You can go home again.

Kevin Snow is on his knees, "rolling quarters," as he puts it, to come up with enough money to make it through the month. "We're all on the margins right now," he says, laughing, "but it sure as hell was worth it to get here. I wouldn't take back what happened for anything in the world."

What happened was an outpouring of support for gay visibility in Birmingham, Ala., just when that city seemed the least likely place for it in the country. The incident points up something gay men and lesbians are learning all across the country: Rather than flee to a place that's known for being gay-friendly, sometimes it pays to dig in your heels and find community at home. You just might be surprised at how much of it there already is.

Birmingham's gay identity crisis started when the city's ABC network affiliate announced that it would not air the now-famous coming-out episode of Ellen--the only station in the country to refuse to do so. For that hour, the network feed would be blocked, declared representatives of Birmingham's Channel 33/40, saying the sexual orientation of both real-life Ellen DeGeneres and the character she plays on her TV series was too much for Birmingham's Christian, family-oriented viewers.

In response Snow, who is the vice president and entertainment chairman of Birmingham Pride Alabama, a gay political and cultural group, decided to find a theater that would let him run a satellite-feed broadcast of the Ellen episode to a live audience. The old downtown Boutwell Auditorium said yes, and on the night of the broadcast more than 2,500 people jammed the hall not only to watch the show but also to listen to a series of speakers and entertainers tell them that gay men and lesbians in Birmingham are not going to be invisible anymore.

"I've lived here all my life," says Cathy Belue, a registered nurse and aspiring stand-up comic who joined Snow and others in organizing the event with help from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, a national media watchdog group. "And I saw people at the Boutwell Auditorium that I never would have thought I'd see. It gave me a lot of pride in my community as well as in myself. It made me think this wasn't such a bad place to live after all."

Is this the new face of the South? Snow, whose family in the vicinity reaches back eight generations, doesn't think so. "It is the true face of the South," he says. "We have always been portrayed as being culturally intolerant, but here in Birmingham we've had things like gay parades and the annual Apollo drag ball for years without an incident. I think what is happening instead is that we're finally coming more into focus."

But that focus, while spiritually stimulating, has also been--at least temporarily--expensive. Tickets to the Boutwell coming-out event brought in at least $12,000 for Birmingham Pride Alabama. But the rent for the auditorium, police protection, projector, and 25foot screen came to more than $15,000. "So we're in debt," says Snow, shrugging. "It was worth it."

Other gay and lesbian activists in Birmingham are similarly buoyant. "Who would have thought that even here gay and lesbian people could take a stand and not suffer recriminations?" ponders Shirley Lambert, a leader in the local gay-friendly Covenant Metropolitan Community Church. "But we have, and I think this might be the beginning of a new era for us."

Mark Moore, associate editor of The Alabama Forum, Birmingham's gay newspaper, agrees: "People here are real excited right now. I just hope we can accomplish other things too."

Tucked in a winding valley between two mountain chains, Birmingham has in the past been home to legendary struggles for human rights. It was here, in 1963, that white segregationists bombed a black church, killing four girls--and here also that Martin Luther King Jr. penned his famous paean to nonviolence, "Letter From a Birmingham Jail, " the same year.

In the years since the 1960s civil rights confrontations, Birmingham has more often than not been a city of two halves. It is divided by two congressional districts: one largely white, conservative, and located to the outside of the city; the other mostly black, liberal, and urban.

It is also a city smack in the middle of a powerful evangelical tradition. This spring, when a circuit court judge in Gadsden, some 60 miles to the northeast of Birmingham, refused to bow to pressure to take down from his courtroom wall a sign bearing the Ten Commandments, the local religious community--more than 20,000 people--rallied to his defense.

