“I learned about the Atlanta Gay Center and I started going there. It grew, it flourished for quite a number of years.' Another one started up later on, that was doing basically the same thing. There was a disagreement and he took it upon himself to change all the locks. There was this older guy who came in and took over. And he had rented a house on 4 th Street, maybe 6 th Street, just west of the Biltmore, and he let us have a floor in there for the Gay Center. The newspaper didn’t make much money, so he started running an escort service called Young Men in Atlanta. It was run out of a house on Peachtree Place - Williams Street, West Peachtree on the very corner. 'There was the Gay center, which was on 4 th street or 6 th street, over by Spring that we started. The Gay Center moved a number of times throughout its existence and it eventually closed during the mid-2000s. It provided a help line, various health, legal and social services, as well as publishing the bi-weekly Gay Center News (1984). The Atlanta Coalition for Human Rights opened a more formal iteration of the Gay Center in Midtown in February 1979. For approximately nine months, it functioned in an office owned by Bill Smith, and provided a help line and a community meeting place. The Atlanta Gay Center was founded informally in 1976.
