RVA 2024 • METRO
Cece Cox, right, with her wife, Shelly Skeen It was a cold December night in 1988, and the LGBTQ community in Dallas was still raging over Judge Jack Hampton’s proud, defiant admission that he had given a relatively light sentence to the teenager who had, in May of that year, murdered two gay men in cold blood simply because the victims were gay.
But the community was also locked in a much broader battle — fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic that was still killing gay men weekly, if not daily.
And that night, the Dallas Gay Alliance was gathering the community in the Dallas City Hall plaza to protest official inaction on the epidemic, and to hold a candlelight vigil in memory of those lost to the epidemic.
It was also Cece Cox’s first step out into the world of LGBTQ activism. As Cece told The Dallas Way in 2018, she had moved to Dallas in 1984 with her journalism degree from Northwestern University.
