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It’s Sunday night at the Rage nightclub in West Hollywood. In the middle of a dark room illuminated only by strobe lights, hips roll and shoulders juke to the latest rap and hip-hop tracks. In West Hollywood, black party promoters are taking up Thais-Williams’ fight from the early ‘70s: creating spaces for black gays and lesbians. “There’s something about being around others like you, how great it feels to be affirmed in a place where people look like you.” “We have to find a space to validate who we are,” Thomas said. Shane’a Thomas, an adjunct professor at USC’s School of Social Work, said these clubs are more than just party spaces, they’re institutions of affirmation. “Having community space at the intersection of both gender, sexuality and race has been really important as a resource for navigating racism, homophobia and heterosexism,” she said. That and the advent of the Internet and cellphone dating apps contributed to the Catch’s decline.īianca Wilson, senior scholar of public policy at UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, called the disappearance of black gay spaces concerning. In Los Angeles, black gays are now attracted to the newness and central location of West Hollywood, where club-hopping is possible. Detroit hasn’t had one since the closure of the Continental in the late 1990s. Jeffrey Pub on the South Side of Chicago holds the mantle as the last black-owned gay club in that city. The black gay clubs, serving an already limited number of people, were left without clubbers as the community shrunk. But early on, black gays did not see HIV as an issue affecting them, because the media and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention portrayed the virus as a white gay disease.īy the time blacks realized it did affect them, the damage had been done and club-going practices had shifted. When the HIV epidemic broke out, white gays banded together, using their clubs as spaces for fundraising and political galvanization. For black gays, their clubs were often the only gathering place they had. Whites had bathhouses, health organizations and other spaces. So in 1973 she opened Catch One, one of the first black discos in the country. There was no space where black gays could enjoy themselves in one another’s company, escaping what they saw as the racial discrimination of West Hollywood and the homophobia of the African American community. When allowed in, she would often be double-carded, having to show two forms of identification.
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When she started clubbing in the early 1970s, gay clubs often denied her entrance because she was black and female.
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Jewel Thais-Williams is a petite 76-year-old with a short gray afro. Celebrities would make pit stops when they were in town - from Madonna and Sharon Stone to “Queen of Disco” Sylvester.Īs the sun rose, they left drenched in euphoria and sweat.īut the joy experienced at Jewel’s Catch One club was more than a weekend choice for fun it was an act of defiance by black lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the face of clubs in West Hollywood where they felt unwanted because of their race. Once inside, they danced under strobe lights and a lone disco ball in the center of two of its seven rooms. In sequined dresses and leather jackets, afro puffs and high-top fades, they lined up outside the stucco nightclub on Pico Boulevard off Crenshaw, sometimes wrapping around the block.