Bob Morgan has told all the stories but his own. That changes with new film | Opinion
In 1996, my future husband Van moved back to Lexington to be with his older brother, Hale, who was dying of AIDS.
Van found an apartment on Third Street next to a man named Bob Morgan. Bob was an artist and activist who had already lived through the first horrifying times of the disease in the 1980s, when so many of his former lovers and friends died horrible deaths. He counseled Van and Hale, told each of them how to face death and grief, and the stigma that still surrounded AIDS at that time.
Bob couldn’t save Hale, but I think he saved Van.
That’s our story about Bob. But all across Lexington, there are hundreds of people with similar stories about Bob, now 75 — how he mentored young artists, helped gay kids come out, fed the dying, took people to their first AA meeting, raised money for groups like Moveable Feast.
He championed forgotten geniuses like Charles Williams, kept alive the memories of his own mentor, Henry Faulkner, and many others through the Faulkner-Morgan Archive, the largest collection of LGBTQ history in Kentucky, and one of the largest in the nation.
Now a man who has done so much for other people gets his very own tribute: “Bob Morgan’s Just Going To Tell Some Stories,” a documentary by UK film professor Tom Marksbury and New York filmmaker Grayson Johnson. It centers on Bob’s own life, and the bold, luminous art that life has produced — or as the filmmakers put it, stories about “art and garbage, sex and drugs, AIDS grief, cultural subversion and being an outsider turned community icon. The story of an assemblage artist and queer Kentucky.”
The film will be at the Kentucky Theatre on March 16 at 6 p.m. as a fundraiser for the Faulkner Morgan Archive.
At first, Bob said, he was mortified the film was exactly as advertised: him in his favorite places, just telling stories. But now he sees it as a continuation of other work, like Jean Donahue’s films on Faulkner and about early queer Lexington with “The Last Gospel of the Pagan Babies.”
“But this is new ground,” he said. “And I want people to remember it.”
Marksbury has known Bob for a long time, but realized recently that he’d make a good subject for a film.
“What I was really interested in was all the Bobs: He’s such a great artist, an AIDS activist, a mentor to young people, an archivist, he’s a raconteur,” he said. “His ability to relate the remarkable insights he has is really unique. His art is his life, and vice versa, and it makes him such a good role model for all of us.”
Marksbury introduced him to Johnson in 2021, when they decided to do the film. No script, no plan, just Johnson shooting while Bob talked and walked around his favorite places.
“I did not know Bob until we started filming,” Johnson said. “The movie sort of unfolds as my experience with Bob unfolds as well.
“To me, there isn’t a lot of precedent for a guy just talking for an hour and 26 minutes,” he added. “I thought it was compelling, but I was unsure it would reach an audience.
But it did. The film premiered at the San Francisco Documentary Festival and won a special jury prize. Johnson said it also got a big crowd at a festival in Birmingham, Ala.
Bob is an inconvenient artist, the kind that keeps a lot of things in front of people they’d rather not see. That’s even more important at this moment in history, when our government is trying to recreate some dystopian 1950s reality that erases LGBTQ people from the narrative altogether.
Bob’s stories are one small but important block to that happening, at least here in Lexington.
“The most important thing is that younger generations love and crave this kind of stuff,” Bob said. “It makes a difference to them and how they see their place in the world.”
“Bob Morgan’s Just Going To Tell Some Stories” will show at the Kentucky Theatre at 6 p.m. on March 16. To buy tickets, click here.
This story was originally published March 5, 2025 at 7:56 AM.
