Building People Power: Stories From the Fight For Fairness
Queer Kentucky’s limited print publication “25 Faces of Fairness” is available now on our website, in select stores, or available free to monthly supporters at any dollar amount. Not a Queer Kentucky monthly member? You can sign up here.
By Chad Kamen and Cassidy Meurer
Special thanks to Pam McMichael for her help on this.
All photos from the Fairness Campaign records, Archives & Special Collections, University of Louisville.
SPARKING A MOVEMENT
“I’ve helped create Fairness” tapestry on display, circa 1999-2000.
In the mid-1980s, the shape of queer activism in the state was rapidly changing. The onset of the AIDS epidemic, as well as changing ideas around visibility, mobilized organizers to focus on solidifying people power among queer Kentuckians. An emergent activist group called the Greater Louisville Human Rights Coalition (GLHRC) followed this call to action in Louisville by pursuing anti-discrimination protections for queer people. Their aim was the endorsement of the Louisville-Jefferson County Human Relations Commission, which they won in 1986 through documenting discrimination in the city and building coalitional support from civil rights leaders, such as Dr. Lyman T. Johnson.
Though the GLHRC was successful in getting an endorsement, there was a continued need for pressure to dismantle prejudice against queer people, as well as to win the support for legislation from Louisville’s Board of Aldermen. These continued fights led a group of organizers to create the March for Justice. As the first Pride march in Louisville, the March set the tone for activism in the area by highlighting the need for visibility, intersectional approaches to hate, and greater civil liberties. A key example of such was the March’s connection to the passage of Louisville’s Hate Crimes Ordinance. This intersectional piece of legislation, passed in 1991, was built in response to white supremacist violence against a Black family living in the Preston Park neighborhood. Through the coalition-building of activists across the city, the legislation became the first in Louisville to explicitly include sexual orientation as a protected class. However, the fight for clear and explicit protections against discrimination for queer Kentuckians was just beginning.

Carla Wallace speaks on the steps of City Hall during the Fairness Campaign’s first press conference, October 9, 1991, Louisville, Kentucky.
CONSTRUCTING FAIRNESS
The March for Justice’s 1991 platform included a demand that would become central to organizing across the state: the call for protections from discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations. To achieve this vision, organizers from the March for Justice and other related activist groups across Louisville established the Fairness Campaign, which would be formally announced during a press conference that fall.
From its founding onward, the Fairness Campaign served a variety of functions. It was an organizing collective, a community of friends, a support system, and an outlet for queer expression. Built into the fabric of Fairness was also a call to anti-racist work, as the organizing team recognized that there could be no queer liberation without that for people of color, specifically Black Americans. While this article focuses primarily on the Fairness Campaign’s work toward anti-discrimination legislation, the organization’s investment in anti-racism has been and continues to be substantial – ranging from trainings to internal assessments of organizational culture to coalition-building actions.
Building on the broad-based success of the Hate Crimes Ordinance, the Fairness Campaign was able to gain support for the first Fairness Ordinance in November of 1991. However, the measure never made it to a vote after support from the Board began to unravel due to election turnover and homophobic external pressure. Following this attempt, organizers further committed themselves to getting the opinions of the Board on record for future campaigning purposes. In the summer of 1992, the Fairness Campaign successfully mobilized support from the Board for a vote, leading to an 8-4 decision against the ordinance on August 25, 1992.

(From left to right) Sara Reed, Betty Payne, and Mattie Jones at a candle-light vigil for the Fairness Ordinance after it fails to get enough support from the Louisville Board of Aldermen, 1991, Louisville, Kentucky.
1992 also saw a transformation of the fight for queer rights in Kentucky through the case of Commonwealth v. Wasson. Overturning the state’s criminalization of consensual sodomy, the Kentucky Supreme Court’s decision made the state the fifth in the country to strike down its sodomy laws. In turn, queer organizers across Kentucky met this victory and the resulting attempts by state politicians to re-criminalize sodomy with fervor. The fall of 1992 would see organizers form the roots of what would the following year formally become Lexington Fairness and the more statewide-focused Kentucky Fairness Alliance (KFA).
With the goals of educating the public about LGBTQ+ issues and defeating anti-gay bills introduced in the Kentucky General Assembly, KFA pulled together a broad coalition of leaders from across the state, ranging from Henderson to Northern Kentucky. This building of unity would quickly be brought outward in 1993 through collaborations between KFA and the Fairness Campaign on an awareness-building booth at the Kentucky State Fair and extensive, successful lobbying in Frankfort. In 1994 alone, the political action committees associated with both KFA and the Fairness Campaign would defeat a slate of 15 anti-gay bills. By 1995, KFA built chapters in Paducah, Henderson, and Madison County, as well as developed a system called the Action Alert Phone Tree to mobilize supporters against anti-queer legislation.
SECURING A FAIRER KENTUCKY
The mid-1990s saw new challenges in Louisville for the Fairness Campaign, as organizers encountered a generally unsupportive Board of Aldermen. In both 1995 and 1997, the Fairness Campaign was unsuccessful in getting an ordinance to pass, with both attempts involving restructuring of the ordinance’s language in hopes of passage. While the effort in 1995 attempted to focus on employment non-discrimination, the 1997 push for fairness included the first fight to incorporate the language of gender identity. The latter push for the inclusion of gender was not taken up by Fairness’s allies on the Board for fears it would not pass, a move which would propel Fairness to deepen its commitment to trans solidarity in future efforts. In response to the unsuccessful attempts in 1995 and 1997, Fairness supporters engaged in civil disobedience by respectively refusing to leave City Hall and blocking Sixth Street.

