.
And politicians began to listen.As Maison recalled in an oral history for The Dallas Way, “The raid and its aftermath sparked a dialogue between the police department and the gay community that hadn’t existed before. Dallas Wade's sexuality.
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By the end of 1980, the remaining Village Station cases were decided, mostly with guilty verdicts, although at least two of those were later dismissed.
It was a turning point for LGBTQ citizens of Dallas. In February, Dallas Criminal Court Judge Chuck Miller found two more defendants not guilty after five of the undercover vice cops at the Village Station that night could not corroborate their testimony and it was revealed that they could not even agree on the layout of the club.
Riled at the judge’s decisions, District Attorney Henry Wade dismissed the remaining six cases and reassigned them to conservative Judge Ben Ellis’s court, citing bias on Miller’s part.
The typical mid-week clientele danced to Donna Summer’s “Dim All the Lights” and Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough” while nursing 10-cent draft beers.
A sign at the door of the Village Station proudly proclaimed the bar to be “gay-owned and gay-operated.” (Courtesy of The Dallas Way)
By Sam Childers
Courtesy of The Dallas Way
It was the last Wednesday of October 1979 at the Village Station, a popular gay disco that had opened at the corner Cedar Springs and Throckmorton barely four months earlier.
Available on These Platforms! In November, Dallas schoolteacher Don Baker, backed by the Texas Human Rights Foundation, filed a federal class action suit challenging the state sodomy law. They’ve tried to buy up every piece of property around here and turn this into a queer community, but I don’t intend to let this place become a queer joint.”
But the Village Station raid was different.
Club Dallas filed a federal suit against city and county law enforcement, citing harassment of its patrons in December. One unnamed undercover officer quoted in the story compared the harassment as “a big game hunt” and made repeated references to “queers” and “lewds.”
“It’s disgusting,” he said, “but you get such a satisfaction out of putting them in jail.” And the vice division’s captain said that the public “doesn’t want us to leave the homosexuals alone.”
That story helped build momentum within the gay community to push back against harassment, discrimination and antiquated laws.
Then, a little before 1 a.m. Some compared notes on the “March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights” held the week before.
Others contemplated checking out the Hidden Door, a new bar holding its grand opening the next night.
They didn’t know it was the twilight of an era. Gay citizens began appearing at city council meetings, demanding an end to harassment.
Joined by undercover cops inside, they began making arrests, eventually charging 10 men for public lewdness and a bartender with a liquor violation.
Even though the LGBT community had made progress toward equality since the Stonewall Riots in New York a decade earlier, persecution of gay people was commonly accepted in 1979. They were assured that the police actions were not harassment, but two weeks later the Dallas Times Herald ran a story about the DPD’s vice squad and its entrapment methods.
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--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.It later led the police department to assign a liaison officer to the gay community. And in Dallas, gay men — and some women — were routinely labeled “perverts” and “deviants” in local newspapers, while raids on gay bars, bathhouses and theaters were commonplace. The Dallas gay community had had enough.