Terry Mullins and Bill Chandler are a couple who live in Lexington, Kentucky. Terry Mullins is director of Moveable Feast—a non-profit that delivers meals to people in Lexington with AIDS. Terry was also a bartender at Crossings when it first opened in 1989. They were heavily involved in many gay organizations, including the Tri-State Gay Rodeo Association, the Lexington congregation of the Metropolitan Community Church, and a gay acting group called Act Out. The pair has been together over twenty years.

In this recording, photographer Blythe (Peggy) Jameson, describes her two projects and gives over prints and negatives.

Charles Williams (1942-1998) was born in Blue Diamond, Kentucky, a place he described as a “little old country hick town in coal mining territory, eight miles from Hazard, Kentucky, back up in the hollow where the blacks lived.” As a child, Williams taught himself to draw by copying comic book figures like Superman, Dick Tracy, and Captain Marvel but never finished high school.

Williams worked avidly on paintings, drawings, assemblages, sculptures, and furniture until his untimely death in 1998, the result of AIDS-related complications and starvation. A few months later, an organization called Moveable Feast Lexington was founded in his honor and tasked itself with providing hot meals to people living with HIV/AIDS in the region. In the past 14 years, Williams has been exhibited at Institute 193, UK Art Museum, and the Atlanta Contemporary.

Danny Matherly talks about his collection of Sweet Evening Breeze items, and then goes into his life as a gay man from Harrodsburg, then a student at Georgetown, and later his life in the gay circles of Lexington.

The bulk of this material relates to Womin Energy, a Lexington-based lesbian newsletter published from April 1977 to June 1979. There are also materials from other local lesbian groups, like Amber Moon Productions, as well as national lesbian groups and publications.

This interview features Ellen Stewart, a lesbian woman born and raised in Lexington. She was born around 1942, and came out as a lesbian woman at the age of 25, after having been married with one son, Greg Stewart, a gay man who is interviewed in Day 64. Ellen Stewart co-opened the first lesbian club in Lexington, The Country, in 1978. It was located at 849 Lane Allen Road. In the interview Ellen talks a lot about the club, why she opened it, and her relationship to softball, as well as The Living Room, Leigh Angelique, and Sweet Evening Breeze.

Freddy Mills has worked for the Kentucky Theatre since 1963. He relates his early years in Lexington, coming to know the gay scene in Lexington, and especially the gay scene of the Kentucky Theatre. Mills talks about his three arrests for obscenity from the soft-core pornographic movies shown at the Kentucky Theatre.

This interview features Greg Stewart, a gay man born and raised in Lexington to a lesbian woman, Ellen, who is interviewed in Day 63. Greg was born around 1963, attending the Millersburg Military Institute and the New Mexico Military Institute. Greg discusses his sexual abuse as a child, his early sexual activities, and affairs at the military schools, including with teachers. He discusses gay life in Lexington in the early 1980s, his relationship with Louis Bickett, and his struggles with alcohol and drug addiction. He also talks about his mother’s bar, the troubled relationship he had with some of his mother’s lovers and his mother, herself. He also talks about contracting and living with HIV in Lexington in the 1990s.

The materials gifted in this collection come from Daniel Desrochers, a reporter at the time at the Herald Leader, and consist of clippings of articles about Henry Faulkner and the topic of homosexuality.

Michael McCormick and Joe Devers were Lexingtonians, and McCormick lived on North Broadway between 5^th and 6^th street.  McCormick would own Breezing’s bar, a gay bar in Lexington, on Short and Esplanade.

JP Johnson is a librarian at the Lexington Public Library Kentucky Room, and has shared information about Lexington’s gay history from materials in the library.

The Kentucky Fairness Alliance (KFA) was an LGBTQ rights activist organization from 1993-2013. KFA was initially formed in response to conservative efforts to re-establish Kentucky's sodomy statute in 1993,  and its members worked alongside the Louisville-based Fairness Campaign, founded in 1991. In its early years, the organization focused its efforts on combatting anti-LGBTQ legislation as a lobbying presence. However, in 1995, KFA expanded their mission to become a "statewide, grassroots organization" consisting of local chapters and with a focus on education of the public about LGBTQ issues like marriage equality, housing and employment discrimination, and hate crimes towards LGBTQ people. The organization advanced this mission through the dual labor of the KFA Education Fund and the KFA Action fund. A landmark moment in KFA's struggle was the passing of Fairness Ordinances in Lexington and Louisville in 1999. The organization went on to be involved in many local fights for LGBTQ rights until its 2013 merger with the Fairness Campaign, which continues this important work today. 

This is a collection of material from the Lexington Chapter of Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. The material dates to the mid-1990s when the chapter was founded. It was given to me by the current president of the chapter, Linda Angelo.

An early luminary of the gay movement, Elijah Hadyn Clarke was raised in Hindman, attended Eastern Kentucky University, and upon graduating, joined the Army. In April 1965, while working in the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, Lige helped organize the first openly gay picket in front of the White House—four years before the Stonewall Riots. He and his partner Jack Nichols went on to become prominent activists and pioneering gay journalists. They moved from D.C. to New York City in 1968. In 1970, they co-founded GAY, the first weekly newspaper in the U.S. to cover politics and culture from a gay perspective. It became the most profitable gay newspaper in the country. Tragically, Lige was murdered just before his 33rd birthday while on a trip to Mexico in February 1975.

Paul Michael Brown is a young artist from Owensboro, Kentucky, who moved to Lexington in 2007 to attend Transylvania University. After living in New York for a few years, he has now returned to Lexington to be the new director of Institute 193. In Part two, Brown talks about his experience of growing up gay.

Now known at the Lexington Pride Center, this collection contains materials spanning decades about PCSO. It is organized by subject and based on the major activities of the PCSO, also known as the Gay Services Organization (GSO) and the Gay and Lesbian Services Organization (GLSO).

Skylar Davis is the education director at the Headley-Whitney Museum and the cousin of Shea Metcalf. She discusses her interest in queer life, and learning about her cousin, Shea, and her family’s response to her interest in him.

Tom Brown was the partner of William (Bill) Petrie. They lived on the farm in Grant Co. Kentucky. Bill died in 1995 and Tom continued to live on the farm until he passed away in 2021. Tom is from Louisville, Kentucky and went to Western Kentucky University to study theatre. He worked from 1969 to 1974 in New York (where he went on a date with Harvey Milk). He moved onto the farm in 1974.