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. 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.