Linda Lopez

Linda was born into a military family in Paris, Texas, and moved around frequently. Despite her family being extremely politically conservative, she realized during her teens that she was gay.

While at college at Brigham Young University during the mid-1960s, she met her first partner, Carroll, whom she married, thanks to Carroll’s minister father. However, tragedy struck when Carroll took her own life following her father’s suicide. Following this heartbreak, Linda realized her desire for a child, so she married a second time, this time to a man. After her pregnancy and divorce from her husband, she moved to Fort Worth, Texas, where she was introduced to girl bars by a queen and her partner. Around the time that her son was four months old, she met her second lesbian partner, Cecelia, and began to attend the first Daughters of Bilitis-Dallas chapter meetings. 

Successfully contesting and winning a custody battle with her parents over her son, she lost both her job as a certified court reporter for the State of Texas, and her partner, Cecelia, eventually having to create a fake background in order to hold a job.

However, since the early 1970s, she was an officer for DOB-Dallas as the secretary, and remained active in the DOB until the time the Dallas chapter began to dissolve, when she turned her energy towards other gay & lesbian political activist organizations in the area.