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Though the city’s first nightclubs catering exclusively to gays and lesbians were still several decades away, the art of female impersonation began drawing crowds in Cowtown as early as 1899. Prior to these sensational crime-related pieces, media outlets instead focused on a different aspect LGBT life. However, local media outlets never devoted as much ink to them after these two cases. Stories of gay killers proved popular fodder for the more salaciously-minded press at the time, and Hollywood’s obsession with them, beginning with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 thriller Rope, persists to this day. An even bigger headline grabber was the 1949 bludgeoning death of Texas Christian University dean John Lord by his alleged lover, a nineteen-year-old housemate named Arthur Clayton Hester. Disney by purported lesbian Kathleen Latham, a friend-and rumored lover-of his wife. Two sensational murders made front-page news of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the first being the 1943 death of Jack B. Echoing films of the time, gays made news only when they could be cast as villains. In the 1940s gays and lesbians became headline news, though the circumstances allowed only for their representation in certain prescribed roles. The earliest mentions of homosexuality in print media took place in the 1890s, with listings in crime blotters in the Fort Worth Morning Register calling out offenders charged with the “serious crime” of sodomy. Texas passed its first sodomy law in 1860, and the serious ramifications for being identified as a homosexual could not only result in imprisonment but also social rejection, loss of employment, or, in some cases, death. In many ways, this gradual progression paralleled the gay struggle in the United States in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, but was also-in a number of respects-specific to Texas, the Southwest and “Cowtown.”īefore the turn of the nineteenth century and several decades thereafter, documentation of queer life was virtually nonexistent, due in large part to the criminalized status of being openly gay. Beginning with community standards that marked homosexuality as a crime, leading to an underground culture fostered in semi-gay spaces (such as theaters and nightclubs that at times employed female impersonators) and eventually explicitly openly-queer spaces such as gay nightclubs, the multi-decade evolution of LGBT life remained largely invisible until the rise of “out” culture with the community progressing to public activism and eventually modern-day acceptance. Effectively telling the story of LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) life in Fort Worth and Tarrant County is a challenge for many reasons, the biggest obstacle being its slow transformation from unspoken secrecy to gradual acceptance and community visibility.