The manager called to tell me this, and said, “Should we open tomorrow?” I said, “You better. Just standing up and talking to them and saying, “No, this is not right.” I can recall one incident when I went to the station to speak to the captain because a couple nights before them, I was in New York when they came, but the manager let them in, and they put everybody out.
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How did you get the police off your case? I walked in with a thousand bucks, which was literally all I had, and had to come up with $17,000 more in 30 days. It’s no accident you were put in this position to do these things.” Nothing came from a silver spoon here. In fact, I’d say to myself, “There’s no quit to your game, Jewel. In the early days, when the Catch One was subject to a lot of police harassment, did you ever think about just calling it quits?
JEWELS GAY BAR NEW ORLEANS FREE
I had happy hours most days because I knew a lot of folks had been disowned and didn’t have anything to eat except what we had at happy hour, at the free buffet every day. I’ve gotten what the universe gave me without having to give up anything except passing it on-and, no, I didn’t think about that at all that when I was doing it.
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As I often say when I’m given an award or something, is a selfish act-it makes me feel good to help others.
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It was just what you do you show up without thinking it’s a need or thinking it’s extraordinary, you just do it. What was it like when you saw the finished film for the first time? We caught up with Thais-Williams over the phone. The doc premieres on Netflix on May 1 but first it shows as part of a double feature with Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman at the Pacific Design Center’s Silver Screen on Sat., April 28. The film was completed in 2016, but it’s finally getting proper distribution thanks to Ava DuVernay’s distribution collective, Array. Besides interviews with Thais-Williams, the film features conversations with Sandra Bernhard, Sharon Stone, Thelma Houston, Evelyn “Champagne” King, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and other people close to the club and its owner. Fitz made the documentary Jewel’s Catch One.
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(The Catch One building is now home to Mitch Edelson’s Union nightclub.) In the years leading up to the closing (and in its wake), filmmaker C. Long known as America’s oldest black-owned nightclub, Jewel’s Catch One shuttered for good in late 2015, in part so Thais-Williams could focus more attention on her acupuncture and Eastern medicine clinic, the Village Health Foundation. During the disco years and through the AIDS epidemic, the club was a safe haven for gay black people who’d been estranged from their families, a place where all folks could let loose. Of course there were plenty of good times too. To Thais-Williams’s recollection, police were a near-constant presence at the club, parking as many as six cop cars outside some nights to deter customers. Then, in the mid-’80s, the club closed for two years following a catastrophic fire, which Thais-Williams still believes was a targeted arson. From word go, Thais-Williams was a pioneer, and the authorities gave her hell for it. In 1973, when Jewel Thais-Williams opened Jewel’s Catch One on Pico Boulevard in Arlington Heights, gay black women didn’t own nightclubs-particularly nightclubs that catered to gay black people.