Michael Dominguez remembers almost nothing of the moment that changed his life. This much he knows: he was leaving a bar to walk the short distance to his apartment when someone approached him from behind and smashed the back of his head. He woke up a couple of hours later in hospital.

“I had the back of my head fractured, I had my left eye socket fractured,” he said. “I had a laceration going off the side of my temple across my eye. I was stabbed on the left side of my neck right underneath my ear. I was stabbed in my left ribcage and my left arm and had a couple of defensive wounds, it looked like, where I tried to fight the guy off. Somebody found me on the side of the street and called 911.”

Nearly seven months later, no witness or footage has emerged that would help Dominguez fill in the blanks, to add detail beyond the memory of tasting blood in his mouth. But while the “what?” and the “who?” remain mysterious, the “why?” seems clear: the 32-year-old is a gay man who was leaving a gay club in Oak Lawn, Dallas’s main LGBT nightlife district. And as the weeks and months after his assault would reveal, Dominguez was not the only victim.

Two weeks earlier, on 20 September, the same day as the Dallas pride festival, Blake Rasnake was dragged from an Oak Lawn street into a van, beaten with a baseball bat, called a “fag” and dumped out a couple of streets away. As in the assault on Dominguez, his wallet was not stolen.

Jarret Duke was walking home around midnight one evening last August after finishing his bartending shift. “I didn’t hear anything, I didn’t see anything, I just remember getting hit twice,” he said. “I remember waking up a little confused, I wasn’t exactly sure what had happened. I just knew I was covered in blood and in extreme pain, so I just started yelling and screaming. Someone in the neighbourhood had called 911.”

The 26-year-old needed stitches and staples to close head wounds. “My wallet was there, my phone was not, my glasses had been shattered. The whole of my left side was extremely sore,” he said.

Between then and now, activists estimate there have been about 30 attacks in the Oak Lawn area – a dozen or so unreported – all but one against gay men and committed by perhaps six to nine individuals. Police have made no arrests and seemingly have no suspects. Dallas police did not make a spokesperson available for this article.

After a spate last fall there was a quieter period, but activists say there have been more attacks in recent weeks that have gone unreported. Only two have been officially categorised as hate crimes: to be classed as bias –motivated the authorities require evidence such as the use of gay slurs. But whether propelled by hate, the intention to commit robberies, or both, the location and profiles of the victims suggest the perpetrators believe gay men are easy targets.

Oak Lawn is an appealing neighbourhood near downtown and Love Field airport with restaurants and bars along its lively main strip, Cedar Springs Road, where Dominguez was attacked. The residential side streets are quiet but on the main roads, pedestrian and vehicle traffic almost create enough of a buzz to muffle the rumble of the aircraft flying low overhead. It’s well suited for bar-hopping on foot, but that seems a risky proposition these days, just as it did more than a decade ago when there was a succession of murders of gay men.

“If I go out now I’m with a group of friends, I don’t walk home. If I find myself wanting to leave earlier than friends, I will call an Uber or a Lyft even if it’s two blocks,” Dominguez said.

“Obviously people want arrests and they want this to be over, but I think it’s become part of the fabric of the area now, unfortunately. I Uber directly from door to door when I go down there, just because I’m a lot more aware of my surroundings,” said Steven Pomerantz, director of Taking Back Oak Lawn, a documentary about the community’s response to the attacks that premiered last week in Dallas at the USA film festival.

After campaigners criticised the response of law enforcement and local business owners as lacklustre, extra patrols were introduced – both police and civilian – street lighting was improved and cameras installed. In public meetings, most recently on Monday, officials said they are committed to protecting residents and solving the crimes. But it is hard to feel safe when none of the attackers have been caught.

“Every weekend we’re checking our phones, checking police blotters to see if something else has happened. That sucks, that you have to live in that kind of fear,” said Dominguez.

The violence undermines the aspiration that Texas’s big cities can be tolerant and progressive havens for LGBT people trying to escape prejudice and violence in rural areas. The openly lesbian Annise Parker served three terms as Houston’s mayor from 2010 to the start of this year. Dallas county’s sheriff, Lupe Valdez, is in her third term as an openly lesbian elected official. Readers of Out Traveler magazine voted Oak Lawn the best “gayborhood” in the country in 2014.

Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Austin all voted Democratic in the last presidential election.

A year after it was daubed with “666” graffiti, there were impromptu celebrations at the Legacy of Love monument in the heart of Oak Lawn last June when the US supreme court legalised same-sex marriage nationwide. “We got marriage equality, we thought it was over,” said Lee Daugherty, owner of a bar with two staff members who were attacked. “A lot of people think it kind of ended there. It actually just started.”

Houston voters last November rejected an equal rights ordinance depicted by opponents as a “transgender bathroom predator” bill amid hysterical rhetoric.

And transgender women have been murdered this year in Austin and Houston. Some wonder whether the political climate is fostering hatred that spills into brutality. “We are concerned that the heightened level of animus that surrounds the presidential campaign and the media in general … can fuel higher rates of violence against LGBT people,” said Chuck Smith, chief executive officer of the LGBT advocacy group Equality Texas.

In response to the attacks, Burke Burnett and Dominguez founded a group called Survivors Offering Support that provides emotional and financial help. Burnett, 30, came out at 15. He lived in the remote small city of Paris in north-east Texas and would drive to Oak Lawn to socialise with other gay people.

In 2011 he was assaulted at a party near Paris: punched, stabbed and thrown onto a fire while his attackers shouted homophobic abuse. Two men received prison sentences. Burnett moved to Dallas and is optimistic despite the recent aggressions.

“Things like this have been going on for a long time. I think that our community having a reaction like it has had is something that I’m proud of; I’m proud to be part of that,” he said.

“I think things are absolutely going forward. I am looking forward to what 10 years from now in Texas will look like. I mean, I’ve got a ring on my finger, I’m married to my husband, we have two beautiful kids at home. If you’d have asked me 10 years ago if that was a possibility, I’d have said no. The way things are moving forward is really encouraging to me.”

Dominguez and others mobilised to put pressure on officials and a neighbourhood they feared had become complacent. Their film shows them forming an action plan, holding rallies and speaking out in a movement that is a mix of anger and love. Activists sell “Take Back Oak Lawn” T-shirts with a logo of a rainbow-coloured clenched fist, the usual order of the hues inverted to signify distress.

“When a community, whether it’s marginalized or not, is approached with hate, it’s up to the community to rise up and fight back against hatred with positive solutions,” said Daugherty.

Still, if Oak Lawn is optimistic, it is also anxious and partying with care. The documentary did not have a conventional happy ending. The bad guys were not caught by the time the credits rolled.

“I’m still cautious, I’m still wary, constantly kind of looking over my shoulder,” said Duke, the bartender attacked last August. “For a lot of us, it’s in the back of our minds that it may not yet be over.”