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Watts also had a gift for directing comedy. Later, in the mid-90s, he went on to found another queer theater ensemble, Theatre New West, in Montrose. "He was truly a gay Houston hero," observes Larry Lingle, a retired Houston entrepreneur who owned Lobo, a gay bookstore that was a gathering place for gay men in the '80s and '90s. Houston Post theater critic William Albright selected it as one of the best productions of the year. The Group Theater presented "One," featuring actor Kent Johnson portraying a person living with HIV. That same year, as the gay community was reeling from the AIDS crisis and people living with HIV were objects of fear and loathing, Watts directed one of the first plays about AIDS in Houston. In 1985, during an extremely homophobic period in Houston's history when many gays were deep in the closet, he founded one of the city's first gay theater companies, The Group Theater. IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: How Montrose became gay But when things caught on and they realized that he was a formidable force, that he was a really creative man, he packed the houses." "I can remember performances that he was lucky to have 10 or 12 people in the audience. "When Joe first started doing gay theater in Houston, people were indifferent to it," observes longtime friend George Jonte-Crane of Watts's early days in the 1980s. Confronted with penuriously low budgets and unable to afford the rent of an established theater, he staged productions at unconventional venues, including art galleries, The Holocaust Museum Houston and The Pink Elephant, Texas's oldest gay bar. Undaunted by seemingly overwhelming odds, he persevered in pursuit of his vision, discovered creative solutions and made sure that the curtain went up regularly on queer theater productions for three decades.