In January 1979, then mayor Marion Barry met with a local black gay rights organization, DC Coalition of Black Gays to discuss the group’s complaints about the alleged discrimination. Racial discrimination at white gay-owned establishments occurred primarily through the practice of “carding.” Many black gay men witnessed white patrons walk into these establishments without showing ID, while black patrons were asked to show multiple pieces of ID, only to be told that the identification was unacceptable for admission. On several occasions since white gay-owned bars like the Pier, the Way Off Broadway, and the Lost and Found opened in the 1970s, DC’s Commission for Human Rights cited them for discrimination against women and blacks. Mapping the Racial and Class Divide in Gay Washington, DC The club also became a foundational site for the development of both longstanding local institutions for fighting AIDS in black communities and national AIDS campaigns targeting black communities. And although national media attention continued to focus on the impact of AIDS on white gay men, the ClubHouse emerged as a local site where the devastating impact of the virus on black same-sex-desiring men was both recognized and felt. The ClubHouse-DC’s most famous black gay and lesbian nightclub-became a key site of AIDS activism because of its prior visibility as the center of African American lesbian and gay nightlife and as a local venue for black lesbian and gay activist efforts. However, local black gay activists strategized to create culturally specific forms of AIDS education and outreach to counter this misinformation and neglect. Community-based narratives about the virus’s transmission through interracial sex, coupled with public-health officials’ neglect of black gay neighborhoods in AIDS outreach, structured the black gay community’s belief that the virus was a white gay disease that would not affect them as long as they maintained separate social and sexual networks organized around shared geographic locations. I then demonstrate how social divisions and spatialized arrangements in gay Washington shaped black gay cultural knowledge about the AIDS virus. This essay asks, how did black gay men who were dislocated from the center of AIDS service and public-health outreach (by discrimination or by choice) in the early years of the epidemic receive information about the virus’s impact? How did the racialized geography of gay culture in Washington, DC, shape the black gay community’s response to the onset of the AIDS epidemic? This essay only begins to approach these questions by considering the critical role that the ClubHouse played in early AIDS activism directed toward black gay Washingtonians.ĭrawing on archival materials, oral-history narratives, and close textual analysis, I show how racial and class stratification structured Washington’s gay nightlife scene in the 1970s and early 1980s. When many black male members of the DC black gay nightclub the ClubHouse became mysteriously ill in the early 1980s, club and community members responded. Though this is true, attention to the specificity of Washington’s black gay nightlife nuances this narrative.
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In her groundbreaking study of AIDS and black politics, Cathy Cohen identifies the early 1980s as a period of denial regarding the impact of AIDS in black gay communities. What follows is a case study of the early impact of AIDS in black gay populations in Washington, DC, and the local community’s response to it. Fewer have directed attention to the local political responses that have also shaped how the virus is understood in particular cultural communities. Numerous studies have focused on the national and even global impact of AIDS, paying attention to the cultural politics that has undergirded the uneven distribution of care and state resources.