I’ve got a lot of drafts — and tiny dumb observations that might’ve one day developed into drafts — left over from my old newsletter, Lost in Panther City (RIP). Today, I’m publishing one of those, a piece I’ve wanted to write for at least two years. Below, you’ll find a few thoughts on the 2012 documentary film, Raid of the Rainbow Lounge, which explores the fallout from an aggressive police raid of a Fort Worth gay bar on the fortieth anniversary of Stonewall. This post is kind of a film review but also just a rant or maybe a few different rants.

The documentary is still extremely relevant, not just as a historical record but — unfortunately — as one link in a chain of state-sponsored bigotry that continues into the present. For example: Just a few days ago, the Fort Worth Report broke the news that Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare killed an attempt to have a historical marker recognizing Fort Worth’s LGBTQ community placed at the site where the Rainbow Lounge used to stand.

The bar isn’t there anymore; it burned down in 2017. That may seem like recent history, not something that will be forgotten anytime soon, and it’s true that as long as groups like Fort Worth’s YesterQueer persist, there will always be someone to commemorate the Rainbow Lounge’s existence. But it fills me with rage to see powerful right-wing freaks attempt to suppress historical knowledge that is already marginalized. At the moment, I’m not worried about such knowledge fading away gradually; I’m worried that it will be maliciously erased.

Anyway, Raid of the Rainbow Lounge is available to stream for free and if you have any interest in Fort Worth or queer history, I suggest you give it a watch.

1. The film is flawed but valuable #

I’m usually just not that interested in documentaries that don’t at least try to break away from the genre’s standard storytelling and aesthetic conventions, like a reliance on talking head interviews and heavy-handed dramatic music. Raid of the Rainbow Lounge features both of these. It’s not very inventive and, frankly, has some serious flaws, including a convoluted, overlong second half and Windows Movie Maker–level visual effects reminiscent of bad true crime docs. But I think its value as an archive of Fort Worth’s queer history helps it transcend these limitations.

There are people featured in this film that, had it not been made, may never have had their voices and experiences at the Rainbow Lounge recorded and remembered. It’s not even possible to capture some of their stories now: At least one of the interviewees, Tom Anable, co-founder of the gay rights organization Fairness Fort Worth, has since died. At its best, Raid of the Rainbow Lounge functions as a kind of oral history archive, providing a rich snapshot of Fort Worth’s gay community at a particular moment in time. It just sucks that the genesis of this archive was a violent police raid that traumatized a whole bunch of people.

Oh and speaking of the police:

2. The cops lied about what happened #

The raid itself was terrible, but what Raid of the Rainbow Lounge makes very clear is that the City of Fort Worth’s handling of the initial fallout was also quite bad. Despite promising a thorough investigation of his officers’ actions, then-Fort Worth Police Chief Jeff Halstead immediately justified his officers’ violence during the raid (and also denied that it was a “raid”) by spreading a homophobic lie, claiming that patrons of the Rainbow Lounge had groped and sexually harassed officers — i.e., a version of the gay panic defense.

Witnesses uniformly and unequivocally rejected this as false — and, in the documentary, point out how bigoted the allegation was — but Halstead kept saying it. He was repeating what his officers wrote in their police report, which was then uncritically amplified by journalists, both local and national. (The story recieved widespread attention online and coverage in outlets like The New York Times.)

While the documentary doesn’t draw definitive conclusions, evidence presented by Raid of the Rainbow Lounge suggests that police threw a gay man to the ground so hard that he had to be taken to the hospital and treated for skull fractures. Of course the officers involved wouldn’t admit to this! So they made up some bullshit to excuse their actions. This was clearly another example — as if we needed more but here we are — of the way cops lie to protect themselves.

3. The Star-Telegram’s editorial response was, uh, lacking #

Longtime readers know that I generally have a low opinion of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s opinion section. In recent years, it has mostly served as a watering hole for extremely forgettable conservative commentators (though the recent hiring of Bradford William Davis, a columnist who is at least willing to call out transphobia and criticize the cops, was a welcome change). So would it surprise you to learn that the Star-Telegram’s columnists and editorial writers completely flubbed their coverage of the Rainbow Lounge raid?

Bud Kennedy is an especially good — or rather, bad — example here. He failed to mention that the Rainbow Lounge was a gay bar in his initial column, even though it was published a whole two days after the news first broke! Only after the raid began to get national and international attention — and drew extensive criticism from prominent gay writers — did Bud decide to mention this fact in a follow-up, but even then he used this second column to defend Fort Worth. As he wrote:

I might easily argue that Fort Worth was ground zero for equality long before officers opened the door of the Rainbow Lounge.

Incredible work, sir.

4. It’s depressing to see how optimistic this documentary was #

From where I’m sitting in 2025, in the midst of a sustained far-right backlash against LGBTQ civil rights, it’s hard to watch the final ten minutes of Raid of the Rainbow Lounge. The documentary ends on a painfully optimistic note, with the film’s narrator stating that: “In the months after the raid, Fort Worth would emerge as a leader in LGBT equality.” It’s true that the city did reform its policies to try and make local government more inclusive; local gay rights movements exerted political pressure on public officials and, while they failed to compel the police department to substantively punish the officers responsible for the raid, they at least managed to drag the city in a more progressive direction. Whatever Bud Kennedy may believe, the city was no utopia of queer liberation before the raid.

But some things have clearly not changed. Fort Worth still has a deep, abiding reactionary culture that has never been adequately challenged. The Mayor and City Council sometimes manage to recognize June as Pride month, but taking the smallest possible symbolic action doesn’t excuse the city’s recent capitulation to transphobic hate groups, some council members’ resistance to an LGBTQ advisory committee and Mattie Parker’s decision to strip the pride badge from her summer reading program two summers ago.

Look, I love the slogan “Y’all means all” just as much as Mattie does; I even have the Visit Fort Worth T-shirt. But I gotta be honest with you, praising the “economic output” of Fort Worth’s gay community strikes me as a weirdly conservative way to celebrate Pride! Do we really want to say that people are valued because of their contributions to net GDP? What about the folks who don’t start businesses, who aren’t and never want to be entrepreneurs, who aren’t “productive” in a way that can be measured? Do we love and accept them too? (If you couldn’t tell, this really bothers me!)

The aftermath of the Rainbow Lounge fiasco did seemingly change things for the better; the efforts of local organizers have probably prevented further police abuse of the gay community and certainly blunted the effects of open discrimination within city government. But progress isn’t permanent, and I have to wonder: Would the filmmakers still call Fort Worth “a leader in LGBT equality” today?