As we continue celebrating our 25th anniversary, we pause to look back at the people and events that shaped Georgia Equality.
Cindy Abel, an Atlanta LGBTQ filmmaker, served as the first Executive Director of Georgia Equality. Cindy previously served as the Director of Stonewall Cincinnati and relocated to Atlanta to be Executive Director for the small, newly founded LGBTQ organization. At the time, Georgia Equality had no full-time staff and desperately needed full-time support to work on fundraising and increasing visibility. As for the political landscape – the State Capitol, according to Cindy, was “not a welcoming climate – to put it mildly.” “This was in the wake of the Otherside Lounge bombing of February of 1997 and LGBT relations were tense. Most work with the legislature involved stopping ‘anti-bills,’ and it was hard to promote anything for LGBT equality. We were mostly fighting off harmful initiatives,“ she continued.