Honoring Don
Dallas Pride 2022 is dedicated to the late Don Maison DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writertaffet@dallasvoice.com The Dallas Pride Committee has dedicated the 2022 Dallas Pride celebration to Don Maison, the attorney who carried the battle for LGBTQ equality into the courts in the late 1970s and through the 1980s before taking over as executive director of the agency then known as the PWA Coalition of Dallas (now known as AIDS Services of Dallas) in 1989.
When Maison retired as president and CEO of AIDS Services of Dallas at the beginning of 2019 after 32 years as head of the organization, he was the longest-serving head of an AIDS service organization in the country.
He died on Feb. 21 this year following a long illness and a short battle with esophageal cancer. Maison’s first big battle in the fight for LGBTQ equality was when he represented several men arrested during a 1979 Dallas police raid on a gay bar called Village Station, then located at the corner of Throckmorton and Cedar Springs.
Maison used one of the arresting officers’ sworn testimony — he said that while standing near the bar’s entrance he had seen men touching each other on the dance floor — to bust the prosecution’s case, using a copy of the bar’s floor plan to prove that the officer was lying because they could not possibly have seen the dance floor from where they said they had been standing.
