Trailblazer: Kentucky’s highest ranking LGBTQ politician, Jim Gray
Jim Gray is sitting beneath a large portrait of him that hangs in the bar of the 21C Hotel in Lexington. In the striking photo collage created by James Robert Southard, there are many nods to his city-altering term as mayor of Lexington from 2011-2019. There’s the historic courthouse he had restored, an image of a newspaper story about his decision to relocate Confederate statues from the courthouse’s lawn, the remodeled and expanded Rupp Arena and Central Bank Center that has helped to reenergize downtown, and many other allusions to the tremendous impact he had during his eight years in office.
Gray doesn’t seem to notice I have purposely chosen this spot to sit. He’s just returned from a trip to Japan and South Korea with Governor Andy Beshear, and his sleep schedule has been stunned by jet lag, but he is eager to get back to work. When I tell him I am interviewing him because he’s thought of as a hero of fairness by many, he blushes.
“Well, I never think of myself that way,” he says, as a good politician would. But the difference with Gray is he’s being authentic. Unlike most politicians, one of Gray’s foundational traits is his modesty. Those who have known him for years may not even know he is a graduate of both Vanderbilt and Harvard, where he was a Loeb Fellow in their College of Design, as he never mentions it. When he was 19, he became the second youngest person in history to serve as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. But he has always been proud that he was the first openly gay mayor in Kentucky. Today, as Kentucky’s Secretary of Transportation, he is the highest-ranking LGBTQ politician in the Commonwealth.
His counterpart at the federal level is Pete Buttigieg, the nation’s first openly gay cabinet member. When Gray first met him years ago, Buttigieg told him he was “a trailblazer.” Gray still seems surprised by the compliment, even though it’s a word that is often associated with him.
Bernadette Barton is a professor of sociology and gender studies at Morehead State University and one of the founders of Just Fund, an organization dedicated to promoting fairness in the state. She has been grateful for Gray’s service. “Alongside the peace and prosperity Lexington enjoyed under Mayor Gray, I especially appreciate that he was a trailblazer for the LGBTQ community in the Bible Belt, normalizing sexual diversity and helping evaporate the stigma of the closet,” she says.
“I know he’ll rebuff this statement, but I’m going to say it anyway: Jim Gray is a history-maker,” says Jon Coleman, director of the Faulkner-Morgan LGBTQ Archive in Lexington. “The bravery he has shown…as an openly gay man cannot be understated. I know, for me personally, what it meant just to witness him walking in Lexington’s parades as both a candidate and as mayor, or entering the inaugural ball with [his partner] Eric by his side. What a proud legacy he has made for himself, and for us.”
Gray says one of his proudest achievements as mayor was the controversial move to install rainbow crosswalks in downtown Lexington, near a block that is associated with gay bars and restaurants. He knew he would be attacked, even though no tax dollars were used for the project; it was paid for by a grant from the Bluegrass Community Foundation.
Those rainbows made many LGBTQ people feel seen, just as Gray’s visibility has. Sometimes the very act of existence as a queer person is a revolutionary act, and Gray is grateful he has had the opportunity to be in the public eye as a gay person during a time of volatile rhetoric and legislation— and a time in which many politicians still cannot come out. “Sadly, people feel they have to be closeted for many reasons, still, and I was lucky that I had a family that was generally embracing…it took a long while to get to that point,” he says. “And there are still ramifications for people who come out, there is still fear and anxiety.”
He knows that from experience. When Gray first ran for mayor of Lexington in 2002, he was still closeted. “There were lots of whispers, lots of speculation. I was not at all comfortable declining or denying it, and wouldn’t do that, so after that I was determined to not go through that again.” He came out later in life, at the age of 53, and in 2016 ran against Rand Paul for the U.S. Senate. On the campaign trail across the entire state, he says he had encounters with a couple of people who were “not violent, but aggressive” about him being openly gay. Meanwhile, the New York Times and other national publications ran pieces about a gay man running for federal office in a red state.
“I put myself to the full test there of going back to my roots and going to communities around the state where I had done work as a businessman, with the full knowledge that I was out and that I was really challenging the cultural norms,” he says. Although he lost the race, Gray was buoyed by the way his hometown turned out to support him, and talking about that is the only time he grows a bit emotional during our conversation.
“I’ll never forget going to Glasgow on the final day of the campaign and I didn’t know if it’d be five or ten people or twenty people, but I sure didn’t expect 200,” he says. Gray is proud of his rural Kentucky roots, but he struggled with the overwhelming conservative leanings. “As much as I’m attached through family and history and to my hometown, family that grew up there, I wanted to get out of there because of fear, fear that I couldn’t be authentic, couldn’t live an authentic life,” he says.
Gray strongly values his LGBTQ community and says he believes that there is “bonding through experiences” as members of marginalized groups. He says that affinity allowed him to better understand the opposition to Lexington’s Confederate statues that he was instrumental in getting removed after the group Take Back Cheapside raised the issue. “Arguably it cost me the 2018 congressional race,” he says, referring to his primary run against Amy McGrath. “But I felt it was [the right thing], especially after a Black teacher told me, ‘How would you like to walk down the street and see a statue to a fellow who had fought to keep your ancestors and your people in slavery celebrated in the most central public space in the town?’ That really resonated with me.”
These days, Gray serves in the cabinet of Governor Andy Beshear, whom he says is the “most pro-LGBTQ governor, ever, in the South.” In 2019, Gray and his longtime partner, Eric Orr, were famously the first gay couple to be introduced together at a Kentucky inauguration, and Gray says he’s felt the full support of Governor Beshear.
“He’s about the golden rule,” Gray says of Beshear. “He transparently lives his values and those are Christian values. He translates that faith in an unusually positive and affirming way.”
Gray looks back on his early days in politics and hesitantly agrees with me that he’s been a part of change. “When I got into politics I…definitely had an aspiration to make a difference…and to be a role model,” he says, but that’s as far as he will go. Even if he won’t brag on himself, many others will, and he has earned a permanent place in Kentucky’s fairness and LGBTQ history.