"That is the South--I don't care if you want to call it new or old, but that is the South too," maintains the Rev. Raymond Culpepper, pastor of the 1,800-member Metropolitan Church of God, whose congregation's numbers dwarf Covenant Metropolitan's 150. "The new South that gays and lesbians would like to see will never happen because there are so many more of us who feel otherwise," adds Culpepper, whose church conducts an outreach program to people he calls "sexually broken," which, he says, includes gay men and lesbians.

Equally problematic are the schisms that naturally exist in any city with a diverse population, such as Birmingham has today. "Everything here is divided," says Steve Haberly, a professor of political science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "White gays and lesbians live on the white side of the town...black gays and lesbians are still pretty much segregated."

Moore, who is black, agrees: "The black and the gay communities are not united. There is segregation everywhere, between men and women, gays and straights as well as blacks and whites. So it makes it difficult to build coalitions."

Yet despite the obvious obstacles, many gay and lesbian activists believe a new day has arrived in Birmingham--more accurately, that it arrived years ago but came to a splendid boil with the local blacking-out of the Ellen episode. And the turnout at the Boutwell Auditorium, they say, is proof that gay men and lesbians here will never turn back. "There were so many people who came out," Lambert says. "And not only gays and lesbians but a good number of heterosexuals too--couples with children, people from all walks of life."

In the wake of the Boutwell blowout, activists here say they would like to see the gay and lesbian community become more political, endorsing gay-friendly candidates for public office or even running their own candidates. Birmingham mayor Richard Arrington, who is black, not only had the temerity to make available a city building for a local AIDS treatment and care program but also has attended gay and lesbian community events, stressing the need for diversity.

"Politicians around here are still not brave enough to come out and say they are pro-gay," says Moore, "but they will say something like they are diversity-loving or nondiscriminatory, which is a step in the right direction."

Snow hopes the new buoyancy in Birmingham will spill over to the annual gay pride parade and festival. "I hope we can keep the energy in overdrive," he says, "and have the best--and best-attended--pride event ever."

The momentum should also come in handy in paying off the debt incurred to air the Ellen show--a debt Snow regards as a promising investment in Birmingham's future. "I've lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York," says Snow, "but in the end I wanted to come home. And I'm really glad I did."

RELATED ARTICLE: You can go home again Building a community

There's no sign in the window of Boise, Ida.'s new gay community center. No rainbow flag, And it's open by appointment only.

But it's a start. It's also part of a growing trend, according to Ben Stilp, a spokesman for the New York City Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. Instead of moving to gay meccas such as San Francisco or New York, gay men and lesbians across the country apparently are deciding to stay put and build their own communities--with gay centers at the heart--even though the going is sometimes tough.

In San Francisco, for instance, support for a new $5.5-million gay community center extends to the most influential power brokers in city hall. By contrast, the Boise center's rent runs about $5,000 a year, and the seven board members organizing the effort are simply hoping they get enough community support to keep the place open longer than a year.

"It will be either a matter of continuing or saying the community isn't ready for a center and packing up and leaving," says Al Dawson, assistant chairman of Community Center Inc., the corporation founded to assist in the development of the Boise center. Right now, Dawson says, they're proceeding very slowly and very, very carefully.

But at least the center is open. And that's saying a lot. For more than two years, the center, which serves the entire state of Idaho as well as eastern Oregon, has consisted of a single telephone line that rings into Dawson's home. Now it has a physical home. Dawson envisions a place where people can go to check out a book, play a game, hold a meeting, or just hang out. "It will allow people who come to be who they are, " Dawson says. "It will be an open forum for people to be themselves."

Stilp says that's exactly what gay centers are all about: creating havens where community members can gather. That's even more important, of course, in places where gay men and lesbians feel most threatened. Since the nation's first gay community center opened, in 1971, on average one to five centers have opened each year. Today, there are some 76 lesbian and gay centers and center-organizing committees throughout the country, including some in such relatively remote places as Caribou, Me., and Scottsbluff, Neb. "Local organizations are really critical to our survival," says Stilp. "Gay people are born into isolation. It's incumbent upon us to organize into a community and to create a safe place."