Dick Peeples was born and raised in Fort Worth. He graduated from Paschal High School in 1966.

Dick attended Austin College in Sherman, Texas, from 1966 to 1970, a time of change and turbulence on college campuses across the country. Protests over “the military draft” and the escalating U.S. military presence in Viet Nam were growing more and more confrontive and even violent.

“We watched it all going on around us; we talked about it. But, to my knowledge, there were no demonstrations or visible manifestations of unrest on the Austin College campus.” Dick recalls. “We went to Dallas or Austin to experience those things. Being in Sherman was like being in the eye of a hurricane. Quiet there, but turbulence all about. “

On the fateful night of the first national Selective Service “draft drawing lottery” on December 1, 1969, Dick was with friends in the living room area of Luckett Hall on the Austin College campus. Days of the year were drawn out to establish ranking for the draft. His day came up #72. But being drafted was not to be. Nurse Jane, who administered allergy serum shots to Dick twice a week at the health center, accidentally injected too much serum one time. The result was a quick trip to the emergency room to counteract swollen eyes and intense sneezing. The ER doctor wrote to Dick’s local draft board that “under no circumstances should this boy be inducted into military service.”

With his liberal arts undergraduate education completed, Dick next entered the University of Texas, first in the graduate school in economics for a year, then in the University of Texas School of Law in 1971.

“My Austin College education, along with U.T. graduate and Law School, encouraged me to think and to analyze – not to blindly accept what I read or heard.” This process was reinforced in the last semester of law school in early 1974, as Dick and his classmates watched the Congressional Watergate hearings every Friday after their last class was over.

After graduating from law school in May of 1974, Dick later vacationed with friends in Cuernavaca, Mexico. There, in the Mexican press, he read about of the resignation of President Nixon.

One day, not long after that and while he was still in Mexico, Dick’s mother told him that someone from the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas had called for him. When back in Texas, Dick returned the call, only to be told that “no, no one called you.” But, only a few days after that disappointing exchange, he received another call from the Federal Reserve Bank. This time the purpose of the call was to schedule an interview. He later received an offer of employment. Shortly after that he found out that the number one choice for the position had become disqualified due to untruthful statements on his job application. Dick was now not only on the way to becoming licensed as an attorney, but employed!

Dick was hired as a regulations attorney for the Federal Reserve Bank. The most significant part of his job was serving as team leader, along with a financial analyst and an economist, for the purpose of analyzing and making recommendations concerning applications for entities desiring to be recognized as bank holding companies, or for acquisitions by existing bank holding companies.

(L to R) Charlie Hott, Rodney Woods, Jack Vaughn — (L to R) Charlie Hott, Rodney Woods, John Vaughn

Dick moved to Dallas and found an apartment at The Village in the summer of 1974. It was a convenient location and also had bus service that took him just a block from the Federal Reserve building downtown. After a year, Dick moved to an apartment in the River Oaks complex on Cedar Springs. This location was also on a bus line with service to downtown. For several years Dick started enjoying his new adult life in Dallas. He had become comfortable with his sexual orientation: “I came out to myself,” he says. He met a couple named John Vaughn and Rodney Woods. They introduced Dick to gay bars, particularly the Old Plantation and the Bayou Landing. Dick began enjoying visits to the OP which was his favorite bar. “My first time in a gay bar was at the Old Plantation, and the old house on Rawlins actually looked like it was straight off the plantation, with big columns along the front porch. The bar had at least three different bar environments inside. It was such a fun place” he recalls.

Rodney Woods also reintroduced Dick to his old Austin College residence hall counselor, Jay Evans. Jay took Dick under his wings and started introducing Dick to his circle of friends in Dallas.

Within two years of going to work for the Federal Reserve, Dick decided to leave and open his own law practice. John Vaughn was an established business pension consultant; he was also quite the salesman. John had convinced Dick that he could essentially supply Dick with all the work Dick needed in support of his young law practice focused on qualified pension plans. “I showed up in my new office on the first day. John had placed nine files on my desk, each one representing a company’s request to have its employee pension plan officially reviewed and approved by the Internal Revenue Service under a new law called ERISA. Well, I really didn’t know anything about that law, but I decided to just jump in, learn, and do the best I could. If I made mistakes, the IRS agents would contact me about making corrections.”

At a modest charge of $300 per submission, Dick took on the daunting project of dealing daily with IRS or Labor Department agents – each of whom was different from every other. Once the submission was finally approved as “qualified” by the IRS, Dick would return to file to John Vaughan for continued administration.

On June 7, 1977, a highly politicized campaign led by a former Miss Oklahoma, Anita Bryant, resulted in the repeal of a Miami-Dade County, Florida, ordinance that had prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Bryant had claimed: “What these people really want, hidden behind obscure legal phrases, is the legal right to propose to our children that theirs is an acceptable alternative way of life … I will lead such a crusade to stop it as this country has not seen before.”

Like thousands of others in his generation, Dick would be caught up in the lead-up to the vote and fallout of the Dade County referendum. Across the country, organized opposition to gay rights was gaining traction. However, the repeal also had an extraordinary impact in energizing the gay communities of many other cities in this country. Dallas was no exception.

