My friends and I didn’t hesitate when we found out a party for queer women was being held at a bar in the center of Hollywood last summer. After all, most of us women of color feel the need for a safe place to shed our shields — even if it’s only for one night.

We talked of nothing else in the week leading up to it, but when we got there we quickly discovered it was a space for some of the ostracized, but not all. Almost everybody was white. The music was mind-numbing, and the sense of loss that came to define our lives was still there.

I couldn’t help but wonder: What place is there for a queer woman of color in society? If my questions seem challenging today, imagine the difficulties queer women of color faced in decades past.

That is the world Jewel Thais-Williams came up in. Now 78 years old, Thais-Williams lived through a version of Los Angeles where gay culture wasn’t allowed to exist outside of the closet and black people weren’t allowed in white-operated underground gay spaces.

“Black women are on the bottom of the totem pole for everything,” she says now, making the statement as a fundamental fact that she’s come to reckon with, but which she also refuses to let define her life’s trajectory.

Her response to the absence of black LGBT spaces? Fixing the problem herself. Thais-Williams ended up founding and running the first black gay disco in Los Angeles — the historic and legendary Catch One.

Read more. Photo courtesy of Jewel Thais-Williams.