The Country: Remembering Lexington’s First Lesbian Bar
Opened in 1978 in a suburban strip mall, The Country was a hub of lesbian-feminist community making in Central Kentucky. 38 years after it closed, The Country remains a storied space in the LGBTQ history of the Commonwealth. More than a bar, The Country was a haven for queer women to find lovers, develop friendships, and organize for social and political change.
The Country: Remembering Lexington’s First Lesbian Bar was a 12-month intensive focus by Faulkner Morgan Archive to collect the oral histories of women whose experience at The Country sheds light on the broader narrative of queer women in Kentucky in the 1970s and 1980s.
The collection is now available and open to researchers at Faulkner Morgan Archive and the Kentucky Historical Society.
Project Director
Adriana Sisko is a doctoral candidate in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky. They acted as primary interviewer for OutSouth: LGBTQ+ Oral History Project, a partnership between the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History and the University of Kentucky’s Office of LGBTQ* Resources. The project’s central mission was to document the lives of LGBTQ-identified individuals in the South.
The Country: Remembering Lexington’s First Lesbian Bar is made possible by our supporters and a generous grant from the Kentucky Oral History Commission.