They shut down an airport terminal on Thanksgiving Eve. Like the potter’s field, other GUTS demonstrations were equally colorful and effective. So, GUTS was born, which some joked stood for “Gay Urban Terrorist Squad.” Being the “good Dallas boys that we were,” he says, they asked for permission to use the name. The group’s genesis rested in another gay rights organization called ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which was located in cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, Waybourn explains. Officials spiked AIDS support to $552,000 the following year. The city was so embarrassed by the demonstration that they left the crosses up for a couple of days, Waybourn says, laughing.īut it worked.
Media swarmed the makeshift potter’s field, which was featured on the evening news. The Dallas Morning News had dubbed it the city’s own “Grand Canyon.” Dallas City Council approved spending $500,000 to pack the crater the same year it had devoted just $55,000 toward AIDS funding, according to a 1996 D Magazine article. Their shadows stretched across the grassy field, he says: “It was a beautiful day.”įor years, the empty lot was home to a large hole that had filled with stagnant water, an eyesore landmark brought by a development project gone south. GUTS leader William Waybourn remembers the sun crawling over the horizon, its rays catching the crosses. Members of the Gay Urban Truth Squad (GUTS), a Dallas activist group, drove the wooden stakes into the dirt at the intersection of Lemmon and Cole avenues. They carried some 700 hand-painted white crosses bearing the names of Dallas County residents who’d succumbed to AIDS. The staccato thud of hammers broke the predawn stillness one morning in 1988.