It was an atmosphere of fear, and the resulting repression remained strong in Louisville for decades. Jack Kersey allowed himself to be interviewed on the local news and became the first gay man in Louisville to be publicly outed on television. It was 1978. “I was tired of people not knowing who I was,” he said. “I wanted to come out of the closet and be myself.”

The reaction to his interview took two forms, both of which surprised Kersey. Most straight people who knew him didn’t seem to care. But many of his gay friends no longer wanted anything to do with him. They were too scared that the straight people in their own lives would realize that they were gay if they were seen with Kersey. “This was very hurtful,” Kersey told me in an email.

Kersey and his generation continued to stay mostly out of the public eye well into the 1970s, even as other people were emerging with entirely different sensibilities. When the drag queens in New York’s Greenwich Village began chucking rocks at the police outside the Stonewall Inn in the summer of 1969, Stinson, for example, was still entirely enmeshed in the underground gay world in Louisville. The significance of those days of anger in New York did not register with him at the time. “We were all aware of Stonewall, but it seemed like a tale told of a place far away.”

But for Micky Schickel Nelson, 1969 came at just the right time. She was 17 and was just about to graduate from a Catholic girls’ school whose campus was not far from The Downtowner. Coming out for Nelson was a simple matter: Her parents had caught her at age 13 making out with a neighborhood girl. “My father walked in and the only word I remember him saying is, ‘queers.’” After that, Nelson’s father told the girls that they had to stay in the kitchen and play cards. “So naturally, we just started hanging out at her house instead.”

All of which is to say that unlike Stinson and Kersey—and me—Micky Nelson knew who she was all along. “I think you have a harder time coming out as gay if you have a loving, supportive family,” she said. “If you grow up feeling you are going to lose the people you are closest to in life if you tell them, then you really don’t want to burn that bridge. But I didn’t have that fear.” Nelson’s parents were both older, and had both worked during her childhood, which was unusual at the time, she pointed out. “They really didn’t have any expectations for me at all, other than that I do well at school. So my support system were the people outside my family—my hippie-dippie friends and the people I ran around with.”

Rather than discover bars, Nelson discovered activism. Soon after the Stonewall riots, she read in an underground newspaper called The Louisville Free Press that the Gay Liberation Front, an activist group that coalesced in different cities after the Stonewall protest, was seeking to form a Louisville chapter. (They eventually started an informal community center in Louisville in 1971 and later started the city’s first gay newspaper—Trash.) She showed up with a girlfriend at one of the earliest meetings in 1970. It was held in a converted apartment in a run-down mansion in Old Louisville, a leafy, if sometimes sketchy, part of town where the city’s monied class had lived in the nineteenth century when steamboat traffic made Louisville one of the largest cities in the country.

Even as we embrace a new and better world, an important question remains: What of the old one is worth saving?

“The first time I walked into a meeting I was surprised at what I found,” she said. “I just sort of expected, in my teenage narcissist way, that there’d be more denim-clad, radical people, people like me. Instead, there was this surprising cross-section.” She recalled one meeting where a heavy-set woman with bound breasts, cropped hair, and wearing a pair of Florsheim wingtips was accompanied by a very quiet, much smaller woman. At another, she said, “I remember someone asking me and my girlfriend, ‘So which one of you is the butch and which one of you is fem?’ and we just looked at each other and said, ‘If you can’t tell does it make any difference?’”

When the Gay Liberation Front decided it needed a larger space to operate from, one member rented a house in a Louisville neighborhood called the Highlands, east of Stinson’s restaurant and past Cave Hill Cemetery, where my mother is buried not far from Colonel Harland Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Cave Hill constitutes the northern border of the Highlands, a neighborhood that stretches southeast from the edge of downtown for three or four miles along Bardstown Road.

The house that the Gay Liberation Front rented still stands at 1919 Bonnycastle Road, a prosperous street dotted with old trees. The house has two floors and four bedrooms, one of which Nelson took, as well as a front porch and roomy common areas. The Front’s volunteers operated a telephone help line for gay people, and volunteers, friends, and all manner of strangers and hangers-on came and went freely.

One night in 1971, Nelson was getting ready to go to bed when she noticed a beefy man in a windbreaker coming up the stairs. “I had no idea who he was, but he didn’t look like he belonged.” It turned out he was a police detective, and within minutes nearly 30 people, residents and guests, were being subjected to a slur-filled lecture by the authorities. “I don’t know what had tipped them off, but they were ready for us that night,” Nelson told me. “There were paddy wagons outside, and they had enough room to haul all of us downtown.”

Nelson was bailed out quickly, and most of the charges against everyone were dropped—they related mostly to marijuana possession—but the names of the arrested were published in the newspaper, as people who lived in a gay house. Some lost their jobs, but Nelson got off easy. “I was working for McDonald’s. They didn’t care what I did, as long as I showed up.” Nelson was in the courtroom when two gay women tried to get married—one of the first documented cases in the country—and she began making appearances at local colleges to answer questions from students who were equally titillated and scandalized. By the 1980s, when the AIDS crisis began killing people, she and her partner, a lawyer, began to help the dying. “I witnessed a lot of wills,” she told me. “They were almost always alone. They just didn’t have anyone else.”

I arrived back in Washington late in the afternoon on Derby Day. The celebrations among straight people back in Louisville would have begun with the close of the race, in the city’s pedigreed restaurants and Bardstown Road’s bourbon bars. The gay bars in the Highlands—unafraid to keep their shades up—would be full as well. These are newer places, and they don’t always announce themselves as gay bars. In their modernity and openness, they present a different image of gayness than was once found in this city, one that differs greatly from that of their predecessors, establishments in which the ability not to be seen ranked among a place’s chief virtues. Stinson described it as a “gay format but without the gay identity,” adding that that was exactly what he and other gays had been fighting for all their lives.

I was also reminded of something David Williams told me. He said old bars and clubs were “like walking into a bubble. Once you walked out the door, well, you looked left and you looked right.” This might sound frightening, and it was, but it held a certain appeal for him, too. “It was like leaving a fantasy world, or leaving the cinemas. You leave the world of the movie behind, and you go home to your everyday life.”

But I was still preoccupied with the problem that had driven me, a week earlier, to the steps of the Supreme Court before I made the journey home. The importance of the gay marriage fight lies in its ability to force Americans to abandon the old hateful division of the world into straight and gay. I was confident, whatever the court decided, that the division would soon fade away. It won’t be missed. But even as we embrace this new and better world, an important question remains: What of the old one is worth saving?

There is still, of course, a gay Louisville. But it is no longer a separate culture exclusive to its members. I believe this kind of community does not depend on the self-defining strictures of prejudice and fear to exist. But to fashion a new gay culture, we must not let go entirely of the old one. We must continue to embrace the things that made us different and special, the sense of family and support—the unity of purpose—that stitched us together. That, finally, is what had drawn me home to Louisville: an act of commemoration, a final opportunity to pay respect to those who had gone before me. I will be happy when gay marriage is legal in Louisville, and everywhere. But there was a beauty, even in those uglier times, in the old ways, in the old Louisville.