BAI was conceived in March 2002, when a group of concerned LGBT individuals in the Mobile community came together to discuss the dangerous political climate in the area: “Recent negative decisions by the Alabama Supreme Court regarding custody of children by gay parents, as well as inflammatory public remarks against the LGBT community from the highest political levels,” spoke of a need to protect the LGBT community. These organizers believed that creating a traditional community center would promote “equality, fairness, and safety for the LGBT community.” The center would also offer a Web- and telephone-based referral network and provide office space for “two allied programs,” both of which were support programs for gay, bisexual, and questioning men. The original organizers also hoped to sustain a “media campaign,” although a plan of action for this initiative was never fully articulated. Bay Area Inclusion (BAI) was granted 501 (c) (3) status 25 July 2002. For six years this small group functioned primarily as a fundraising organization aimed at providing a community center for the LGBT population in the Mobile, AL area.

A small grant was procured in April 2003 from the Gill Foundation ($7,500.00) to help start up the alliance between the two men’s programs (an alliance which also represented a partnership between BAI and Mobile Aids Services). The doors of a rented space were opened as a community center that year. In early 2004, Mobile-Gulf Area Pride (M-GAP) merged with BAI, becoming a BAI committee and making the annual Pride weekend a BAI-sponsored event. In mid-2004 the second part of the Gill grant went to the purpose of “capacity building,” specifically, board enhancement. In July, BAI announced its intention to launch a large scale annual fundraiser, the People’s Ball (an inclusive Mardi Gras-type ball). The People’s Ball event has been held in the fall of each year since (mildly successful as a community builder, but less than successful as a fund-raiser until recently). In December 2004, BAI’s first Web presence was launched.

By 2005, the organization had begun to write and revise yearly Strategic Goals. These included welcoming newcomers, hosting social events, conducting community needs’ assessments, producing and distributing a monthly newsletter, and maintaining an events calendar on the Web site. Although the organization was struggling financially, a Political Action Committee was announced in March, and several critical dates were also pinpointed: BAI intended to secure both a permanent facility and an Executive Director by October 2006. A community needs assessment survey was conducted in 2006 in an attempt to discover the most desired sort of community center.

BAI succeeded in keeping the community center’s doors open from late 2003 to 2006 by
hosting many fundraising events and by renting out meeting space within the center to allied individuals and organizations. This provided income enough to pay rent and minimal operating costs on the facility on a month-by-month basis. By August 2005, the Pride committee had broken with BAI, taking the name Mobile Area Pride (MAP), and filing for individual 501(c) (3) status. Due to a combination of lack of full-time, committed, and professional leadership, a strong professional volunteer base, systematic grant writing and sustainable funding, and seemingly unavoidable in-fighting, the center closed in 2006.

BAI continued offering and even developing new programming outside the walls of a brick and mortar facility.
Although it proved impossible for this group of volunteers to sustain the physical community center, core individuals remained committed to providing services to the Mobile Gulf Coast LGBT community. Realizing that an overarching vision for making the area more hospitable to the LGBT community was missing in the simple “community center” idea, these key leaders began to recruit a professional Executive Director who believed that the primary responsibilities of LGBT social and civil activism are to achieve “full political and social enfranchisement” of the disenfranchised group.

Namely, this activist insisted that civil rights workers must work, 1) to protect and advocate for the most vulnerable populations, and 2) to affect long-term progress toward altering homophobic ideologies.
In March, 2008, we invited this potential Executive Director, Dr. Moira Amado-McGittigan to share her vision with us and to present a plan of action to the Executive Committee. In that meeting, Moira argued that the insular and sequestered nature of a “community center” could do little to alter the “culture of silence” that allowed homophobia to thrive. She suggested that at the beginning of the 21st century, the “center” implied an exclusionary and insular model producing a situation in which the “gay community” was sequestered, and outreach, education, and community involvement was not nurtured. She wondered about the lasting usefulness of a “community center” to the LGBT community, because she worried that “safe spaces” could not authentically be offered in the absence of a larger plan for combating the violence that compelled such a need.

Moira asked that we as board members and activists living, working, and raising our families in the “deep South” think about inclusion and “community” in new and complex ways. She asked us to consider a coalition instead of a “center.” She asked us to flip the script, to consider whether we needed a “center for us,” or if we should think in terms of “us for the community.”

In April 2008, we engaged Moira as our first paid Executive Director. This was a great leap of faith for all of us, because our fundraising efforts were not sufficient to guarantee this move. However, we realized if we were to move forward we needed a professional leader with a real vision for this work and with the credentials and experience to advocate for our community. Our choice, Dr. Amado-McGittigan understood that the “community center model” hadn’t worked well for us due to at least four interlocking problems. Under Dr. Amado-McGittigan’s leadership we began to recognize that if we were to actually affect change in our community—a community that so desperately requires an ideological shift in its understanding of the LGBTQI community and of homophobia itself—we would have to focus our efforts on educating about those problems at the root.

“BAI Community Action Alliance” is the second generation of what was and continues to be the first LGBT community center in southern Alabama. However, since April 2008, our vision now reflects our understanding that our work is based in civil-rights, education, alliance, and advocacy and we have developed a stronger, bolder, and more contemporary mission. Shortly thereafter, we drafted a completely new mission statement which focused on ideological change and social activism based on “relentless community involvement” (this first attempt at a “new mission statement” can be found here as part of our current “vision statement”). We made the conscious choice to become activists and to teach others to become every-day activists themselves. Our new mission statement is driven by the understanding that a community is only as healthy and strong as its weakest and most threatened members.

As a member of our Advisory Board in the previous year, our Executive Director had been producing and directing our InView film series as our primary educational program. Now that she was working full time for us, we became engaged in intense, systematic, and prolonged study about how ideologies work, about where the LGBTQI community fit within the history of social activism in North America, about the differences between sexuality and gender and the amazing diversity of the human experience, and about how finding and celebrating not only our own community but engaging the community of straight allies in our work.

We soon realized that education and outreach had to be our first priority if we could be successful in any larger mission. 2008-2009 was BAI’s first year in attempting to address the need to move from insular to community-invested, from LGBT-only to LGBTQI-and-allies, from social to social activism, from exclusionary to educational, from “creating a safe space” to actually working to “eradicate homophobia.”

2009-2010 has seen us growing into the go-to organization for questions about activism, resources, and networking opportunities; for providing direct advocacy especially as it benefits youth between the ages of 15 and 25; and as the outlet for the “storytelling” that must ultimately break the back of the “culture of silence” that allows homophobia to flourish. 

We have been proud of our ability to adapt to change as an organization and to learn and grow as individuals. In the past year, for instance, it has become clear that if we are to educate, do useful outreach, and provide advocacy, we must also focus a good part of our attention on primary research. Our Executive Director has been given a clear mandate that she must not only lead our efforts as we “cultivate wellbeing through education, service and dialogue,” but that she must continue her scholarly research and writing as a way to undergird this direct advocacy work.

As such, in the 2009-2010 fiscal year, our mission statement has distilled into a unique object and a clear vision: “Dedicated to exploring misunderstandings about gender identity and sexual orientation especially as those misunderstandings lead to violence and other recognized social ills.”