Some mornings I venture to a Starbucks on the outskirts of Oak Lawn near the Medical District.
This is a unique Starbucks because you can’t go inside – it only has a walkup window and an extremely busy drive-thru.
The walkup Starbucks at the edge of Oak Lawn.
Ingrid the Labradoodle at the walkup Starbucks. She’s being patient.
My regular barista says that the walkup Starbucks has a reputation for making terrible drinks. I thought this was unnecessary shade until the walkup Starbucks botched my usual order of coffee with cream.
Pre-Pride is that quiet period between the Gay Super Bowl (the RuPaul’s Drag Race finale) and the beginning of Gay Pride week.
Dallas Gay Pride Parade participants practicing in front of iLume Park.
Pre-Pride is a roughly 5-week period in which we make half-hearted attempts to diet and save money/liver energy for the hot mess festivities of Gay Pride weekend.
It’s like Lent without the righteousness.
Why do we celebrate gay pride?
The modern Gay Pride parades started as an annual commemoration of the Stone Wall Riots.
Police clash with rioters at the Stonewall Inn
The quick story – On June 28, 1969, New York City Police raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. Although such raids were common, this time the bar patrons fought back and kicked off several days of rioting.
The riots generated enough press and communal energy to spark the modern Gay Rights movement.
Homophobia is increasingly a social faux pas, although hate-crimes and issues like transphobia are still a huge problem.
Gay Pride has also evolved from a somber civil rights march to the closest thing that most U.S. cities have to carnival – an event with floats, elaborate costumes, and lots of booze.
A float at Miami Beach Pride in South Beach
Twin Cities Pride 2015 outside of Union Restaurant.
Dancing at the iLume Block Party at Dallas Pride.
A drag queen performing at the iLume Block Party.
A drag queen wearing a rainbow dress at the iLume Gay Pride block party.
Alyssa Edwards at the Dallas Gay Pride iLume block party.
Drag Queens on a float at the Alan Ross Gay Pride Parade in Dallas.
In places like Dallas, Gay Pride can sometimes feel like “just another event.”
Dallas celebrity and lifestyle guru Steve Kemble was the gay rodeo’s Grand Marshal.
Texas Bear Roundup weekend at Station 4 nightclub in Dallas
National Showman Pageant at the Round-up Saloon in Dallas, Texas.
A jazz talent number for at the Miss Dallas FFI drag pageant.
That is why Pride can seem like “just another drunken street parade” on par with St. Patrick’s Day.
Pride Parades still play an important role in small and midsized cities.
In places without established gayborhoods, Gay Pride is often the only public gay-friendly event.
Participants at Iowa City Pride 2013
Small-town Gay Pride parades attract tourists from the greater metro area (or state) and show the community that gay people do exist outside of dive bars. This is often crucial support for isolated young people.
The importance of small-city prides and gay tourism is why I am making an effort to travel to more Pride parades. My last small town pride was a while back in Iowa City. This year, I plan on hitting up some of the lesser-parades in Texas.
Although there were no Lemonade-style watch parties, The Odyssey is still pretty interesting. There are a lot of grimy Los Angeles scenes, and an unexpected trek to rural Scotland.
After living in Texas for almost a year, I still occasionally experience culture shock.
For example, when I visited Whole Foods in Highland Park for the first time, I was surprised to see a woman inspecting the kale selection while nursing a glass of wine.
Apparently all of the Whole Foods stores in Dallas have bars and happy hour at the grocery store is “a thing.” Perhaps alcohol makes the prices easier to swallow?
Many business are getting into booze – you can drink at most fast-casual restaurants like Chipotle and Taco Cabana, and even Starbucks offers wine now.
The bars in the gayborhood were packed on Monday night for the season finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
We watched the finale at Alexandre’s while sitting between an underweight boy who kept screaming “YASSS COME THROUGH!” and an overweight man who kept asking whether every drink he ordered “had carbs.” (The bartender lied to him, of course.)
After much anxiety, tweeting, and YAS!, we learned that Bob the Drag Queen won the title of America’s Next Drag Super Star.
Thank god!
The top 3 contestants were very similar to last year’s finalists – two younger Instagram-famous queens and a slightly older queen who prioritized comedy over glamour.
Finalists Bob the Drag Queen, Kim Chi, and Naomi Smalls.
I am a huge history geek, which is why history was one of my totally practical undergraduate majors.
When I first moved to Miami for high school, I enrolled in a History of South Florida night course at Miami-Dade College. The class allowed me to orient myself in my new city through the stories behind its neighborhoods. (It also turned me into an obnoxious trivia-box for friends and family.)
Michael and I spent the evening learning more about Dallas history by watching documentaries from the Building Community Workshop – a local nonprofit “community design center.”
BC has a “NeighborhoodStories” project, which consists of well-produced short films about Dallas neighborhoods.
Here are the three documentaries that we watched:
Bon Ton + Ideal
The first documentary covers two areas of South Dallas called Bon Ton and Ideal. These adjacent neighborhoods were built on undesirable tracts of land that Dallas reserved for black residents.
The conditions in Bon Ton were shocking bad – we had to keep reminding ourselves that the pictures were from the 1950’s, and not the 1850’s.
Flooding in Dallas’s Bon Ton neighborhood.
The Bon Ton neighborhood was in the flood plain of the Trinity River, and many of the houses lacked plumbing and electricity. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, Bon Ton had the nickname “Bomb Town” because white residents literally blew up the houses of black people who moved too far outside of the neighborhood.
A map of the Bombings which led to naming the neighborhood “Bomb Town.”
