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The next year, in 1979, Jack told her mother she was gay. Though she’d never two-stepped in her life until she started working in Dallas, she soon found herself teaching dance lessons at the bar, then waiting tables, and eventually working her way through the ranks of the city’s queer bar scene. Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, Jack grew up riding and training horses. She quickly felt at home at the High Country, though.
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At the time, three other lesbian clubs existed across the city, but not having come out yet herself, Jack hadn’t visited any of them. In 1978, a friend invited Jack to the High Country, a country and western lesbian bar that catered to a mixed crowd and was located about two miles down the road from where Sue Ellen’s would eventually sit.
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“She’s the manager of the lesbian community.” The exterior of Sue Ellen’s. “She’s not just the manager of a lesbian bar,” Pennington says. Her regulars, though, say that Sue Ellen’s has lasted so long because of Jack herself. Jack attributes the bar’s longevity to her staff - particularly their staunch commitment to welcoming all walks of life in a town that used to segregate its queer nightlife by gender. “And you suddenly become part of this family, and you keep wanting to go back.” “Sue Ellen’s has always been a place where everyone’s welcome,” Corbin says. Through all of this, patrons have come back to Sue Ellen’s to drink beers, go on first dates, and meet up with friends. Life in Dallas, and for LGBTQ people across the country, has transformed through these decades, from the end of sodomy laws (in which Dallas lesbian Mica England played an early role ) to the legalization of gay marriage from a citywide equal rights ordinance for transgender people in 2015 to this June’s Supreme Court ruling mandating nondiscrimination protections for all LGBTQ people. In its 31 years of operation, Sue Ellen’s has lived through the AIDS epidemic, a housing crisis, and a recession, in addition to weathering the recent COVID-19 pandemic. “They’ll fill with water almost every time she makes a speech to the staff.” “She has the kindest brown eyes,” says Kathy Corbin, who’s been singing at the bar for two decades and, before that, dated Jack on and off. (“There might’ve been one before I came into the community, but not that I know of,” she says.) Jack’s presence and ability to take charge of a room are rivaled only by her capacity for making patrons feel welcome. More than thirty years ago, she broke through in the Dallas queer nightlife scene as one of the city’s first women to manage a bar. A few hours before, Jack had dusted off Pennington’s throne and presented her with the cake and the accompanying toy inside.Ī matriarch of the Metroplex’s queer nightlife, Jack is a 62-year-old with a closely cropped silver fade. Pennington says she felt happy - and yes, gay -that night surrounded by so many loved ones, including the bar’s owner, Kathy Jack. After the bar collectively sang Pennington a happy birthday, she pulled a Barbie from her cake and licked the icing from the doll’s legs. Pennington was celebrating her sixty-first birthday at the happy hour that night. Here, you can often find duos singing Indigo Girls covers, drag and burlesque performances, and karaoke. The place was so packed, someone could practically sober up before even making it back to their seat.ĭee Pennington, the creator of “Chick Happy Hour,” sat on a grandiose wooden armchair (which she calls her throne) on the Sue Ellen’s stage.
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On this particular night, patrons passed from room to room in the two-story bar, flirting with one another as they made their way to the downstairs counter, sometimes ordering two drinks at a time. As one regular put it, “Chick Happy Hour” is a roving monthly congregation of the city’s lesbian socialites who gather the first week of every month, each time at a different bar. On a Thursday night in December, well before the coronavirus pandemic had reached the United States, two to three hundred women were gathered at Sue Ellen’s, a remnant of Dallas’s once-bustling lesbian nightlife.