Jewel Thais-Williams Passes (AUDIO)

Sad news to hear that Jewel Thais-Williams a woman whose courage & compassion changed the landscape of LGBTQ life in LA & beyond has died at 86. I met Jewel in 2017 with filmmaker C. Fitz when their documentary “Jewel's Catch One” was presented at the Boston LGBTQ Film Festival. The film tells the story of Jewel’s legendary “Jewel’s Catch One” nightclub often referred to as the Studio 54 of the West & one of the first Black discos in the country creating a safe space for our community to gather, be seen & thrive. In the late 1990’s Jewel continued to serve our community becoming an acupuncturist & herbalist & establishing Village Health Foundation in LA. In 2017 when I asked how she saw our LGBTQ community moving forward in the first Trump administration Jewel stated, “United & on all fronts I feel is the key to it as well as being supportive of other groups. I think that we saw during the Civil Rights Protests & Campaign embrace every aspect of the human conditions & so we had folks joining from various & slightly different groups to support that cause & I feel if we can get that kind of support around our LGBTQ issues & we’re finding hope with millennials. We see them protesting things like Black Lives Matter & they might be Asian, Indian & Caucasian, whatever, this is the kind of support we need to face anything that is happening politically to us now. We all have to join together every facet of our Americana especially those people that are being discriminated against & of course we’re one of the main ones of that. If we all come together there’s power in numbers.” LISTEN TO FULL INTERVIEW