“Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.” ~ L.R. Knost
crossing the rainbow crosswalk
Several years ago, the city of Lexington painted some of the downtown crosswalks as rainbows. Naturally, this caused a kerfuffle among the homophobic, but their cries dried up when they learned most people in Lexington thought the crosswalks were cool. Of course they’re cool. They’re rainbows for heaven’s sake, what’s not cool about a rainbow? Lexington is known for her long-time acceptance of people of all stripes. One such example was James Herndon aka Sweet Evening Breeze, the subject of this beautiful downtown mural. Sweets worked for forty years at Good Samaritan Hospital as an orderly after having grown up there, unbelievable as that sounds. He was known as much for his good deeds around town as for his penchant for women’s clothes, which in the 1940s and 1950s was not at all common or easily understood. Nevertheless, Lexington has long held a place for those who fly their own flag, though it hasn’t always been quite as open about it as today’s rainbow street crossings would make it seem. Growth is slow, and social growth of “the other” seems to grow at a snail’s pace, but grow it does. Kentucky gets panned as a backward, illiterate, red-voting, Mountain Dew mouth state, but the reality is much different, at least in Lexington. Don’t get me wrong, neither Lexington nor Kentucky are perfect and there is plenty of division just like the rest of the country, but we’re not what Hollywood would have the world believe. Just spend a weekend here where gay and straight, young and old, punk and hipster, PhDs and dropouts, black and white and brown and atheist and Christian and Muslim and Jew all mingle around town doing their own thing and nobody gets killed… unless you’re dealing drugs. Then you might get killed.
Sweet Evening Breeze
No responses yet