I then moved into my own efficiency in the Saracen Apartments at Hall and Carlisle Streets. In March,’76, I packed up my car and moved back to Dallas, where I spent my first ten days in a rented room in the Downtown YMCA on Elm Street. (by the time I returned to Dallas permanently, the “ OP” had moved to Denton Drive Cutoff near Maple and Inwood, and later moved to Harwood Street near downtown). During this trip I twice visited the original Old Plantation on Rawlins Street in Oak Lawn, before it burned to the ground.
In the fall of 1975, two college roommates, Ronald Harris and Frank Stotts, invited me to come down to Dallas by train and spend a month with them for a ‘trial run’ of my moving back to Dallas. We were instructed to park our cars by backing tightly against the building so that sheriff deputies could not record our license plates (Kansas doesn’t have front license plates). There was also one gay bar in North Topeka, near the river, called The Other Side. I still remember slouching down in the dark Jayhawk Theatre in 1974 to see Boys in the Band. I would occasionally take a bus to Kansas City for a weekend of ‘coming out’ in the bars. I moved back into my parents’ home in Topeka, Kansas and continued at Washburn University Law School. After graduating from SMU in 1973, I enrolled in law school at SMU, but after the first year could not afford to stay.
