The ClubHouse’s opening night, Saturday of Mother’s Day weekend, was the end of one journey for DC’s Black LGBTQ community and the beginning of another. Eddy, Aundrea Scott, Scott’s sister Paulette, Morrell Chasten, and Rainey Cheeks opened the club at 1296 Upshur Street NW across from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Petworth in 1975. It was “a place where anyone 16 and over could go and have the house party they couldn’t have in their house,” recalled John Eddy, president and one of the founders of the ClubHouse. Tucked away in a residential neighborhood in Northwest DC, over the next 15 years the ClubHouse became a nationally known after-hours dance club and a seedbed of important developments in the LGBTQ communities. If you can supply any names, please send an email with the subject “ClubHouse” to All photos appear, courtesy, Rainbow History ProjectĪ small group of dedicated Black LGBTQ Washingtonians opened the ClubHouse to serve their community in 1975. People shown in most ClubHouse photos are not identified.
Check out the Rainbow History Project’s short video series about the ClubHouse.Īt the door to the ClubHouse at 1296 Upshur St NW. Olinger looks back at the ClubHouse, a remarkable nightclub founded by Black members of DC’s LGBTQ community that filled multiple social needs from 1975 to 1990. In this Place of Interest, DC History Center volunteer John P.
