Land lines: modes of communication in Kentucky's queer past and present.

As the queer historical discipline grows in reach, prominence, and scholarship, southern queer histories are on the tail end of this growing academic attention. Academic historians, digital humanists, and public historians alike have neglected Kentucky’s rich queer history in academic circles. This thesis aims to mend this gap in historic interpretation through research in Kentucky gay press, television, radio, and their effect on Kentucky’s queer organizing. Through extensive primary research in the Williams-Nichols archive, and secondary sources on the women in print movement, queer rurality, and gay media studies, this thesis measures the ways Kentucky queer communities have correlated with original gay newspapers, public access television stations, and radio shows in the mid to late twentieth century. This thesis is an expansion of the kentuckyqueerhistory.org project: a digital mapping initiative that began in the summer of 2018 and plotted over three hundred different sites of queer significance in Kentucky. While spatial humanities, digital humanities, and public history informed the initial stages of this research, we approach our sources with a new lens of queer southern studies and media studies. While the previous project plotted out the dots on the map, this thesis connects them through gay press and communications. At an intersection of queer history, southern studies, media history, and public history, this project argues the importance of interdisciplinary lenses in mapping and defining Kentucky’s queer past, present, and future.