New highways left only a single point of entry into the Bon Ton neighborhood and effectively walled it off from the rest of the city.
In the 1970’s, Bon Ton and Ideal became drug-ravaged and largely vacant. The documentary highlights the work of local residents who formed community groups to drive the drug dealers out, and then lobbied the city to rebuild the neighborhood after devastating floods.
PBR is the beer of the hipster crowd – a cheap light beer that actively markets to young musicians and artists. You could not go to a dive bar or lesbian dance night in Minneapolis without seeing a sea of PBR cans.
The special thing about PBR is that it comes in 16 ounce “tallboy” cans despite being the same price (if not cheaper) than Budweiser. That’s why PBR is a favorite among brokegrad school students.
I started regularly drinking Kool-Aid for the first time since grade school.
Although I feel incredibly judged while buying Kool-Aid packets at Kroger, my intentions are rather responsible.
I buy Kool-Aid for two reasons:
Staying hydrated in this Texas heat, and,
Avoiding the awful ingredients and calories in many cocktail mixers.
So I recently started throwing Kool-Aid in my ice sphere molds. (I bought mine at World Market in Oak Lawn, but they are the same price on Amazon.)
During the day, I pop the colored ice spheres into club soda or mineral water. The ice spheres release a light color and flavor which is identical to many of the expensiveflavored waters at the store.
In the evenings and weekends, the colored ice spheres can be used as a calorie-free way of spicing up a vodka-soda or mimosa.
There was a pageant of sorts at the Round-Up Saloon last night.
I have attended many gay bar employee drag shows, but this was by far the most entertaining. The event was hosted by Anesta Roches and one of our favorite bartender as “Peaches.”
There were inventive costumes, high-glamour, a bearded queen, and a lot of surprisingly good live singing by the employees who normally host the Round-Up’s karaoke nights.
All of the contestants at the 2016 Round-up Saloon employee drag pageant.
We go to a lot of drag pageants, but few are this good.
As a charity pageant, the expectations were very low – most employee pageants are half-assed comedy events featuring a lot of burly guys in Goodwill dresses. That is why we were pleasantly surprised by the effort that everyone put into their looks and acts.
It is around 8 a.m. and I am walking the dogs near the Highland Park Whole Foods.
I come across an older woman in a track suit.
Blanche Devereaux: “Are those your dogs?” Me (Taking off my headphones): “Pardon me?” Blanche : “The dogs. Are they yours?” Me: “Um, yes…” Blanche: “Well they are just lovely! Have a good morning walk.”
Blanche then gets into a waiting town car.
Later that day, I tell one of my neighbors about the encounter, and she is horrified.
Jill: “That’s terrible!” Me: “Why? She was perfectly nice, I just thought it was an odd question…” Jill: “You know that’s a microaggression, right? She thought you were a dog walker!” Me: “That’s hilarious, and strangely appropriate for the neighborhood.”
Something glorious happened last week on The Real Housewives of Dallas – two of the cast members were gossiping by the pool and pulled out wine glasses full of ice!
I felt vindicated because I was watching the show with a big ball of ice floating in my Olivia Pope wine glass.
I came across an editorial aboutfirst world problems a strange neighborhood zoning fight involving a mansion-turned-wedding-venue and its neighbors.
Here’s the gist:
Around the same time that Highland Park was getting started in the early 1900’s, some of Dallas’s richest residents built houses on Swiss Avenue.
Swiss Avenue had unique zoning rules, such as each house had to cost at least $10,000 and had to be built for the intended families (no spec homes.) Swiss Avenue was also the first paved street in the city of Dallas and offered private trolley service to the residents.
By the 1970’s, the original tenants were gone and the neighborhood was in decline. One of the organizations that fought to keep the mansions from being subdivided was the Dallas County Medical Society Alliance Foundation, which bought a mansion at 5500 Swiss, known as the “Aldredge House.”
To keep the house running, the Foundation turned their mansion into a wedding venue. The neighborhood then rebounded, the mansions were restored, and the new residents complained about the raucous parties at the Aldredge House.
Then a shitstorm ensued.
The article about the Aldredge House made us curious, so we decided to take very long dog walk to Swiss Avenue and see what it was about.
I try really hard to dispel these stereotypes and convince my friends that Dallas is a modern, progressive, and huge city (instead of a country backwater).
…and then I spend my weekend cowboy boot shopping for a rodeo.
At least it was a gay rodeo.
We went to the Texas Gay Rodeo Association‘s Rodeo & Music Festival last Saturday. It was held at Texas Horse Park, which I’ve never been to before.
My apartment is usually not this clean on a Friday.
On a typical Friday, my apartment looks like something between a police raid and episode of Hoarders.
But not today! Today my apartment is fabulously clean.
Why? Because my labradoodle puppy is sick. It started with horrifying scene in the kennel this morning and continued throughout the morning and afternoon.
So today has been a series of emergency dog walks, laundry cycles, and floor/kennel scrubbings.
Ingrid even had to get a bath or two. Good thing our building has a full “dog spa” with professional wash tubs and dryers.
I recently looked at my Facebook “connected applications” page after experiencing a connectivity issue with Bufferapp and I was surprised to see over 80 applications connected to my Facebook account!
These apps stuck around after every smartphone and easy “login with Facebook” button – collecting all of my information.
I spend my mornings speaking with the President of the United States, afternoons covering up scandals for Washington D.C.’s most powerful politicians, and end my days drinking out of outrageously sized wine glasses.
Only one of those things is true.
After watching ABC’s Scandal one evening, I finally committed to buying Olivia Pope wine glasses.
