service members for being in known gay bars, Mahoney said. “There was a really thriving gay community in the ’60s and ’70s it was just sort of hidden from the rest of the city because they were afraid of harassment and beaten up for being gay,” he said. The poster for Noi Mahoney’s new documentary on Hap Veltman, who opened the first gay disco in San Antonio in 1973. The owner told Alexander, “because if we get raided, I don’t want the police or the sheriff to take over the mic to order the patrons around.” “It just was a very professional, upscale atmosphere.”īucking custom, though, the DJ would have no microphone, on strict orders from Veltman. “Here was a huge place that was really done very nice, and all the staff were attractive, wearing bow ties and dress shirts,” Alexander said. In Mahoney’s documentary, photographs of Veltman’s club show a grand, multifloor space with soaring, vaulted ceilings, elegant furniture, a rose window, multiple rooms – including a neon-lit, mirrored space frequented by showy drag queens – and a dance floor complete with disco ball. Please reload the page and try again.Īlexander described “The Country,” as many in the film refer to the club, as an “upgrade” from the previous selection of gay bars in the city, which were often windowless, dark, and small. Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription.