Dallas lawyer provides gay-rights history lesson at PRIDE lunch-and-learn

As a recent law school graduate newly arrived at a Dallas civil firm in 1976, Michael W. Anglin began learning about how laws affected LGBT individuals.

“There was a law in Texas called 21.06,” Anglin said Wednesday at a lunch-and-learn presented by the special emphasis group Exchange PRIDE. “It was a law that criminalized same-sex relations between people, in private, adults. It didn’t matter – if they were the same gender, it was a crime.

Michael Anglin, a retired attorney with more than 40 years of experience in Dallas, covered more than 70 years of gay-rights history during a PRIDE lunch and learn.

“That law was never used to prosecute anyone,” added Anglin, who served in the Navy from 1969 to 1972 and is a decorated Vietnam War Veteran. “The reason it existed is because the criminality itself justified many forms of denigration and discrimination against LGBTQ people. We were not allowed to marry, we were not allowed to serve on the police force, the fire department. We could not teach. We could not coach. You could if you were secretive, but not if you were open.”

The law stood up to court challenges until 2003, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional in the Lawrence vs. Texas case. John Lawrence and Tyron Garner, two Houston men, were arrested in 1998 by Houston police and convicted under the 21.06 statute. Lawrence and Garner appealed, and their legal journey led to the Supreme Court, where justices ruled 6-3 that the law was unconstitutional.

The 21.06 statute was just one part of Anglin’s talk, “The Way it Was,” which covered more than 70 years of gay-rights activism in the United States, and the role that Dallas – where Anglin practiced law for more than 40 years – played in it.

After learning about 21.06, Anglin began researching about the history of gay-rights organizations, beginning with the 1950 founding of the Mattachine Society, one of the United States’ earliest gay-activist groups, followed in 1955 by the founding of lesbian-rights group the Daughters of Bilitis.

It was a decade later that a gay-rights organization started in Dallas, with the founding of a Circle of Friends in 1965, “which was a very early time for a central United States city,” Anglin said.

“It was basically a mutual-support organization with a little bit of activism,” In 1970, they had their first, very small, gay-rights parade in downtown Dallas. They figured they would be pelted with rotten tomatoes, but in fact many people on the sidewalk were sort of delighted to see it and joined in for no reason at all.”

Other gay-rights milestones that Anglin addressed included:

1969: The Stonewall riots in New York’s Greenwich Village, considered a cornerstone of the gay-rights movement.  “That had a big impact on the East Coast,” Anglin said. “Especially in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and New York, and somewhat in California. But it had no real influence in Texas. We were way too far away.”

1975: Leonard Matlovich, a decorated Air Force Veteran of the Vietnam War, was the subject of a Time magazine cover story when he was forcibility discharged after revealing that he was gay.  “This got a lot of attention, because that was just something that was never, ever done – that anyone we be so public about something so private,” Anglin said. Matlovich supported gay-rights causes until his death from AIDS in 1988.

1977: Singer and Florida Orange Juice spokeswoman Anita Bryant led a successful effort to recall a Miami-Dade County, Florida, ordinance against anti-gay discrimination in employment and housing. The story made national headlines and motivated gay-rights activism across the country. “I had been in Dallas for a year,” Anglin said, “and I started hearing about this thing that had happened in Miami-Dade, and how unfair they thought that was, and we were going to start organizing in Dallas. So there was this thing organized in Dallas called the Dallas Gay Political Caucus, and that was the first gay political organization in Dallas.”

The same year, the ABC sitcom “Soap” premiered, featuring Billy Crystal as Jody Dallas, one of the first regularly appearing openly gay characters in a network TV series – and, unusually for the time, a positive gay character. “In fact, in the two families portrayed in this ongoing soap opera, all for comedy, Jody was the only one who was sane,” Anglin said.

1978: Harvey Milk, elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in January 1978, came to Dallas in June. “He was there to raise funds from our community and to talk to us about the importance of coming out, wherever you are,” Anglin said. Milk spent much of 1978 campaigning against the Briggs Initiative, a proposition introduced by state legislator John Briggs that would ban tax-supported schools from employing gay people from being teachers or administrators. “The voters of California turned down that idea” on Nov. 7, 1978, Anglin said. “[Milk] was assassinated 20 days later.”

1979: “I always use that as the year that a lot of things started changing in Dallas as far as growing acceptance, growing numbers of organizations, involvement in the national March on Washington, large rallies and get-togethers.” Dallas Black Pride was also created in 1979.

1983: The Pasteur Institute identified the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, as a virus that leads to AIDS. “In 1983, there were more sick people in our community, and the Dallas Gay Alliance applied to the state health department for some support in dealing with the growing AIDS crisis,” Anglin said.  “However, the State of Texas denied that funding, because the homosexual lifestyle was against the law.

“In other words, they were once again using 21.06, the criminality statute, to even deny funds to help people get medical attention and get food and shelter,” he continued. “The Dallas Gay Alliance then had to take on the responsibility of supporting a lot of these people and created the Foundation for Human Understanding, which was really the center point for pulling together donations and food.” The foundation has been renamed the Resource Center.

1985: With sufficient AIDS treatments lacking in the U.S., Dallasite Ron Woodroof organized a way to bring treatments from other countries into Dallas.  (Woodroof’s story was the subject of the 2013 movie “Dallas Buyers Club,” featuring Matthew McConaughey’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Woodroof.) According to Anglin, the Dallas Gay Alliance and AIDS Resource Center also worked around the system, getting flight attendants to smuggle medications to Dallas from Europe.

“You can sort of reflect today, since we’ve been through the COVID crisis, what it would have been like if that was what we had to resort to to get medications to people who had COVID,” Anglin said, “instead of huge, governmentally supported, industrially supported reaction. During the AIDS crisis, there was no such thing.”

2004: Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage.

2011: The U.S. military repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” allowing openly gay people to serve in the armed forces.

2015: In Obergefell vs. Hodges, The Supreme Court ruled that there is a national right to same-sex marriage, regardless of state.

2020: The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 assures employment security to all LGBTQ+ people in the United States.

“Of course, each one of those decisions led to a lot of celebrations,” Anglin said toward the end of his talk. “Probably the largest was the 2015 Obergefell decision. This is something that I can’t underscore [enough] how impossible that would have seemed to us in 1976.”

On Friday afternoon, Exchange Chief Operating Officer Jason Rosenberg presented his coin to Anglin.

After Anglin’s Wednesday talk concluded, Exchange PRIDE executive champion Dr. Patrick Oldenburgh, the Exchange’s Chief Human Resources officer, led a presentation of an award to founding executive champion Ana Middleton, the Exchange’s president and chief merchandising officer who retired on July 1.

“Ana was the original executive champion for the PRIDE group,” Oldenburgh said, adding that the group’s origins started around 2013. “It started chugging along and then we said, ‘We’re really going to do this! We’re going to make magic happen!’ And now we’re where we are right now. This is just a little thank-you for being one of our original founder.”

If you missed Anglin’s presentation, you can watch it here. For a look at how Exchange stores celebrated Pride Month in June, visit our Flickr album.