A City Changes From Homophobic to Gay-Friendly

For many decades, the only thing that prevented bigotry against homosexuals from being widely expressed in Louisville was that so many of the city’s residents had never heard of the word “homosexual.”

In a conventional and settled community where the lower Midwest meets the upper South, the sports pages, church homilies and union newsletters were standard reading -- the Kinsey Report was not.

My mother recalled that in the late 1940s, during her college years, a certain number of bars, diners, and clubs downtown were straight by day, and gay by night.

The office worker lunch crowd never knew.

This is not to say gays were left alone -- beatings of people thought to be non-straight, as well as dismissals from jobs and exclusions from religious denominations were as common in Louisville as anywhere in a time when a homosexual orientation was considered a curable disorder and conversion therapy was mainstream.

Even the liberal, ardently pro-civil rights Louisville Times and Courier-Journal in the 1960s very rarely acknowledged gays -- still, for instance, using the boldface template “Born to Mr. and Mrs:” at the top of the daily birth listings.

The heterosexual assumption was the mainstream mindset, even left of center.

In the 1970s, Louisville underwent a huge culture and arts blossoming, drawing ballet performances by Mikhail Baryshnikov and Edward Villella, and becoming a center for opera, symphonies and the nation’s largest outdoor art fair. The centerpiece was Actor’s Theater of Louisville’s Festival of New American Plays, considered the English-speaking world’s biggest yearly theatrical event.

All this as the city was reviving the United States’ largest Victorian neighborhood among its many historic districts being preserved.

And gay Louisvillians were prominent in all these aesthetic triumphs putting the city on the world’s maps.

Community leaders appreciated their endeavors -- on the condition that that H-word (or by this time, G-word) stay out of the public lexicon. One afternoon in July 1970, two Louisville women brought the word, and themselves out -- forever dislodging a community’s heterosexist complacency.

Marjorie Ruth Jones, a 39-year-old twice divorced mother of three, and Tracy Knight, 25, a flashy-dressing professional dancer, entered the Jefferson County Clerk’s office, stepped up to the counter and said they were there to apply for a marriage license.

The reactions of the county clerk and county attorney ranged from confusion to dismissive amusement, but after they turned Jones and Knight’s request down, the two women got their day in court, asking a judge to declare that the 4th Amendment’s equal protection of the law required Kentucky to issue them a marriage license.

From Jones and Knight's 1970 civil trial

Jones and Knight, who for reasons of safety did not use their actual last names in their legal filings, lost their case and the appeal. Though they settled back into relative obscurity (today, their case is more widely studied in law school texts than it is discussed by Louisville’s LGBT activists) Marjorie Ruth Jones and Tracy Knight’s courageous challenge awoke Louisville’s gay community. News of their attempt to obtain a marriage license spurred the forming of the Louisville Gay Liberation Front in the summer of 1970. Founding members told the Courier-Journal they were tired of having to hide their sexual orientation to stay employed and of always being questioned by police whenever a report of a crime against a child was filed in their neighborhoods. Many gays and lesbians lived in Old Louisville, that large Victorian restored district.

The city’s GLF disbanded in 1971, said LGBTQ historian David Williams, who once served as editor of and contributor to The Letter, a gay and lesbian newspaper.

An online history by Williams said that In 1974, the Louisville Lesbian Feminist Union was founded, publishing a newsletter and operating a community center/house on Brook Street, just off of Old Louisville.

The building had meeting space, a library, and rooms to rent for local and visiting lesbians.

“The LFU lasted only through the end of 1978, in part because of internal disputes about how separatist it should be,” Williams wrote, “but through its newsletter and myriad activities, it nurtured a larger and visibly activist community of women who continued to advocate for both lesbian/gay and women’s rights.”

Highland became the nation's first Southern Baptist
church to ordain a gay man as a pastor,
one of many pro-Fairness actions by
religious groups in Louisville.

In Louisville during this period, lesbian feminist music groups and poetry forums, pro-LGBT churches, gender-equalizing employment training, and gay-friendly service sector businesses began to accelerate the drive for gay rights.

