Every city guide can tell you where to go. This page is about why it’s here at all — how four blocks of Cedar Springs Road became the beating heart of queer Texas, and who carried it through the decades so we could dance on it today.
Before the rainbow crosswalks
Queer Dallas didn’t start on Cedar Springs. Through the 1950s and 60s it survived in unmarked bars downtown and in Oak Lawn’s cheap apartments — places you found by word of mouth and left through the back door. What Oak Lawn offered was what gay neighborhoods everywhere offered first: density, anonymity, and neighbors who wouldn’t ask questions.
Then, in 1978, the Throckmorton Mining Company opened at the corner of Cedar Springs and Throckmorton as one of Dallas’s first openly gay bars. No back door, no pretense. That corner — the one locals still call The Crossroads — became a declaration, and the neighborhood grew up around it.
The Strip takes shape
The early 1980s built the skeleton of the street you’ll walk tonight. JR’s Bar & Grill arrived in 1980 and became the Strip’s unofficial living room. The Round-Up Saloon taught a generation of queer Texans to two-step without apologizing for either half of that sentence. Sue Ellen’s followed — the oldest and largest lesbian bar in the South, named with a wink at the TV show that made “Dallas” a household word. Restaurants, bookstores, and shops filled in between the bars, and for the first time queer life in Dallas had a main street in daylight.
The plague years
The 1980s were also brutal. AIDS tore through the neighborhood and took friends, bartenders, choir members, and regulars whose names are still spoken on the Strip. But Cedar Springs organized the way it partied — completely. Resource Center opened its doors and never closed them. Cathedral of Hope grew into one of the largest LGBTQ+ congregations in the world. The bars raised money on their own stages, drag queens became the neighborhood’s most reliable fundraisers, and the Strip learned that it was a lifeline first and a party second.
The Strip learned that it was a lifeline first and a party second.
Pride on Cedar Springs
The Alan Ross Texas Freedom Parade — named for the community leader who ran it for years — marched down Cedar Springs each September, deliberately apart from June, growing from hundreds of marchers to hundreds of thousands of spectators. Generations of Dallasites came out, in every sense, on that parade route. The parade has since moved to Fair Park and downtown celebrations, but the September weekend still belongs to the neighborhood, and the block party always comes home to the Strip.
The corner, again
In June 2015, rainbow crosswalks were painted at Cedar Springs and Throckmorton — the same week the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. The corner that had been a declaration in 1978 became a landmark, this time with the city holding the paintbrush.
A short timeline
- 1978 — Throckmorton Mining Company opens at Cedar Springs & Throckmorton; The Crossroads is born.
- 1980 — JR’s Bar & Grill opens; the Round-Up Saloon starts the two-step.
- 1980s — AIDS devastates the neighborhood; Resource Center and Cathedral of Hope become anchors.
- 1989 — Sue Ellen’s opens: the South’s biggest lesbian bar.
- 1990s — The Alan Ross Texas Freedom Parade grows into one of Texas’s largest Pride events.
- 2015 — Rainbow crosswalks painted at The Crossroads, the week marriage equality becomes law.
- Today — The Strip keeps evolving: new venues in Deep Ellum and Bishop Arts, same corner holding it all together.
Why it still matters
Most American gayborhoods have faded into brunch districts. Cedar Springs hasn’t. The bars are still queer-owned, the drag calendar still runs seven nights a week, and the sidewalks still fill up the way they did when showing up was the whole point. When we say Dallas is one of America’s last great gayborhoods, this history is what we mean — and when you order a drink on the Strip, you’re a part of it.
Want the deeper cut? Read The Magazine for stories like the history of The Crossroads, or just come walk the street yourself — it’s the best archive we have.