Projects
Queer Kentucky is privileged to partner with several progressive organizations to create programming, artwork, and journalism by creative Kentuckians across the state. Below, you’ll find a few of our latest collaborations.Â
The Lee Initiative
Queer Kentucky is looking to partner with the Lee Initiative to uplift the Queer culinary voices of Kentucky. We will do this by interviewing and profiling five LGBTQ+ identifying people within the culinary world across the state. We will focus on their journey as a Queer person in the Bluegrass and how culinary arts helped them accept and love their identities.Once the series is complete, we will ask someone from the Lee Initiative to participate on Queer Kentucky’s podcast to discuss the series as a whole and how the hospitality industry and queerness intersect.
Great Meadows Foundation
Visual artists are a vital part of Kentucky’s Queer community. Thanks to the Great Meadows Foundation, which was launched in 2016 by contemporary art collector and  philanthropist Al Shands (1928-2021) in order to critically strengthen and support visual  art in Kentucky, Queer Kentucky will be featuring interviews with a number of these  artists. Appalachian Stories created through a grant from JustFund KY — Queer Kentucky is expanding our geographic representation and opening up featured space on our renowned storytelling platform for LGBTQ+ individuals from Appalachia. The project will identify and pay writers from and living in the eastern part of Kentucky willing to share their authentic experiences of being queer and Appalachian and the conjunction of both identities.
Prism
Stories created through a grant from JustFund KY PRISM is a somatic and cartographical project that aims to amplify the work of Black, Brown, and Indigenous Kentuckians who are also Queer, Trans, 2-Spirit, and Non-binary. Five storytellers across the state used their bodies and lived experiences as maps to explore concepts of gender expansiveness, self-possession, and culture revitalization in the midst of historical and ongoing genocidal campaigns against our right to create a legacy. PRISM is an energetic footprint in the form of prose, poetry, visual art and the personal narrative. Each side of this pentahedronic force is an emblem of liberation in the active tense.