“Some of these,” Williams wrote, “for example, Louisville’s Woman Works, a construction company owned and operated by all women… persisted longer than the currents of lesbian feminism that had given rise to them.”

In 1976 Lesbian Feminist Union supporters contributed $100 each to become partners in a women’s bar called Mother’s Brew, which had musical entertainment by women, as well as poetry readings and shelter space for battered women.

Louisville Realtor Jack Kersey came out publicly as gay in 1978, Williams’ history said, marking the first such move by a widely recognized mainstream business person.

By the end of the 1970s, it seemed that a thriving LGBT life co-existed with the city’s basic social conservatism, though government, schools, and corporate power hitters seldom acknowledged gays, despite Kersey’s example.

Any pretense that this was a peaceful co-existence ended in 1981 when First National Bank, Louisville’s largest, fired an employee for refusing to end his gay rights advocacy.

Sam Dorr was told by the bank he had to stop affiliating with Dignity, a group for LGBT Catholics, or quit his job. Dorr chose his conscience over his paycheck, and Louisville’s gay equality cause was moved by his example into the realm of legislative lobbying, not just existing in its own space as a niche in the city’s landscape.

Gay activists called for city and county ordinances banning discrimination, or more specifically amendments to the existing civil rights ordinances.

In 1986, the Louisville-Jefferson County Human Relations Commission, which hears discrimination complaints and recommends policy, called for a ban on anti-gay discrimination, a first by a government chartered panel in Louisville. But the influential Courier-Journal disappointed progressives by publishing an editorial asserting no evidence could show such a ban to be necessary.

Still, the HRC’s call resounded all over town. Gay rights backers formed the March for Justice in 1987, a group which held yearly marches by the same name to Louisville's downtown. They persuaded the city Board of Aldermen to pass an anti-hate crimes ordinance, pushed through by then LGBT friendly alderman Paul Bather, an African-American later elected to the Kentucky state legislature.

Bather delighted the 1991 March for Justice crowd by announcing he would sponsor the Fairness Amendment, a measure to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in housing, jobs and public accommodations.

Shortly, LGBT activists learned that moving to the next level meant staring hate in the face. A shadowy group called Freedom’s Heritage Forum largely run by an allergist named Dr. Frank Simon began a ruthless backlash. The group derailed what had been a healthy discussion by spreading hysteria over AIDS, accusing the gay rights movement of elitism, and distributing tens of thousands of pamphlets containing false claims that gayness was tied to pedophilia.

The attempt to win passage of the Fairness Amendment failed 8-4, but LGBT activists got busier. They forged stronger ties with Louisville’s array of anti-racist groups, coming together at the Braden Center, an organizing hub in the African American West Louisville section. Helping do repairs and maintenance on the center was just their most tangible work.

Fairness volunteers helped groups like the energetic Justice Resource Center boycott, picket and lobby for fairer job opportunities for blacks, a police civilian review board, and race equity in schools.

Soon, the photos and testimonials of LGBT Louisvillians published in Fairness pamphlets featured many black and Hispanic Louisvillians, as the ranks of the movement became multi-racial. A Men of All Colors chapter (formerly Black and White Men Together) became a large contingent within Fairness.

Justice Resource Center director Rev. Louis Coleman endorsed the Fairness Amendment, as did Mattie Jones, a longtime anti-racist activist with the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Oppression.

Bob Cunningham, another African-American activist in the Kentucky Alliance, summed up the inter-dependency of gay rights and racial equality with these words at the 1991 March for Justice:

"We can survive without one another, but we cannot win or make greater progress without one another," Cunningham said. “The struggle needs all of us. So I call for you to stand up wherever you are and I call on you to break out of your closets wherever you are. Don't live by other people's definition of you."

After long applause from the thousands gathered outdoors downtown, Cunningham added: "People who are able to define you can confine you."

Union labor support, a resource not often secured in gay rights struggles, was also forthcoming after Fairness activists joined United Food and Commercial Workers strikers against a Fisher Packing plant in Louisville. The UFCW local endorsed the Fairness Amendment.

Advertising on municipal bus exteriors and in print with the words: “Fairness. We are Asking for Nothing more. We will accept Nothing Less” summed up the quest.

