Gay bar of magnolia tx

The piercing ding of my iPhone at a. I glanced at the screen with bleary eyes to see who was texting me at this ridiculous hour, saw it was my best friend Kyle Trentham, and thumb-scanned my way to Messages. And then a few seconds later, bar that same slightly inappropriate, grim tinge of humor that had cemented our friendship all those years ago when we first met at the Rainbow Lounge, the place to which he was referring, a single word appeared.

My brain was stuck in a buffering loop at that hour, so I reached for my laptop and did what any logical human being would do when faced with unthinkably impossible news: I opened Facebook. A few hours later when I was standing outside the smoking wreckage of this once-famous or infamous, depending on whom you asked LGBT watering hole — the acrid smell of scorched wood magnolia my nostrils; the constant drip, drip, drip off crumbling, water-drenched brick filling my ears — the reality of what had happened began to sink in.

Oddly, my reaction was more subdued than I expected. The previous few weeks had already been a dizzying nightmare. My husband and I had just returned from a bloodwork appointment down the street. More than two weeks earlier, Doug had received a liver transplant, so this sudden intrusion of flaming reality was a seismic surprise after the exhausting monotony of hospital visits, medication scheduling, and sleep deprivation.

It dawned on us only while we were picking up a chunk of masonry as a souvenir that our 24th anniversary was the next day. Time creeps up on you like that. My own perspective had been severely challenged weeks earlier. I sat alone in a hospital room in Dallas terrified and choking back sobs while worrying that the person with whom I had spent most of my adult life — my personal oasis — might not be there for me the next evening.

Perhaps that emotional test had inoculated me for this shock. I did, because I spent months gay every damned one of them. But I knew one place better than any of them. I had spent more nights there than I can count and even more than I can remember. I watched it go through multiple owners and three names. It was my home away from home, where I met some of my greatest friends, both long-term and sometimes only for a single night.

Still Not Over The Rainbow

It was a tobacco- and cologne-scented Neverland where free-flowing booze fueled some of my greatest memories … and also one of my worst. And now, that place was gone. That morning, I had witnessed this mythical, self-conflated Shangri-La reduced to a giant, brick-walled ashtray and more than 30 years in the word business suddenly left me without access to a single one.

I live to create timelines, alphabetize materials, and, most importantly, put scraps of paper ephemera into acid-free plastic sheet protectors. Long before the Rainbow Lounge dropped its first beat, there was the Club named for its street addresswhich opened in February When police tried to raid the bar for the umpteenth time on the night of June 28, the night of my third birthday, by the waythis urban isle of misfit ladyboys fought back, and the ensuing series of riots over the next few days would give birth to the modern gay rights movement.

Not that those melees meant much to the still-closeted queens in Cowtown. The folks at the that same summer night in Fort Worth probably had no idea what their Yankee brothers and sisters were starting several thousand miles away. Though 40 years later, the folks in a new bar, with a new name but in the same old building, would get a small taste of it themselves.