(Left) Fairness supporters and organizers including Lisa Gunterman (pictured on the left) leave City Hall under arrest, March 28, 1995, Louisville, Kentucky. (Right) Fairness supporters block Sixth Street outside City Hall, September 9, 1997, Louisville, Kentucky.
The year 1998 on both a local and state level served as a turning point for the fight for Fairness. Starting this year, the Kentucky General Assembly would begin crafting and refining the Kentucky Hate Crimes Act. This act would become the first statewide hate crimes protection, as well as the first piece of statewide legislation to include sexual orientation as a protected class.

Alicia Pedreira and Faye Goodman address a rally outside of the Jefferson County Courthouse, November 24, 1998, Louisville, Kentucky.
In Louisville, the discriminatory firing of Alicia Pedreira by Kentucky Baptist Home for Children would lead to a surge in momentum around getting an ordinance passed. Although Pedreira had disclosed her sexuality upon her hiring, her employer reacted negatively when an image of her wearing a shirt with the slogan “Isle of Lesbos” was displayed (without Pedreira’s knowledge or consent) at the Kentucky State Fair. Pedreira’s story broke through to the Board of Aldermen as a growing wave of news reports and Fairness-led events raised awareness about homophobic and transphobic discrimination in Louisville. The throughline of employment discrimination would prove successful, with the Board passing workplace protections for both sexual orientation and gender identity on January 26, 1999 in a 7-5 vote.
The win in Louisville would usher in a wave of victories for additional communities in Kentucky. On July 8, 1999, organizers won the state’s first comprehensive discrimination protections for sexual orientation and gender identity in a 12-3 vote from the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council. The end of 1999 would also see similarly expansive victories reach Henderson in October and Jefferson County.
OVERCOMING OBSTACLES TOGETHER
For the Fairness Campaign and the Kentucky Fairness Alliance alike, the new millennium brought with it the hope of a more just Kentucky. Following the victories of 1998 and 1999, both organizations quickly found themselves navigating new terrain. The growing momentum for extending anti-discrimination protections to queer people opened the possibility for a statewide Fairness bill, with the first attempt at such being filed in the 2000 General Assembly. The four successes in getting ordinances also led to momentum for another win a few years later in Covington in 2003. The effort to get this ordinance on the books marked the first coordinated campaign between chapters of KFA to get comprehensive legislation passed on a local level.

Kentucky Fairness Alliance at the 15th Annual March for Justice, June 24, 2000, Louisville, Kentucky.
However, the growth of the movement faced challenges. In Louisville, Fairness Campaign organizers spent the first years of the 2000s focused on organizing against and then preparing for the merging of the city and Jefferson County. Merger, as it was known, created a different political terrain for activism, displacing power from the historically-Black neighborhoods of West Louisville to the often whiter neighborhoods of East Louisville. Changes in the government of Henderson also impacted organizers for Fairness in the city. After a successful effort throughout the 1990s to build community around anti-discrimination legislation, a new wave of city commissioners repealed Henderson’s ordinance in 2001.

Kickoff event for the statewide Equality Begins at Home campaign, March 21, 1999, Henderson, Kentucky.
Coordinated backlash to greater protections for queer Kentuckians would only grow in the coming years, as 2004 saw the escalation of efforts by state lawmakers to ban marriage equality. That year, lawmakers pushed for a full constitutional ban by putting the question of marriage equality on the ballot. The Kentucky Fairness Alliance and the Fairness Campaign joined together to defeat the measure. Through this effort, KFA and Fairness mobilized a network of over 2,500 volunteers across the state to get out people to vote “NO on the Amendment.” Despite these efforts, Kentuckians would still vote the ban on marriage equality into the state’s Constitution.
The bringing together of organizers through the NO on the Amendment campaign led to deepened efforts at gaining protections on a statewide level, such as hospital visitation rights and partnership benefits for university employees. Collaborating on such a level also meant that organizers in the Fairness Campaign and the Kentucky Fairness Alliance needed greater structure for coordinating efforts, embodied in the creation of the Fairness Coalition.
A NEW ERA OF FAIRNESS
The 2010 session of the Kentucky General Assembly serves as a turning point in the history of the fight for fairness. It was the first in years to not feature any legislative attempts to discriminate against queer Kentuckians. With the room to be on the offense, organizers could focus on shifting organizational strategies and structural capacities. After seven years without a new local anti-discrimination ordinance getting on the books, the Fairness Coalition decided to set their aims on the passing of new city ordinances.

Fairness supporters marching for statewide anti-discrimination legislation in the Kentuckiana Pride Parade, 2010, Louisville, Kentucky.
To support these efforts across the state, KFA and the Fairness Campaign would slowly continue further aligning their work, ultimately merging into one organization – the Fairness Campaign as we know it today – in 2013. Their increased focus on statewide solidarity brought new faces and cities into the fold, including the Eastern Kentucky city of Vicco, which would become the smallest city in America to provide anti-discrimination protections for queer people.
In its first decade as a statewide organization, the Fairness Campaign has focused on securing marriage equality, championing gender diversity across Kentucky, and fighting a renewed wave of anti-queer (specifically transphobic) repression. As of July 2024, Fairness ordinances have now reached over 24 communities across Kentucky, ranging from Paducah to Morehead. Through the actions and organizing of Fairness Campaign team members and volunteers, the struggle for statewide non-discrimination continues on.

The Fairness Campaign team poses at a workshop hosted by Southerners on New Ground (SONG), circa late 1990’s-early 2000’s.