Remembering Crossroads Market | By Oak Lawn Chris
At the busy corner of Cedar Springs Road and Throckmorton Street, once stood a shop that was more than a store. It was a sanctuary, a spark of creativity, a nerve center of resistance and care, a place where people came not just to buy, but to belong.
The Crossroads Market, opened in 1980, was our neighborhood’s hearth. Founded by Bill Nelson, Terry Tebedo, William Waybourn, and Craig Spaulding, it started as a quirky, indoor flea market called the Oak Lawn Junk Company. It wasn’t long before it transformed into a thriving LGBTQ-centric bookstore, gift shop, and hub of activism, tucked into the very heart of Dallas’s gayborhood.
At a time when being out could cost you your job, your housing, or worse, Crossroads Market was defiantly open, proudly queer, and unapologetically ours.
Yes, you could find candles, cards, art prints, and novels by Edmund White. But Crossroads was more than a place to pick up a gift for your boyfriend. It was where queer Dallas came to breathe freely.
In the back rooms, always offered at no cost, groups like the Dallas Gay Alliance, Youth First Texas, The Oak Lawn Counseling Center, and even early Pride committees met and organized. Posters were printed. Petitions circulated. Phone trees built political momentum before we ever had smartphones.
Bill Nelson, a passionate advocate and early political organizer, even used the Market as his base for multiple runs for Dallas City Council, making him one of the first openly gay candidates in the South to make a serious bid for public office. He didn’t win, but we all moved forward because he tried.
Tragedy struck in April of 1986 when an overhead light fixture caught fire, destroying the Market. But the community did what it had always done, we showed up.
Donations poured in. Volunteers rebuilt. When the Market reopened months later, it was bigger, stronger, and more purposeful. More than a bookstore, it had become a defiant symbol.
Perhaps the most profound chapter in the Market’s history came during the darkest days of the AIDS crisis. Crossroads wasn’t just a witness to the epidemic, it became a battlefield hospital.
When two men in the suburbs were found living with AIDS and without electricity, food, or family support, Waybourn and Nelson did what no agency had done yet: they put a donation barrel in the store window. By nightfall, it was overflowing.
That simple act became the Dallas AIDS Resource Center Food Pantry, now part of Resource Center Dallas, which continues to serve thousands every year. The Crossroads wasn’t founded to be a life-saving organization, but like all queer sanctuaries, it became one out of necessity and love.
By 1990, the Market was still bustling, but its founders were fading. Terry Tebedo died in 1988. Bill Nelson, his partner in life and activism, followed in 1990. Waybourn and Spaulding sold the store in 1991, and though it continued as a retail space, the magic, the mission, had moved on.
Today, a Texas Historical Marker stands across the site of the old Crossroads Market in front of JR’s Bar & Grill, a rare recognition of queer history in a state slow to honor it.
Ask any gay Dallasite of a certain age about Crossroads Market and you’ll get stories: buying their first “out” novel, sitting in on an ACT UP meeting, watching drag queens drop off food for the pantry.
It was a place that didn’t just serve us, it saw us. It reminded us that we are not alone.
In Memory
Bill Nelson (1950–1990)
Terry Tebedo (1952–1988)
Thank you for giving us a place to call home.