The Mosaic Project’s mission has always been rooted in a simple truth: when we preserve the stories of those who built our community, we invest in everyone who comes after. Donna Blaze Johnson’s oral history, now archived on Our Community Lives, offers exactly that kind of foundational testimony. From her first steps into Corpus Christi’s gay bar scene in 1977 through decades of bartending, performing, activism, and mentorship, Donna’s journey maps the infrastructure of care that LGBTQIA+ people have always created for one another, especially when the wider world looked away.
What stands out across Donna’s narrative is her consistent presence as someone who made space for others. She became the first woman bartender in the LGBT community, working at the Zodiac and Jolly Jack, tending bar in the vibrant pre-AIDS years when drag shows and community gatherings formed the heartbeat of queer life in South Texas. Even in her own struggle with addiction, Donna remained embedded in a web of relationships, friends who saw her through crisis, an ex-girlfriend who helped her into treatment, and eventually the sober biker community where she found recovery and a new kind of chosen family.
The losses Donna recounts are staggering. The AIDS crisis claimed an entire generation of beautiful men, friends and mentors whose absence reshaped the landscape of the community. Yet even amid that devastation, Donna’s account highlights collective action: ACT UP organizing, the founding of the Coastal Bend AIDS Foundation by her friend Tommy Landrum, and the persistent work of showing up for one another. These acts of care weren’t incidental, they were survival, and they’re part of the architecture that supports today’s LGBTQIA+ community in South Texas.
Now Donna mentors queer youth, promising them chosen family and assuring them it gets better. She’s led Corpus Christi’s Pride Parade with Dykes and Friends on Bikes, understanding visibility as both a gift and a responsibility. Her full interview, available at Our Community Lives, is a master class in how one person’s resilience becomes a resource for an entire community. Preserving voices like Donna’s isn’t just about honoring the past; it’s about ensuring that future generations inherit the knowledge that they are part of something larger, that others have walked this road, and that the work of building each other up continues.
The Mosaic Project exists because these stories matter, because every oral history we archive strengthens the collective memory that holds our community together. If you have a chapter of this story to contribute, we invite you to share it at Our Community Lives. Your voice is part of the foundation we’re building for everyone who comes next.
