FLORENCE, Ala. — There are countless churches but not much openly gay life in this city by the banks of the Tennessee River. So when Benjamin Newbern, a onetime field organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union, convened gay residents and those he calls “straight allies” for dinner one recent evening, it was a radical act.

Over pizza in the back room of a local restaurant, a college student, Jacob Ezell, said his mother worried “it would destroy our family” if his father found out that he is gay. A nurse who gave her name only as Cassandra said she feared being fired if her bosses discovered she is a lesbian. A high school senior, Landon Montgomery, recalled coming out at 13 — and being forced to leave the small Bible school he attended.

“No one would talk to me,” he said. “It was like a disease.”

The dinner, one of 11 Mr. Newbern has organized at the behest of a national gay rights group, seemed at times like a support group for gays in New York or San Francisco from decades ago. But here it was a tentative step in the next chapter of the gay rights movement: a push for equality and acceptance in hostile territory, especially the Deep South.

The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday not to take up a same-sex marriage case was a tacit victory for the national gay rights movement and paved the way for gays to be able to marry soon in 30 states and the District of Columbia. But if the decision suggests a country heading inexorably toward marriage rights nationwide for gay couples, parts of the South seem like a world apart.