Investigating Kentucky’s LBGTQ Heritage Subaltern Stories from the Bluegrass State Catherine Fosl and Daniel Vivian ABSTRACT: The Kentucky LGBTQ Heritage Context Study illustrates the promise and challenges of early investigations into LGBTQ history in a state in which queer life has rural and urban dimensions. In 2015–16, researchers from the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research at the University of Louisville partnered with an LGBTQ- equality organization to examine the history of LGBTQ people in Kentucky. Outcomes included the nation’s first statewide LGBTQ context narrative, amendments to two National Register of Historic Places nominations, and new attention to underrecog- nized dimensions of LGBTQ experience. The project demonstrates the importance of existing relationships with LGBTQ communities and the difficulty of collecting archival material within the time constraints of a grant-funded project. KEY WORDS: LGBTQ, rural/urban, social movements, conservatism, oral history, partnerships Introduction During the past two decades, scholars have placed questions about social geog- raphy at the center of LGBTQ history. 1 In 1999, in a pioneering study of queer men in the twentieth-century South, historian John Howard chastised the field for a “bicoastal bias” and urged attention to people outside urban centers. His- torians of gay and lesbian culture, he observed, had focused overwhelmingly on large coastal cities of the West and Northeast while leaving queer experiences in other areas largely unexplored. 2 In the decades since, LGBTQ history has grown THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 218–244 (May 2019). ISSN: 0272-3433, electronic ISSN 1533-8576.  2019 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2019.41.2.218. 1 Because language has held such power in shaping lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer (or LGBTQ) lives, we begin with a note about its use in this essay. Throughout, we use “LGBTQ” and “queer” interchangeably and in an inclusive sense. On occasion, we also use “gay” in that same inclusive sense—mostly when the source in question uses that terminology or in reference to eras when that usage was common. 2 Howard discusses the concentration of early queer histories on cities in New York and California in his Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 11–12. Others have commented similarly, ranging from early scholars such as Brett Beemyn, ed., Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories (New York: 218