[Left to right] Don Baker, Dick Peeples, Louise Young, Steve Wilkins and Jerry Ward … at a planning retreat for the board of the Dallas Gay Political Caucus (June 1977)

“I had met a new friend named Steve Wilkins. He convinced me to come with him in early 1977 to a raucous meeting of a recently-formed organization called the Dallas Gay Political Caucus. It was held in the main sanctuary of the Metropolitan Community Church on Regan at Brown streets. There were hundreds of people there. Everyone was mad as hell. There was a vacancy on the board of directors, and Steve nominated himself that night for election to that position. He was elected. Chance West was the president, and Pat Cherry was vice president; but both resigned soon thereafter. The next month I was elected to the board, along with Louise Young and Don Baker. Jerry Ward was also a board member. All offices carried 12-month terms but they were staggered so that elections were held every six months. All of us were in our late 20s or early 30s.”

Reunion of early leaders of the Dallas Gay Political Caucus (left to right): Vivienne Armstrong, Dick Peeples, Don Baker, Jack Pettit, Louise Young, and Phil Johnson (at memorial service for Steve Wilkins, January 1995)

Steve Wilkins soon became president of DGPC, and was a strong force in expanding its membership and influence in the community. “He was calm under pressure and came across as an establishment-type guy,” Dick recalled. One of the most significant actions taken during Steve’s term as president was a weekend strategic planning meeting of the board in the summer of 1977. Four goals for the organization were identified and agreed to at that meeting: repeal section 21.06 of the Texas Penal Code (which criminalized same-sex relations), pass a non-discrimination ordinance in Dallas, educate the population about the LGBT community, and establish a community center.

Those years in the 1970s and 1980s were a very different time from today. One could be fired from his or her job merely because of sexual orientation. In fact, Dick's law partner, as well as his longtime companion, were fired from their jobs in the 70s for that reason. In the early 70s, police recorded license plate numbers from cars parked near gay bars and used that information to identify patrons. Sometimes the result was that people were fired from their jobs.

Dick Peeples with Don Baker (on right) in 1981

In 1978 Dallas Independent School District Superintendent Nolan Estes stated that there were no gay schoolteachers in Dallas, but then added that if there were, they would be fired immediately. Over Texas OU weekend in October of 1978, shortly after that pronouncement, Dick plus DGPC board members Louise Young and Vivienne Armstrong were asked to participate in a confidential meeting held at the apartment of Steve Wilkins. Dallas school district trustees Dr. Harryette Ehrhardt and Roberto Medrano were present. Behind a screen, and shielded from the view of the others in attendance, sat a gay Dallas school teacher named Don Baker, who at first wanted to remain anonymous to the two trustees. Don was fearful, thinking that his own job and livelihood might be in jeopardy by explaining to them the unwarranted pressures felt by the many gay teachers in the Dallas school system.

Once Baker became confident that he was speaking to two people who were highly sympathetic to his cause, he came out from behind the screen and joined the meeting openly. Dick remembers Roberto Medrano vote-counting that he and Ehrhardt would be able to put together a narrow majority (five out of nine votes) on the school board to reverse the anti-gay policy announced by superintendent Estes. They succeeded.

In October of 1979, during another catalyzing event, Dallas Police Department vice officers arrested 12 people at a popular bar called the Village Station. The 12 people were simply dancing on the dance floor with same-sex partners. They were all charged with “public lewdness.” In the past each one would have quietly pleaded "no contest" and accepted a token fine in exchange for minimal publicity. This time, however, six of them took their cases to court and several were found not guilty.

Perhaps in response to the court decisions, and the "black eye" suffered by the Dallas Police Department when some of the cases resulted in finding police claims of public lewdness insupportable, the police department began routinely entering gay bars and dance halls for the purpose of intimidating patrons, even if not arresting them. The Dallas Gay Political Caucus organized a new committee to address these issues. The Social Justice Committee was formed, with Dallas attorney Mike Anglin serving as its first chair. The committee went throughout the community, educating employees of gay establishments on how to handle harassment from the police department. The committee also developed and distributed a detailed form to record details of instances of intimidating conduct by police officers. Times, description of the actions, and the names and badge numbers of the individual officers involved were collected.

Dick Peeples and Bruce Monroe together at the March on Washington (1993)

Even during those perilous times, the community of LGBT people who were not afraid to be themselves continued to grow. A result of the energy and enthusiasm was a national march on Washington to demand an end to discrimination and for civil rights. The first March on Washington occurred October 14, 1979. Attendance was estimated at around 75,000-100,000. Dick was at that first march; he also attended the next two. The second march was on October 11, 1987, with an estimated 200,000 people in attendance. National Coming Out day -October 11- was established the year after the 1987 March. But the third march, at the end of April of 1993, was by far the largest one; it was estimated that 1 million people came together on the Mall the weekend of April 25, 1993. Dick said that: “It was just an ocean of people, in the Metro, on the streets and at the Mall. We gathered with other Texas folks and marched together. It had an electric feel. We all returned home very pumped up!”

