A SPECIAL, ONE-TIME-ONLY SCREENING IN PARTNERSHIP WITH INSTITUTE 193
Q&A with the filmmaker
Filmmaker Jean Donohue unravels the story of an underground gay, gender bending Lexington community rooted in the Civil War and on a continuum from closeted Old South homosexual society, 1960s gay liberation, and the ecstatic 1970s to the grip of fear at the rise of the religious right and AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. In 1970, as Old World Southern gay culture was changing, enter The Pagan Babies, a loose group of artists and drag queens who set out to challenge the hierarchical homosexual society with guerrilla theater and fantastic costumes. Before Robert Mapplethorpe's infamous photos, there was R. Michael Walker and John Ashley who documented the Pagan Babies.
Institute 193 is pleased to co-host the film The Last Gospel of Pagan Babies, presented in tandem with the publication of the book Pagan Babies by the Faulkner Morgan Archive and Institute 193 and distributed by the University Press of Kentucky.
Don't miss an exhibition of a thought-to-be-lost portfolio of photographs produced by John Denny Ashley in collaboration with the artist Robert Morgan and his cadre of artists and misfits from the mid-1970s into the 1980s. In addition to Ashley’s photographs, the exhibition contains work by other artists depicting the Pagan Babies and their predecessors. The work remains on view at Institute 193’s main gallery space located at 215 North Limestone, Lexington, KY through November 4.