AS ATLANTA CITY OFFICIALS and residents bask in the 10-year afterglow of the Centennial Olympics this month, some locals are also reflecting on the gold-medal performance by gay and lesbian activists prior to the 1996 games.

The gay victory was no less thrilling — and surprising — than when an injured Kerri Strug vaulted the U.S. women’s gymnastics team past historic powerhouses Russia and Romania to win the gold medal on American soil.

“No one wanted to get involved in something that was considered to be unwinnable,” lesbian activist Pat Hussain recalls about early efforts to convince the almighty Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games to move Olympic venues and events out of Cobb County, where the county commission had recently passed a strident anti-gay resolution.

In February 1994, ACOG announced that Cobb County’s Galleria Centre would host women’s volleyball during the ’96 Olympics. The decision sparked a six-month protest that included bringing traffic on Interstate 75 to a standstill, and questioning the sexual orientation of the Atlanta Olympic mascot, Izzy.

The protest was in response to the August 1993 Cobb County resolution declaring that “lifestyles advocated by the gay community should not be endorsed by government policy makers, because they are incompatible with the standards to which this community subscribes.”

“Little did [ACOG] know how many people across the country and world would become involved in the protest once they found out about it,” says Hussain, who co-chaired the Olympics Out of Cobb Coalition, along with Jon-Ivan Weaver, who is also gay. “If they left women’s volleyball in Cobb County, the promise was to protest during the games — we would tie Atlanta into an Olympic knot.”

After months of stubborn resistance — by ACOG to change venues, and by Cobb County commissioners to rescind their anti-gay resolution — ACOG President Billy Payne announced that the Coliseum at the University of Georgia in Athens would host women’s volleyball in 1996.

Hussain discusses her role in the watershed victory during the July 30 “Atlanta Lesbian Herstory Panel” at the Central Library downtown. The panel also features Cheryl Summerville, a lesbian whose 1991 firing by Cracker Barrel initiated a 12-year national boycott of the restaurant chain. The panel is held in conjunction with several other “Out at the Library events at the Central Library, and as the library hosts the James C. Hormel Gay & Lesbian Center, a traveling exhibit produced by the San Francisco Public Library.

“It is not that long ago, but for many of the women and men in our community, they don’t understand that just a decade ago things were much more difficult,” says Sherry Siclair, development director for the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library. “It’s time to honor our mothers who took the risks.”

When the Olympics Out of Cobb Coalition began pressuring ACOG to reverse its decision to place events in Cobb County, Hussain recalls that it marked gay activists first encounter with a characteristically resolute Shirley Franklin, who at the time was a senior policy adviser at ACOG.

“She was definitely a listening ear and felt we had the right to protest,” Hussain says of Atlanta’s current mayor. “But she was also clear that we weren’t going to get what we wanted.”

Franklin participated in every meeting with gay activists, and Hussain remembers that her primary message was that ACOG was a private entity that had already decided upon locations. Failing to make headway with ACOG, Hussain and others decided to protest when members of the International Olympic Committee were visiting Atlanta.

The efforts to embarrass local organizers in front of the IOC included disrupting a visit by IOC officials to the Marietta offices of ACOG by having gay protesters occupy every lane of the highway driving only 40 miles per hour.

A pair of protestors also infiltrated ACOG’s private unveiling for Atlanta’s Olympic cauldron, jumping onstage and unfurling an “Olympics Out of Cobb” banner. But Hussain says one breaking point for Payne may have been when gay protestors used his beloved Izzy mascot during a tongue-in-cheek demonstration outside the World of Coke.

“We made up our own Izzy costume for the protest and had signs asking ‘Izzy gay?’ ‘Izzy Straight?’ ‘Izzy Safe in Cobb County?” Hussain remembers. “We said, ‘We’re not trying to attack him; we just don’t know what his sexual orientation is, and if he’s gay, he could get in trouble if he goes to Cobb County.”

Shortly after the demonstration, Hussain remembers the surfacing of a Ms. Izzy and little Izzies to quell any doubts.

ONE YEAR AFTER COBB COUNTY passed its infamous resolution, Hussain and Weaver ...

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