651 Jenning Street, Fort Worth, Texas

My father was in the Air Force and he (meaning we) got orders to transfer to Carswell Air Force Base in 1983. We were at George Air Force Base, California near Victorville before that transfer. I was 15 and about to enter 10th grade and I didn’t want to go. We went, I finished high school, went to college in Roswell, New Mexico; went to College in Austin, Texas; spent two years on active Army duty in El Paso, Texas, went back to Fort Worth and finished college at TCU; went to law school in Waco; served 3 years in Germany with the Army, and then I came home. (I spent a bunch more time on active duty in the Army, but that’s not important right now)

I rented an apartment at Parker Commons on Jennings in 2001 and started working with a friend of mine from law school in Burleson. This was 2001, weeks after 9/11. This neighborhood was what passed for Fort Worth’s gayborhood. I could walk to the 651. I could walk to two other gay bars. I tried out the 651, but the country and western vibe wasn’t my cup of tea.

Then the inevitable happened. I was recalled to active duty after 9/11. I spent a year Fort Hood and then a year in Iraq. And when I came home from war my apartment was still there but the 651 had become Hot Shots and was owned and managed by two guys from Austin, Brack Sisco and Robert Rogers. I hadn’t spent much time in the 651 (a country bar), I lived at Hot Shots. One evening I met a guy there. He was younger than me, taller than me, he was (and still is) beautiful and he had great smile. He had dated one of my old bartenders for a little while. While this bartender did a great job with slinging the drinks and throwing me a free cocktail every so often, he wasn’t the most truthful person in the world. He told me about his ex and his ex’s sister. I met that guy one night at the Rainbow Lounge. And we have been together ever since. We were married on March 1, 2014 in Ruidoso, NM.

Robert and Brack are now long out of the bar business (Brack is an MBA business consultant, Robert is a PhD and they have two kids) and have moved away to South Carolina, I spent a few more years on active duty in the Army - this time I took Charlie with me (to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, not to war).

When we came back from North Carolina, the 651 that had become Hot Shots had become the Rainbow Lounge. I spent two weeks doing Army Reserve training at Fort Dix, NJ one summer when the Rainbow Lounge had just opened. I flew back and Charlie and I stopped in to the Rainbow Lounge to remember the good times. Later that night, after we left, a team of Fort Worth Police officers and Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents brought a paddy wagon to a “bar check” and the Rainbow Lounge nee’ Hot Shots nee’ The 651 and an incident that made Fort Worth famous around the world for the way its police interacted with the LGBT community -- thanks to media coverage and the documentation of my dear friend Robert L. Camina who’s work telling the story of that night helped people realize what a gifted filmmaker he is. Raid of the Rainbow Lounge is a must see.

This brief memory, before I start working this morning, is what I will write in lieu of an obituary. The business at 651 Jennings in Fort Worth, Texas burned to the ground last night. The place where I met my husband. The place I have met some of the best friends I have had in my life, like Robert Rogers and his husband Brack Sisco. The place I sometimes used to help run (my payment was in cocktails) has been physically destroyed. But the memories live on. And I cherish them.

The Honorable Barrack Obama

I was on active duty in the Army in 2004. I spent the vast majority of the year in Iraq, dividing my time between Camp Victory in Baghdad, and Forward Operating Base Abu Ghraib (yes, THAT Abu Ghraib) near the edge of the Anbar province as the brigade judge advocate for the 504th Military Intelligence Brigade. Some of us were lucky to get a two-week vacation during our year-long deployment and mine happened to coincide with the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

An obscure state senator from Illinois who was running for the United States Senate got the opportunity to give one of the “big speeches” at the Convention. Some guy just a few years older than I was called “Barrack Hussein Obama”. I don’t remember his entire speech (or where my keys are right at this moment) but there were a few phrases that stuck with me (some of which I later downloaded from the Internet and taped to my office door in Baghdad). One of the most stirring passages from the speech was “there is no red America, there is no blue America, there is only the UNITED STATES of AMERICA.” I remember thinking that this guy might do okay in national politics some day.

Four years later and I was again on active duty, this time at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Obama, by then a US Senator, was challenging then-Senator Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. My high school and New Mexico Military Institute classmate Chris Smith had taken a leave of absence from his day job and was working for Obama and he urged me to do the same. In the end, I did not -- largely because I was on active duty at the time -- and Chris went on to become deputy assistant secretary of the Department of Energy (which is pretty cool).

I have been a political junkie my entire life (in high school my favorite activity was Youth in Government and I got to do a lot of cool things at the Texas capital because of it) and I am a big (YUGE) student of American history and politics. I can honestly say that Obama had a grasp on politics and the ability to inspire that I could only compare to Jack and Bobby Kennedy’s. I watched tonight’s farewell speech by President Obama in Chicago and it moved me just as much as State Senator Obama’s did years ago. History may or may not remember Obama for being a great president (he will surely be remembered as the first non-white president) but he knows what the highest ideals of this country are and he inspires people of all ages to be as good as the promise of this country. He has not had ONE SINGLE PERSONAL OR FAMILIAL SCANDAL during his presidency. Not one.

Our Constitution purposely divides political power between the President and two houses of Congress (and, perhaps not in the way the founders intended, in the Courts) so the degree that the President gets what he (and someday “she”) wants is limited by the political needs of each independently elected constitutional actor. In other words, no President gets everything that they want. Still, there have been no scandals swirling around President Obama. No special prosecutor has been appointed to investigate him, no long articles in the Washington Post have detailed the wayward escapades of his children. He has had one wife, and even his mother-in-law has lived with his family at the White House to help the Obamas raise their children.

Perhaps if I was President Obama’s father or son I would be more proud of the way he has lived his public and private life and the way has has executed the duties of his presidency. But in any event, I will be very sad at noon on January 20th, 2017 when his second term expires.

He is not just important because he is the first non-white president, the first president who even remotely looks like me. He is important perhaps in spite of that. He has done (or at least tried to do) what he said he would do. He has inspired millions of people around the world to have faith in the ability of an ordinary person with talent to achieve the most important office in our nation and, arguably, the world in spite of institutionalized racism (birthergate, anyone?) and in spite of a fierce opposition political faction that has, on occasion, taken liberties with the truth (cough cough, birth certificate, cough).

I will not say “goodbye” to this good and decent man. He has many good years left in front of him. He will write a memoir of his life at the White House, he will build a Presidential Library in Chicago or Hawaii (probably Chicago), he will see his beautiful daughters graduate college and begin their lives as the good and decent women that they have been raised to be by their good and decent parents.

And no child, no matter which gender they are, no matter what color their skin is will EVER again be born in this country with the idea that there are limits to what they can do in life. Not very long ago people were told that there were things that they could not do because of their gender or because of the color of their skin or because of their sexual orientation. Those days are over now, and we have Barrack Obama (and Hillary Clinton) to thank for that.

So I bid President Obama “farewell” and I wish Mr. Trump “good luck”. Right now, some smart kid -- a boy or a girl who may be black or white or hispanic or Asian or gay or lesbian or transgender -- might be thinking about a life in politics. This is the greatest country in the world. President Obama didn’t make his presidency possible, people like Jack Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. did. President Obama stood on their shoulders, and that next “first” in American public life should be proud to stand on his.

So, thank you, Mr. President. Thank you for being what you seemed to be in 2004. Thank you for being a good and decent man. Godspeed.