A History of the Black Queer Party
Mutual aid is at the heart of our framework for community gathering work, as informed by several tender histories.
On the eve of Chicago’s Black Pride celebrations, the federal government passed a large parcel of policy that will slash federal funding for food assistance and health care, disproportionately impacting LGBTQ+ communities of color, low-income families, and folks living with HIV. The cuts to Medicaid will leave 1.8 million LGBTQ+ adults without health coverage and ban gender affirming care.
Those of us who have been fighting this bill may be tempted to despair. We must recall instead the many technologies we’ve forged to survive the neoliberal state’s history of abandoning the health needs of queer communities. As we continue gathering beyond Pride, it’s worth remembering how Black queer communities have historically used parties as means of safeguarding our collective wellbeing – especially in the face of catastrophic resource retrenchment.
Parties are social technologies that queer communities have used to weather times such as this. Black lesbian activists have always woven social safety nets from the support vacuums left by neoliberalism’s resource retrenchment. In 1973, Jewel Thais-Williams opened the country’s first Black, LGBTQ+ dancehall Catch One, in Los Angeles. Thais-Williams used her hard-earned space as a central force, turning the tide of the HIV/AIDs epidemic. She used Catch One to raise money for medical treatment that determined her community’s ability to survive the virus. Outside of nightlife’s walls, she founded the Minority AIDs Project to fight racial health inequities, and then Rue’s House – the first housing facility serving women living with AIDs and their children.
Honored as the oldest living Black lesbian in the United States, Ruth Ellis came out at the age of 16 and spent her adulthood creating sanctuaries for the LGBTQ+ community. Ellis was the first Black woman to own a printing business in Detroit and converted her home into “The Gay Spot,” a refuge for young Black queer folk. As true to Chicago today as it was in Ellis’ organizing context, Black queer folk were denied full access both to white gay clubs and Black straight clubs. Out of the specific needs at the intersection of Black and gay, Ellis imagined a sort of gathering work that allowed her to mentor young Black lesbians in an important model of intergenerational connection that endures to this day.
Black queer event planners stand to inherit a lineage of mutual aid-embedded space making practices that could be instrumental in this next horizon of community resilience. The Harlem Renaissance produced new technologies for caring for one another, such as the ‘rent party.’ Black queer poet Langston Hughes for instance collected rent party announcements, which circulated with playful quips promising enjoyment, music and refreshments. Black renters in the 1920s and 1930s innovated the ‘rent party’ in response to racist rental rates, being paid lower wages, and yet charged 40-60% more than white households. During the pandemic, Williams Institute researchers found that LGBTQ+ people of color are most likely to experience rental housing instability, with more than 50% endorsing a persistent fear of eviction. The experiences of Black and queer community members suggest we revisit mutual aid parties as historical social technologies that could serve us now.
The Black queer party is not inherently radical or revolutionary, but it serves a purpose in nourishing people through difficult times. To that potential, we must carefully tend. Through time, party organizers have transformed the relative frivolity of the party into an intervention point for community health. These organizers help us imagine resource distribution networks that reach beyond the walls of the non-profit and medical industrial complex. The reach of the Black queer party is necessarily subterranean, flexible and intimate to the bones of the people it serves. This infrastructure’s reach is motile and buds to re-encompass our collective’s nuanced needs. We should be asking for what we need – now as ever before.