As a just-out-of-college reporter for the Dallas Morning News in 1979, I watched a landmark event in Texas history unfold, though it would be years before I understood its significance. That November, a former sixth grade teacher from Dallas named Don Baker filed a class action federal lawsuit (Baker v. Wade) challenging Texas’s notorious “Homosexual Conduct” law, known throughout the state’s gay communities simply by its state statute number, 21.06.
Gay activists across the country had made strides in the seventies, as twenty states repealed their sodomy laws during that decade. But Texas went the other direction by passing the homosexual conduct law in 1973, making “deviate sexual intercourse” a crime punishable by a fine. A nonprofit called the Texas Human Rights Foundation wanted to challenge the law, but it needed someone to become the public face of the cause—to show that gay Americans were not deviants, but hardworking, churchgoing, even rodeo-loving folks. Don Baker, a Navy veteran, former Boy Scout, and devout Christian who had recently come out during an awkward but captivating local TV news interview, would become that front man.
The seventies were still the dark ages for most Texas newspapers when it came to gay rights. As a straight reporter, I hardly noticed the casual homophobia in the newsroom, or that the article about Baker’s groundbreaking lawsuit, written by our federal courts reporter, didn’t make the front page. As late as 1986, the Morning News editorial page was still saying sodomy laws were a states’ rights issue and should be left alone by the U.S. Supreme Court. When Baker v. Wade was filed, the newspaper’s editors had little reason to think the lawsuit would become momentous or that gay Texans and their advocates would one day celebrate Baker for his uncommon courage.
Baker was never a news source of mine, but we chatted occasionally if we saw each other at official events or around the Oak Lawn neighborhood of Dallas, where we both lived. He was fit and about five foot eight, with round, scholarly glasses and a businesslike, coat-and-tie style that friends say matched his commitment to “the Dallas Way,” a white male establishment code of sorts that emphasized political decorum and consensus over confrontation and fiery rhetoric. He quickly grew into his role as an activist, winning over more conservative gay Texans and gaining the confidence of straight reporters and business leaders. A longtime college friend of his recalled that at gay organization meetings, Baker developed a natural stage presence and would gesture emphatically as though channeling his grandfather, a fiery preacher from an Oak Cliff Assembly of God church.