The Oak Lawn neighborhood, located along Cedar Springs Road, has held the heart of the LGBTQ community in Dallas for over 30 years and is the primary assembly point for LGBTQ political and social events, including the annual Alan Ross Freedom Parade. As that group grew to over 3,000 while marching through downtown, Dallas became the site of the first gay pride parade in all of Texas.
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. 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. 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.
