Glen Maxey: first openly gay Texas legislator

Send us Fan Mail Former Texas House Representative Glen Maxey was born near a refinery in Baytown, Texas, in 1952. His first job was working in a traveling rodeo and his first serious foray into politics was as a student at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, where he led the charge to allow alcohol to be sold in that formerly dry county. Although he was already a known quantity in the Texas Democratic Party by his early 20s, it wasn’t till he was almost 30 and left teaching 5th grade in rural Texas that he got his first job working at the Capitol. In 1981 after getting Kent Caperton elected to the State House, Glen was asked to join Representative Caperton's staff and immediately began cultivating a relationship with the most powerful senator in the state, Oscar Mauzy. The following year, Glen lost his own race for an open House seat in Bryan-College Station. He quit teaching and permanently relocated to Austin to join the staff of Sen. Mauzy. Glen lived an extremely closeted life as a gay man. But that ended in 1985, when, using the bull horn of Sen. Mauzy’s office, he stood up against Texas’s draconian response to the HIV crisis, and overnight became a very public gay rights activist and the first executive director of the Lesbian Gay Rights Lobby (LGRL). No one thought he had a real chance to win an election in Texas in the early 90s; his good friend Governor Ann Richards said, “Don’t do it. Even if you win, they’ll never let you do what’s important.” Glen Maxey proved them all wrong becoming the first out gay man elected to the Texas State House in 1991 and over the next 12 years passing more impactful legislation than any legislator in Texas history.