The crimson walls are lined with locally made art. There are people of all ages enjoying cappuccinos, hot chocolate, and each other at this beloved spot on Bardstown Road in the eclectic Highlands neighborhood.

Chris Roy started at Day’s in 1995, a year after it opened. It was never highlighted as being specifically for LGBTQ+ folks, but it became a sacred meeting place for the community. “People even called us Gay’s Coffee for a while,” says Roy.

Roy is now a partner at Day’s, where three of the four owners identify as LGBTQ+. A goal of his and the other owners is an inclusive, safe space, which is fostered partially by hiring people who they feel can provide that.

Roy reflects on Day’s Coffee being 30 years old this year, alongside the Fairness Campaign turning 25, “Sometimes, I think we get caught up in the day to day, so it’s easy to forget about the big picture. We are so, so proud. All we ever wanted to do was to feel like a space place, a home away from home.”

Executive Director of the Fairness Campaign, Chris Hartman knows a thing or two about holding space for queer folks in Kentucky. Hartman has helped pass anti-discrimination LGBTQ+ Fairness Ordinances in 21 Kentucky communities: from the state capitol to the small Appalachian town of Vicco.

“Day’s has long been a safe haven and gathering spot for queer folks in our community,” says Chris Hartman. “As far back as I can remember, there were only a few places in town that I knew were reliably queer– the clubs and Day’s.”

With safe spaces being few and far between for queer folks, places to exist together were and are rare. This makes it difficult for community members to find and be with one another. Hartman recalls many first dates at Day’s, as well as meetings for theater projects and the Fairness Campaign.

Carla Wallace, a co-founder of the Fairness Campaign, says that they knew from the beginning that they wanted to grow a movement. They shunned the ‘behind closed doors’ approach that she finds does not work in organizing. For Wallace, this was a chance to organize queer people, but namely white queer people, into a fight for liberation that centered racial justice.

The Fairness Campaign became a model of this approach to folks across the country, engaging thousands of people into the queer, race, economic, and gender justice struggles. But, in order to engage a breadth of folks on a breadth of interconnected issues, Wallace says she knew that they needed to grow the movement.

“Being together in person is critical to movement building,” she says. “Isolation puts us in danger, not only from potential violence, but from depression, addiction, and hopelessness.”

For Wallace, spending time together in person is necessary to build community. But, in the same vein as what Hartman shares, queer people have not historically had a lot of safe places to gather together.

With multiple Evangelical Christian backed and/ or owned coffee shops all around Louisville and the rest of the state, Day’s has existed as an alternative. Having that safe space has been critical to movement building for Carla Wallace.

“We have to build across lines that those in power do not want us to build across,” she says. We cannot do that if we are in places where we cannot bring our full selves.”

While there was a Fairness Office to hold meetings in, Wallace says they needed places with not just coffee, but good coffee.

She knew that Day’s had queer friendly owners, and it was a place they wanted to support. But, most importantly, Wallace knew she and her community would be welcomed.

Wallace notes the “great booths” at Day’s, and how they spent hours there plotting – for the Fairness Campaign and for other community organizing. In those booths, there was strategy developed, but there was also a great trust sewn between the organizers: the foundation for movement building.

Wallace says we must have a “vision of collective liberation that leaves no one behind and has no illusions about a system that wants to let in only some of us – not all of us.”

That vision is difficult to implement without being able to build it with others, especially when safe spaces are difficult to find. Roy shares that Day’s hopes to be around for the next 30 years to continue being a safe space, a home away from home, and a place to not just get coffee, but good coffee.