As a lawyer, Dick realized that the real culprit in Texas, which justified all kinds of discrimination against gays and lesbians, was Texas Penal Code section 21.06, the "homosexual conduct" statute, enacted in 1974 as a successor to a more inclusive ‘sodomy’ statute. Much like the efforts of some people to use "religious conviction" to justify and excuse blatant discrimination in businesses open to the public, this criminal statute, since the mid-1970s, justified and excused many instances of much harsher discrimination. If a school district refused to hire a gay applicant, it was because they were self-admitted criminals, not precisely because they were gay. It was the same with public employment. Police and fire departments across the state would refuse to hire anyone who admitted to being homosexual because they were, in essence, admitting to be criminals -- "and why would we hire known criminals in these positions of public trust and public safety." And on the same grounds, restaurants were free to refuse service to gay people and apartment complexes were free to turn down the applications of anyone they felt might be gay. The “stigma of criminality” warranted all the harassment the police had time to deliver to gay businesses.

"How can one advocate for rights, or for respect, when what you did in private with another consenting adult was criminal? Therefore, our overriding goal was to have 21.06 declared unconstitutional in the federal courts,” Dick says. This was the goal of the entire LGBT community, as evidenced by the 1977 DGPC long-term goals.

In 1978, Dick received a fateful call from a Houston attorney named Robert (Mort) Schwab. Schwab had recently organized a new entity in Houston named the Houston Human Rights Foundation. The main objective of the organization was to create and develop a case to be filed in federal District Court, with the sole objective of having the Texas criminal statute, section 21.06, declared unconstitutional under the United States Constitution. Schwab said that shortly after he had created HHRF he realized it needed to be a statewide organization rather than just a local one. He proposed to Dick that he become the first member of the board from outside Houston. Schwab also asked Dick to identify other prospective board members from Dallas and other cities. Together they would assemble a statewide Board of Directors for the organization. It would be called the Texas Human Rights Foundation. Dick agreed and quickly contacted two of his closest attorney friends, Mike Anglin and Lee Taft, and convinced them to become a part of the new organization and serve on its board. They both accepted.

Thus began a 13-year project with the goal of having section 21.06 declared unconstitutional in the courts. Dick served as treasurer of THRF for the majority of that time. The first case, sponsored by THRF, was Baker vs. Wade. The schoolteacher, Don Baker (mentioned above), agreed to place himself in the very public position of being named plaintiff in the case. Dick stated: “I had the deepest admiration that Don was agreeing to testify in open court, and in front of the entire world, about some of the most personal facts of his life!” Dallas attorney Jim Barber was retained to be lead counsel. The named defendant, representing all district attorneys in Texas, would be Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade (the same titular defendant as in the landmark abortion case “Roe vs. Wade”). The case was filed in Dallas, and United States District Judge Jerry Buchmeyer was assigned responsibility for the case. After several years, the Baker vs. Wade opinion was published by Judge Buchmeyer in August of 1982, declaring the law unconstitutional as a violation of privacy and equal protection under the United States Constitution.

Don Baker and Dick P.jpg — 1985: Don Baker and Dick Peeples walking to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, continuing the fight against Texas Penal Code Section 21.06, that was the basis for so much discrimination against the gay community in the 1980s.

Initially, an appeal of the Buchmeyer decision to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans was dismissed. Unfortunately, that initial decision was overturned by a 9 to 7 vote in an en banc ruling of the entire Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Dick travelled with Don Baker to witness the hearing. “Entering the courtroom and seeing all 16 judges there was scary, but also exciting.” Dick recalls. The United States Supreme Court subsequently refused to reverse the appeals court decision.

“After the loss, in 1989 we organized another lawsuit called Morales vs. State of Texas where we used state law grounds for challenging 21.06. We found five well known plaintiffs -- Linda Morales, Tom Doyal, Patricia Cramer, Charlotte Taft and John Thomas – who were carefully chosen to represent the genders and provide ethnic diversity. “Just like in the Baker case, one of our primary goals was to increase visibility of openly LGBT people and encourage others to come out,” Dick noted.

“We won that case in the two lower courts. But the case was dismissed later in 1994 by the Supreme Court of Texas on jurisdictional grounds." Dick noted. “But in the end, we won anyway, with the third Texas case called Lawrence vs. Texas. The Supreme Court of the United States found that criminal statutes such as 21.06 (not only in Texas but across the country) did indeed violate the United States Constitution – just as Judge Buchmeyer had concluded many years earlier.”

The 2003 Supreme Court decision in Lawrence vs. Texas states in part: "the petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. Their right to liberty under the due process clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government. It is a promise of the Constitution that there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter."

“Giving back to the community was something which my Austin College experience had reinforced in me. That urge kicked in during the turbulent 70s. I have been involved on a volunteer basis with a number of LGBT organizations since that time,” Dick says. Since 1978, Dick has logged 40 years of serving on boards of non-profit corporations, including serving as board chair and in all four officer positions, most often as treasurer. He has been the recipient of the J.C. Penney Golden Rule Award, the Dallas Black Tie Dinner’s Kuchling award, and an Austin College Distinguished Alumnus award, all in recognition of his volunteer services.

Today, Dick Peeples continues to live in Dallas.