But another stumble happened: Paul Bather stunned the movement by withdrawing his support for the Fairness Amendment for reasons he never made clear. He said he needed more time to study all the amendment’s details in what he called a rushed process, but critics said his outside employer, another Louisville bank, may have offered him an ultimatum similar to Dorr’s 15 years earlier.

After a second try to pass the amendment failed, then a pared down version covering only employment also was defeated, skeptical media commentators began asking if the gay rights cause was just too progressive for a conservative and provincial city.

With the sting of the Freedom’s Heritage Forum’s vitriol still hurting, Fairness organizers countered with their own two-page pamphlets placed on doors or handed politely to residents encountered during yard-to-yard distributions in politically moderate neighborhoods where changing minds was possible.

The brief text of the Fairness Amendment was surrounded by boxed sections with plainly explained reasons for middle-of-the-road folks not to fear the amendment, such as:

“Churches are exempt from it -- see, it says so right here,” with an arrow pointing to the part of the amendment stating that the city's civil rights ordinances exempt sectarian religious organizations.

That calm, conversational style contrasted with the increasingly mean and menacing rhetoric from Frank Simon and the Freedom’s Heritage forum (Simon yelled at an alderwoman during a meeting that gay people were spitting in soft drinks and this would give her AIDS).

David Williams, during his tenure writing for The Letter, wrote a superb and thoroughly researched piece examining dozens of claims published by Freedom’s Heritage Forum, ranging from gays overwhelmingly being rich, to a rights ordinance in another state having prevented authorities from prosecuting a child abuser.

Williams searched back to each source cited and revealed that those and almost all other claims by the forum were made out of context or outright falsified; in one case Williams showed that the forum represented a vulgar statement in quotes threatening children with sexual assault as being part of the gay political agenda, when it was actually a line from a play.

Williams' research helped turn politicians of both parties against the once feared Simon. Simon's own fanaticism also helped do in the Freedom's Heritage Forum. Television ads by the forum were rejected by a local station owned by a conservative leaning corporation.

This was such a rare move in the money-driven 1990s broadcast industry that people shuddered to think what must be in the unaired ads.

Henderson, Ky. is one of many centers of activism for equality in the state. The historically anti-discrimination Zion United Church of Christ has led the way. 

In 1995, Larry Forgy, a right wing Republican candidate for Kentucky governor who welcomed the endorsement of Frank Simon, was defeated 51 to 49 percent by moderate-to-liberal Democrat Paul Patton. Patton told Fairness activists he would not support proposed anti-gay state legislation, and that was good enough to get Fairness and its state PAC called C-FAIR doing around-the-clock pro-Patton work in the final weeks of the race that was crucial to his close win.

The next year, Louisville Alderwoman candidate Denise Bentley, who favored Fairness, upset anti-Fairness longtime incumbent Bill Wilson, winning 57 percent of the vote.

Though there were other issues in Patton and Bentley’s wins, being for gay rights helped both, a fact that changed Louisville’s entrenched political mindset.

Bather switched back to supporting Fairness. He, Bentley and the other two black members of the Board of Aldermen now were for the amendment. Some white members also switched to pro-Fairness.

In mid-1996, an independent poll knocked the conventional wisdom over, showing the new Aldermanic support mirrored the grass roots. A remarkable 65 percent of the Louisville’s residents now favored the Fairness Amendment banning discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. That number was a complete turnaround from polls done in the early 1990s.

In this new ‘96 poll, a majority of the city’s African-Americans also backed the Fairness Amendment, and the amendment had a small majority of support of all residents county wide. There was no stopping fairness.

In 1998, the right wing’s last argument -- that the amendment wasn’t needed because discrimination just didn’t happen here -- also crumbled. Alicia Pedreira, an employee of a church-run day care center, was fired from her job because she was a lesbian. Though as that pamphlet noted, the city’s civil rights laws exempt church employers, Pedreria became the symbol of the good people being unfairly held back who Fairness organizers insisted all along their amendment was for.

