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.
“With Jewel’s Catch One, she built a home for young, black queer people who were often isolated and shut out at their own homes, and in doing so, changed the lives of so many. Jewel is more than deserving to be the first black lesbian woman with a dedicated square in the city of Los Angeles for this and so many other reasons.”Under Thais-Williams’ ownership, Catch One featured performances by such prominent entertainers as Sammy Davis Jr.
Catch One was a community center for Los Angeles’ black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning community. It grew to become known as the “unofficial Studio 54 of the West Coast,” and Thais-Williams became a national role model for fighting discrimination and serving the less fortunate, Wesson said.
Thais-Williams co-founded the Minority AIDS Project, which aims to help blacks and Hispanics affected by the disease. She served as a board member of the AIDS Project Los Angeles, which provides HIV/AIDS care and prevention programs and seeks to improve HIV-related public policy, and with her wife Rue, co-founded Rue’s House, described as the first housing facility for women with AIDS. It later became a sober-living facility.
In 2001, Thais-Williams founded the Village Health Foundation to provide preventive health care and education to the black community for AIDS, diabetes, hypertension, high blood pressure and other high-incidence diseases among blacks in an effort to reduce the risk of disease and offer tools for learning to live with an illness.“I’m grateful and overwhelmed to have been honored by L.A. City Council President Herb Wesson,” Thais-Williams told the Los Angeles Blade last month.
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LGBTQ ROCKS!