Lexington ky gay bars in the 90s

Greenwich Village, New York. The Castro, San Francisco. Boystown, Chicago. While the most well-known events and people in the gay rights movement were concentrated in New York and San Francisco, what events and places of gay history have occurred in between? Even without frequent national coverage, the Kentuckian LGBT community stretches from the bustling cities of Louisville and Lexington to the green plains of Paducah and Henderson.

Though the stunning progress the LGBT community has made in the twentieth century alone interconnects every state and county, what places in Kentucky hold the same sense of revolution and resistance as New York and San Francisco? How have LGBT individuals occupied space in the 20 th century? In the beginning of the 20th century, gay life in Kentucky was similar to gay life nationally: kept quiet and behind closed doors.

Thus, Kentucky gay life was restricted to private homes, often of the rich and wealthy. Due to the economic privileges they had, famous artists like Enid Yandell and Oscar Wilde were among the first Kentucky gay people to afford certain luxuries other gay folk may not have had, and their lives are still well-documented due to their fame.

Yandell was born in Louisville yet would move on to live in Chicago, Paris, and Boston. However, due to the all-female communal living space, which was already revolutionary for the time, one cannot rule out the possibility of lesbian or bisexual women in these circles.

Famed Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde, a national symbol for gay men and early gay activism in the nineteenth century, had visited Louisville on February 21st at the Masonic Temple on Fourth and Jefferson.

From Oscar Wilde to same-sex marriage, here's a timeline of Louisville's LGBTQ history

Most of gay life before the end of World War II occured in private homes under lock and key. One of such stories of private courtship follows Lexington brothel owner and city legend Belle Brezing. She was rumored to have a female lover that worked inside the brothel she owned, but there is no physical evidence of this relationship.

Maryjean Wall, in a biography on Brezing, barely mentions her rumored gayness. Again, because much of gay life was behind closed doors and purposefully hidden from the public without a trace, much of gay life and history is speculation or hearsay. However, the lack of evidence of single gay person in Kentucky shatters with Sweet Evening Breeze.

Sweet Evening Breeze defied definition, for she would not have labeled herself a transgender woman in her time, but she has remained a central figure in Lexington queer life for decades. She lived from the to and was a frequent crossdresser and participator of mock weddings with UK football players. In the late s to s, Breeze housed a young white man at her home on Prall Street, an up-in-coming gay artist named Henry Faulkner.

Faulkner was an eccentric and openly gay man, often dressing in drag or makeup for some photographs. This house was often used to solicit young men for sex, and Faulkner was charged with a disorderly home and faced beatings and violence due to his sexuality. However, as his fame as a visual artist grew, so did his public acceptance.

His vibrancy was excused by others as he befriended other famed artists such as playwright Tennessee Williams and actress Bette Davis. Henrietta Bingham, heiress to the Bingham estate and family tycoon, was active from the 40s to the 60s. Henrietta Bingham had multiple affairs with both women and men, one of which was with tennis star Helen Hull Jacobs.