The Board of Aldermen approved a Fairness Amendment version limited to the employment discrimination ban. Mayor David Armstrong, who as a candidate had given uncertain backing -- saying if the board should pass the Fairness Amendment, “I guess I’d sign it” -- did in fact. So in January 1999 Louisville, on the fourth try, got fair. Well, fairer.

Jefferson County government’s absurdly small board of commissioners (just three members for a county of 800,000) took the hint and passed a comprehensive ban on discrimination in jobs, housing and public accommodations. The deciding vote was cast by an unelected member filling out a term who kept Fairness supporters in suspense until the last minute. So by the shakiest margin, the whole county, including Louisville, had comprehensive Fairness.

With very few complaints about Louisville’s limited ordinance, and business groups in the city talking of the need to draw the “creative class” that favors inclusiveness, the Aldermen in late 1999 passed a comprehensive ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity in housing and public accommodations as well as employment, bringing Louisville’s city ordinance in line with the county’s gay rights statute.

Other cities in Kentucky passed sexual orientation discrimination bans, including Lexington, the state’s second largest metro area, and the Ohio River city of Henderson, near Evansville, Ind. Though Henderson’s ordinance, which passed in 1999 by a 3-2 vote was repealed 3-2 in 2001, other medium sized and small Kentucky cities, including Morehead, Midway, Paducah, Frankfort and the greater Cincinnati city of Covington, passed bans on discrimination based on sexual orientation in the late ‘90s and early 2000s; some of those city's ordinances included protection for gender identity.

Vicco, in the Perry County mountains, drew New York Times coverage and its openly gay mayor made network TV feature shows when in 2013 the Appalachian town of 334 people became the smallest municipality in the nation to pass an anti-discrimination ordinance. Vicco’s protected sexual orientation and gender identity.

In 2003, near the end of his two-term tenure, Gov. Paul Patton signed an executive order prohibiting discrimination against the 30,000 state employees on the basis of their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Eternal vigilance, of course, is needed to keep freedom, and the long fought gay equality battles would have to be fought again, and again.

In the early 2000s, a state legislative committee defeated by one vote a bill that would ban enacting any local gay rights ordinances in Kentucky, which would have reversed 30-plus years of progress in Louisville. By that single vote, it was not sent to the full legislature and hasn’t been revived since.

So Louisville’s Fairness Amendment protections were safe, right? Well, a referendum totally unrelated to LGBT issues created a whole new hill to climb. In 2000, voters approved merging Louisville’s government with Jefferson County’s to create a Metro Louisville council and mayor.

All the ordinances of the city and its county would have to be approved again, with differences worked out, within five years of merger taking effect in 2002, or automatically expire. And Louisville was founded in 1778, a fact that made Fairness activists anxious over the potential for a colossal city ordinance book to be used as an excuse to passively aggressively kill hard won LGBT equality by not getting around to Fairness by the 2007 deadline.

And with the new Metro Mayor Jerry Abramson never having supported the Fairness Amendment during his four terms as city mayor (single-term mayor David Armstrong signed both Fairness ordinances in 1999), they wondered how fast a track the issue would be placed on in Metro Louisville.

Abramson, a charismatic and genial Georgetown University educated lawyer and classical pianist by avocation, was always figured to favor Fairness. As an alderman in the 1970s and early '80s, he had been a member of the liberal faction of the board known as Democrats for Progress.

The backlog proved no obstacle, and after the Metro Council passed a comprehensive anti-discrimination ordinance covering sexual orientation and gender identity in jobs, housing and public accommodations, Mayor Abramson signed it.

A lawsuit by a Louisville gynecologist claiming his First Amendment freedom of religion would be infringed on by preventing him from refusing to hire gay people had been thrown out by the courts in 2001. Still, the framing of discrimination as “religious freedom” through laws enacted by many states looms as a threat to Civil Rights laws overall.

But when the issue is discussed without the distraction of the religious freedom claim, Louisville is a gay-friendly place that has promptly grown comfortable with fairness.

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Brian Arbenz is a radical justice activist who lives in Louisville. He covered Louisville's Fairness struggles for progressive newspapers and magazines, as well as mainstream media.