Updated at noon with comment from representative-elect Julie Johnson.

AUSTIN — The number of openly LGBTQ lawmakers in Texas just doubled.

On Tuesday, Jessica González and Julie Johnson, who are lesbians, were elected to represent the Dallas area, and Erin Zwiener, who is bisexual, was chosen to represent central Texas. González and Johnson will be the first openly gay lawmakers to represent Dallas-Fort Worth. All three ran as Democrats.

When the women are sworn in in January, they'll join Reps. Celia Israel of Austin, a lesbian, and Mary González of El Paso, who identifies as pansexual, as well as more than 120 other lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer politicians who were elected nationwide this year.

Gay-rights advocates hope the wins are a signal that Texas is changing.

"I'm very happy," Chuck Smith, CEO of the LGBTQ-rights group Equality Texas, said early Wednesday morning. "I do believe the results tonight, especially in the Texas House of Representatives, demonstrate that rabidly homophobic or transphobic values and an interest in pursuing that kind of legislative agenda are not mainstream."

'There's no telling what we can do'

Dozens of openly LGBTQ candidates jumped into Texas elections this year, part of a state and nationwide trend. By Election Day, 14 were still in the running for the state's top jobs plus the Legislature.

To date, there have been just three openly gay lawmakers who've served in that body in more than 150 years. In January, that number will double to six. The five who will be currently serving are all women — Jessica and Mary González, Israel, Johnson and Zwiener.

Jessica González has been the representative-elect for House District 104 since the primary, when she beat fellow Democrat Roberto Alonzo and took the seat that snakes from Arlington through Grand Prairie to West Dallas.

A former legislative assistant in the U.S. House and a law clerk at the U.S. Department of Civil Rights-Voting Rights Division, the Dallas lawyer tapped into the district's growing progressive movement by tackling criminal justice and gentrification issues. On Wednesday, González said she was "still kind of speechless this morning."

"Having five of us there that are going to be advocating for a lot of the same issues that are important to our communities, there's no telling what we can do," she said. "That, and given that Democrats gained so many seats, it gives me lots of hope that we can actually make huge strides this session."

Johnson, 51, is also an attorney who ran on a platform of overhauling taxes and improving the state's method of funding public schools. She beat incumbent Matt Rinaldi, whose scorched-earth campaign and reputation for being a hotheaded legislator turned off some voters. Her district, House District 115, includes parts of Irving and Carrollton.

On Tuesday, Johnson said Rinaldi used her sexual orientation to attack her, but voters didn't take the bait.

"Voters soundly rejected that rhetoric and selected me based on my merits," she said, adding she'll work with the Republican majority in the Texas House and Senate. "I'm very hopeful about that."

Democrats flipped 12 Texas House seats Tuesday, but Republicans still control a majority of the Legislature. When lawmakers last met in 2017, several bills the gay community considered anti-LGBT were conservative priorities, including the bathroom bill that would have required transgender people to use restrooms based on their sex at birth.

Zwiener, a 33-year-old children's book author, said her orientation did not come up much in her race with Wimberley EMS director Ken Strange.

"My team and I definitely had concerns that my sexuality would become an issue in the campaign," Zwiener said. "It says a lot about where Texas is right now that my opponents did not consider it advantageous to make it an issue."

Glen Maxey, the first gay legislator, said the fact that fewer Republicans are attacking candidates for their orientation shows politics in Texas is shifting.

"When I first stepped out in the '80s, it was the No. 1 issue," said Maxey, who represented Austin from 1991 to 2003. But this year, he added, "I never saw a news story or a report that those candidates were dealing with the historic brick wall or glass ceiling of orientation being a factor. They were judged on their merits, their issues and their experiences."

'Turning a corner'

Nationwide, the total wins for LGBTQ candidates are going to easily top 120 out of 200 races, said Don Haider-Markel, political science chairman at the University of Kansas, who's been tracking LGBTQ candidates. "That would be the most wins in a single election cycle," he said.

Haider-Markel said it's no surprise so many LGBTQ candidates, especially women like Johnson, González and Zwiener, stepped up this year.

"The election and the Trump administration have really riled up people in marginalized communities, including women," Haider-Markel said. "There have been more lesbians running and more female transgender candidates" than gay or transgender men.

There were a handful of painful election losses for the LGBTQ community. Lupe Valdez, the first openly gay and Latina woman to be nominated for governor, lost to Gov. Greg Abbott, and Finnigan Jones, who was running against GOP Rep. Tony Tinderholt of Arlington, lost his bid to become the first transgender elected official in Texas.

But Smith, the gay-rights advocate, said he remains optimistic. Many of these defeats were by razor-thin margins. And while just three LGBTQ candidates were elected, Smith said they celebrated the elections of gay-friendly lawmakers and the defeats of Republicans they saw as hostile, including Carrollton Rep. Ron Simmons, the author of one of the bathroom bills.

"It's great that additional LGBTQ people advanced. It's also great that there were a lot of people who ran on a pro-equality plank," Smith said. "It shows us turning a corner and being able to say with total conviction that the fair and equal treatment of every Texas is a mainstream Texas value."