The Tarrant County Commissioners Court did not receive a scheduled July 1 briefing on a state historical marker that County Judge Tim O’Hare said he stopped for procedural improprieties, but they did debate the issue.
Local Democats and LGBTQ leaders have contended O’Hare acted outside of his authority and with the intent to silence LGBTQ history in Fort Worth.
The briefing was scheduled after the Fort Worth Report reported June 12 that O’Hare penned a letter to the Texas Historical Commission demanding that it rescind approval of the marker application. He argued that Tarrant County Historical Commission members did not follow the correct process in reviewing the city application before sending it to the state commission, which had the final say on approval.
A county staff member told commissioners the person scheduled to give the briefing wasn’t available to speak July 1. Commissioners were initially scheduled to hear the presentation June 17, but that meeting was canceled because the court didn’t have a quorum.
County spokesperson Regina Calderon did not return a request for comment on whether commissioners would hear the briefing at a later date.
The application for a historical marker originated from Fort Worth staff and would have been located at the site of the Rainbow Lounge, an LGBTQ bar raided by members of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission and Fort Worth police in 2009 and widely seen since as a local LGBTQ landmark. The historical marker would not have specifically recognized the bar, but instead spotlighted Jennings Avenue and the surrounding neighborhood in the Near Southside as the center of Fort Worth’s LGBTQ community, according to a draft of the inscription obtained by the Report.
Although the scheduled briefing didn’t happen, commissioners discussed the agenda item during the meeting and heard public comments from five Tarrant residents, who all spoke in opposition to O’Hare’s effort to shut down the project.
Commissioner Alisa Simmons said O’Hare’s issue with the historical marker wasn’t about following processes but about “erasing history, specifically the history of the LGBTQ community in Tarrant County.” She described his effort to shut down the project as “discriminatory” and “political grandstanding.”
“There is not an error of process here,” Simmon said. “What we have is an abuse of power.”
She said appointees to county boards and commissions should be trusted to do the jobs for which they were appointed, which she believes the historical commission chair at the time did. Colleta Strickland, who oversaw the marker application as chair at the time, previously denied O’Hare’s claim that the process wasn’t followed.
“You don’t get to rewrite history because you don’t like it or what it includes,” Simmons said. “This court and these court members should not be in the business of gatekeeping history, especially when it’s rooted in discrimination and political interference.”
O’Hare said commission members told him the marker application never went to their review. He noted that Fort Worth leadership agreed with his assessment and supported pulling the application.
Fort Worth City Manager Jay Chapa asked for the application to be pulled because “there was no public process or external request for making the request and it did not follow the county’s procedures for historical markers,” according to a previous statement from his spokesperson.
“In addition, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that I don’t think glorifying drag show performances is an appropriate thing,” O’Hare said July 1. “I don’t. I won’t now, I won’t tomorrow, I won’t next week, I won’t next month.”
Addressing commissioners July 1, local historian Todd Camp said the historical marker would not have memorialized the Rainbow Lounge raid or glorified drag shows. Camp runs the nonprofit YesterQueer, which documents LGBTQ history across Fort Worth and Tarrant County, and edited the text that would have been inscribed on the marker.
“Markers do more than commemorate — they educate,” Camp said. “They invite visitors and residents alike to engage with the layered, complex stories that shape a place. When one community’s story is absent, the historical record is incomplete.”
He said Fort Worth has seven state historical markers classified under Black history, one marker for Asian American history and one for women’s history — but none for LGBTQ history. The only state marker dedicated to LGBTQ history in Texas is located at the intersection of Cedar Springs Road and Throckmorton Street in Dallas, considered the center of the city’s LGBTQ community since the 1970s, according to the Texas Historical Commission’s database of markers.
During the meeting, Commissioner Matt Krause asked Simmons why she thinks the Texas Historical Commission granted O’Hare’s request to remove the application if the application process had been followed correctly. O’Hare can write “any letter, all the letters he wants,” Krause said, but he doesn’t have power over whether the commission would grant his request.
Simmons’ response was brief: “Political pressure.”
A spokesperson for the Texas Historical Commission previously said it rescinded the application at O’Hare’s request but directed questions about the decision to county officials.
O’Hare said his letter to the state commission is “self-explanatory and accurate,” and he stands by it 100%. If an application for the same historical marker went through the correct process, O’Hare said, the application would get approved and move forward.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that the Tarrant County Commissioners Court approved five new appointees to the county’s historical commission. Calderon, the county spokesperson, did not return the Report’s request for the names of the new appointees, who were not listed on the July 1 meeting agenda.
Cecilia Lenzen is a government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact her at cecilia.lenzen@fortworthreport.org.
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This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
