Dallas Black LGBTQ+ History

Dallas Southern Pride and Dallas Black Pride

Dallas Southern Pride, also called Dallas Black Pride, is described byWikipediaas established in 1996, an annual multi-day event celebrating Dallas-Fort Worth's Black LGBT community. Dallas Voice's ownhistory timelinelists the same 1996 date for the first Dallas Black Pride celebration. Wikipedia's account also describes the event as the largest Black gay pride event in Texas, drawing approximately 15,000 participants annually, a figure from that one source we haven't independently corroborated.

At least one Dallas Voice piece, published in 2014 and written by a then United Black Ellument program coordinator, dates the event's founding to 1997, timed to the State Fair Classic HBCU football rivalry weekend. The two accounts conflict, so we're presenting both dates rather than picking one.

That same2014 Dallas Voice piecedescribes Dallas Southern Pride partnering with Abounding Prosperity and Resource Center's United Black Ellument program to bring HIV and health-awareness programming into its Pride events, and documents a Juneteenth Unity Weekend running alongside the group's Pride programming from at least the mid-2010s.

Organizers who built Black queer community here

In a2013 Dallas Voice piece, Fahari Arts Institute's Harold Steward described organizers including Alpha Thomas, Linus Spiller, and Ajumu forming groups such as Umoja Hermanas and The Ajamu Collective from the late 1970s through the 1990s, working to build community and confront racism within Dallas's broader LGBT community. Fahari Arts Institute and BlaqOut Dallas continue that focus on Black queer arts, culture, and history preservation today, including hosting an annual Marlon Riggs Film Festival.

Abounding Prosperity and Kirk Myers-Hill

Abounding Prosperity, Inc. was founded in November 2005 by Kirk Myers-Hill and his mother, Irene H. Trigg-Myers, to address health, social, and economic disparities affecting Black gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their families in Dallas County, according to theorganization's own about pageand anAdvocate obituary. Myers-Hill, who also served as president of Dallas Southern Pride, died on April 4, 2023, at age 54, and was widely recognized as an advocate for Dallas's Black LGBTQ+ community. In a2019 Dallas Voice interview, he described a particular kind of erasure: "The larger community wants you to embrace being gay without addressing that you are also black."

Ballroom culture and language

United Black Ellument, a Resource Center program, ran a Vogue Academy teaching voguing and ballroom history and technique, documented by Dallas Voice in aFebruary 2023 featurethat situates the program within Black and Latino LGBTQ ballroom traditions. SeeAbout United Black Ellument for the program's fuller history.

Same-gender-loving, often shortened to SGL, is a self-identification term used within Black communities, sometimes as an alternative to "gay" or "lesbian," associated with a Black-affirming, anti-racist framing, perWikipedia's summaryof the term's usage.

Where this history is, and isn't, archived

The University of North TexasSpecial Collections LGBTQ Archive, including its partnership with The Dallas Way oral history project, documents Dallas-area LGBTQ history broadly. As reviewed for this guide, it does not present a clearly labeled, dedicated Black-LGBTQ-specific collection. The Texas State Historical Association'sHandbook of Texas entryon Dallas's LGBT community history, last revised July 30, 2021, covers general milestones such as Circle of Friends in 1965 and the Dallas Gay Political Caucus in 1975, but doesn't separately address Black LGBTQ experience or organizations. That gap is part of why this page exists.