COVID may have postponed Pridefest, but this event celebrates Lexington’s LGBTQ history

Downtown would normally be abuzz with rainbow flags and revelry this weekend at the Lexington Pride Festival, the LGBTQ community’s annual outdoor event, but it’s been postponed until October due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Even so, Central Kentucky’s gays, lesbians and others of non-conforming sexuality can still find their stories being told and celebrated downtown with the Thursday launch of “Pride of Place: Lexington’s LGBTQ History,” a new walking tour that includes stops at more than a dozen locations where local queer history unfolded.

“We had the idea to do this long before COVID-19 put a stop to so much, including Pridefest this year,” says Jonathan Coleman, director of the Faulkner Morgan Archive, which organized the tour and is co-hosting the launch with Lexington Fairness. “The good news is, the walking tour lends itself to social distancing. People will come, get a copy of the tour, and then do the self-guided tour downtown safely and on their own schedule.”

The one-night-only launch event on Thursday will feature special guest experts sharing additional community-sourced information and revealing anecdotes at each stop.

They will include author Silas House, who will talk about the old Phoenix Hotel, at what is now Phoenix Park, where gay men socialized — discreetly and sometimes not so discreetly — for decades, and where local police resorted to entrapment and even two-way mirrors to spy upon and arrest them.

University of Kentucky molecular biologist Marco Clementino will be stationed outside the Bar Complex, Kentucky’s oldest LGBTQ meeting place, to share stories about its long history under several different names including the Living Room and the Gilded Cage.

Some of the on-site experts were personally connected to the people and historical events being discussed. Lexington artist Robert Morgan, for example, will be on hand at the home of his mentor, the late painter Henry Faulkner, to share stories from their long friendship.

Lawyer Tracee Whitley, who will be stationed at the former home of the lesbian-feminist Lexington Women’s Collective on Second Street, is good friends with one of the collective’s founders, artist and spoken-word poet CD Collins.

And Ernesto Scorsone will be at the historical marker recalling the legal case of Jeffrey Wasson, a 23-year-old Lexington man arrested in 1985 in a police sting targeting gay men. Scorsone, a former state legislator and now a Fayette County Circuit Court judge, served as Wasson’s attorney in a long but ultimately successful battle to overturn the state law that criminalized gay sex.

Other stops on the tour — most within the mile-long urban core, a few outside it — include the first brothel of Lexington madam Belle Brezing; the home of legendary black crossdresser James Herndon, better known as Sweet Evening Breeze; the Pride Center, home of the Pride Community Services Organization; the Country, a lesbian bar and meeting place on Lane Allen Road; Crossings, originally a men’s leather bar and now the home bar of the Imperial Court of Kentucky, a drag group and more.

Coleman noted that Pride of Place is supported by VisitLex, the city’s visitors’ center, which will make the tour brochures widely available. (The brochures can also be picked up at the Pride Center, 389 Waller Ave., or downloaded at the Faulkner Morgan’s website, faulknermorgan.org.)

“Everyone who walks in there will see, right beside all the other walking tours of Gratz Park and Lincoln’s Lexington, a tour that is specifically for LGBTQ history,” says Coleman, a University of Kentucky-trained historian and author of “Anywhere, Together: A Queer History of Kentucky,” scheduled for publication next year by the University Press of Kentucky.

“When a queer person walks in, that’s going to be a signal to that person that Lexington is a safe, affirming, welcoming place for queer people,” he says. “And that’s what we want.”

Pride of Place: Lexington’s LGBTQ History launch event

Where: Tour brochures can be picked up at the Faulkner Morgan Archive table outside the Kentucky Theatre

When: 6-7:30 p.m. Thursday

Cost: Free

This story was originally published June 24, 2020 at 1:44 PM.