4001 dallas gay bar

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I hadn’t heard about this particular bust at the time. But in 1979 a group of young, activist gay men stood up to the Dallas police. Bar raids in the late 1970s were not rare. The building which still stands at 4001 Cedar Springs and Throckmorton was a gay bar called Village Station, where Zephyr Bakery Café is now located. Don Eastman of the Metropolitan Community Church were important in coalescing the gay community of Dallas to finally stand up against continued police harassment. One of the most poignant recollections about the Village Station event, in retrospect, is an article which appeared in D Magazine in January of 2010 and was written by Campbell Read – a dear friend and donor to AIDS Services of Dallas, a retired professor of statistics at S.M.U., and who was, in the early years, a board member of the Dallas Gay Alliance. This was an episode that, in a sense, transformed a small but cohesive activist community that had emerged from the Dallas Gay Alliance, which I had become a member of in 1977. One of the most important things that I was involved with as a young lawyer was related to the “Village Station Busts” on October 25, 1979. I moved to Texas on April 30, 1969, completed college at University of Texas at Arlington I worked as a juvenile probation officer at Dallas County, went to law school in San Antonio, became a lawyer and practiced law for thirteen years before taking my present job as President and CEO at AIDS Services of Dallas.

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