By Emma Cieslik
Bishop Kwabena Albert Rainier Cheeks built the ClubHouse, one of the only Black, LGBTQ+-welcoming clubs in Washington, DC, with his own two hands. At the time, the Washington, DC native wasn’t neither a bishop nor a reverend but a construction worker. What he created was not only a queer sacred space for community but also mutual aid during the HIV/AIDS pandemic. His model of community care became a central part of his work with Inner Light Ministries and Us Helping Us, a holistic organization for African Americans living with HIV/AIDS.
Spaces like the ClubHouse–Black, LGBTQ+ clubs–were few and far between in the 1960s and 1970s. Cheeks originally met the club’s founders when his partner convinced him to take a night off of training from Tae Kwon Do and visit The Third World, a little bar and disco at 221 Riggs Rd NE.
As he recalled in a 1998 oral history interview with Rainbow History Project, it was an important space because of racism within the DC LGBTQ+ community.
“That was about the only Black club that people would go to because they got hassled getting into the white clubs. You needed two or three ID’s and all of this stuff.”
It was at the Third World that Cheeks met André Scott, one of the club’s owners who mentioned that he and some friends were planning to open a new club. Scott invited Cheeks to join.
In order to keep people safe, Cheeks and the owners created a membership list including their friends and community members, sending out membership cards before the club officially opened on Mother’s Day 1975.
“It was our way of sort of quietly screening people, but having the right not to. A way of keeping trouble makers out. Here we are opening up a Black gay club in the community, never been done before. It wasn’t downtown,” Cheeks said in 1998. “It was in a residential area.”
Partially because they couldn’t get a liquor license and to meet the community’s needs, the ClubHouse was completely alcohol and drug free, and was open from midnight until 8 am in the morning, welcoming in about 800 to 1,000 people every Saturday night. At the end of the night, the DJs would start to play gospel music and people would be on the floor praising. When neighbors came across the street and asked why the music was still playing so late in the morning, Cheeks would open the door and say, “they are doing nothing but praising God.” As Cheeks proudly asked them, “you want to call the police for us playing gospel music?”
In his oral history interview, Cheeks said that Black Pride in Washington started from the ClubHouse — then known as the Children’s Hour, a fantasy party featuring entertainment and catered food. The ClubHouse also served as the center for mutual aid and community care campaigns during the HIV/AIDS crisis, paying rent, utilities, medical care, and funeral costs of community members with HIV/AIDS.
“The journey through the ClubHouse was a very spiritual journey which most of us that worked there especially looked at it that way,” Cheeks said in the 1998 interview.
By 1985, the need became so great that Cheeks, along with Aundrea Scott, Dr. Prem Deben, and others founded Us Helping Us, a holistic health organization dedicated to supporting members of their community with HIV/AIDS. Us Helping Us was built, Cheeks said, knowing that the Black LGBTQ+ community is especially vulnerable to HIV/AIDS because of fewer resources, racism, and homophobia. “We talk about sexism and homophobia,” Cheeks said in a separate oral history interview in the early 2000s, but the truth is in our community we have so many isms that we still work with.”
Largely because of lives lost to HIV/AIDS, the ClubHouse shuttered its doors in 1990. It had operated largely with the same staff for those 15 years but many died because of HIV/AIDS, including Scott. After the ClubHouse closed, Cheeks moved Us Helping Us into his own home. The organization would later move into its first independent home at 819 L St. SE in 1993, the same year that Unity Fellowship Church founder Rev. Carl Bean called Cheeks to ministry. It started with a phone call from Bishop Bean who asked him to open a church in Washington, DC. Cheeks was initially hesitant.
“No, I don’t do that,” Cheeks said. “Street outreach, that’s me. Meditation prayer, that’s me. An Activist, that’s me. Pastoring a church is not in my plans.”
But Bean was insistent, and on July 3rd, 1993, Cheeks established his own church–Inner Light Unity Church, where he welcomed the same community he had over 15 years earlier through the ClubHouse doors.
He built his church on the idea of radical inclusiveness that has existed throughout his whole life.
As he shared in the same early 2000s interview, “I see God in you. Cause I tell people,” Cheeks said, “if you learn to see God in other people regardless of who they are, you can’t hurt ‘em. You can’t attack ‘em. You can’t gossip on ‘em. Whether they see mine, me loving you has nothing to do with you loving me. My job is to love you anyway.” Sometimes Cheeks acknowledged, that means loving people from a distance and sometimes that means sitting with people as they die–Cheeks has ministered to the sick and dying ever since his ClubHouse days.
As Cheeks shared in an oral history interview in the early 2000s, “I always tell people, if you don’t have a God that’s big enough to make somebody Gay or Lesbian, Bisexual or Transgender, let me introduce you to my God. My God is able to do all of that.” Cheeks’ church practiced radical acceptance from the very beginning, built on fighting the sexism, homophobia, and racism that continued to affect his community. In fact, Cheeks is one of many Black queer activists who have paved the way for inclusion within their own spiritual communities, as faith remains a key part of many Black LGBTQ+ people’s lives despite homophobia within Black churches and racism within the wider LGBTQ+ community and many queer faith spaces.
As R.G. Cravens shared in his book Yes Gawd! How Faith Shapes LGBT Identity and Politics in the United States published January 2024, there are notable differences between the experiences of religious queer people of color and white queer people of faith. Queer people of color, Cravens observed through a 2021-2022 survey of 1,100 religious LGBTQ+ people, were more likely to look to political groups for support about their gender identity or sexual orientation as opposed to religious or secular social groups.
Queer people of color, Cravens also found, were most likely to say the LGBTQ+ community was hostile to religion and to separate themselves from queer spaces due to religious discrimination. Similarly, a 2017 study found that many young Black men chose not to leave non-affirming religious communities because of its cultural relevance within their communities, as spaces of political activism and support. Conversations about homophobia and transphobia within the Black church were reinvigorated during the 2020 presidential campaign, and in the years since, historically Black churches are reckoning what it means to be intentionally open and affirming.
This discussion came to the National Mall in 2023, when Ashon T. Crawley, Ph.D. created and opened HOMEGOING, one of six installations titled Beyond Granite: Pulling Together, commemorating the lives of Black queer church musicians who died due to AIDS-related complications. In a conversation with Kenyon Farrow from TheBody, Crawley explained that the HIV/AIDS crisis highlighted the failing of some concepts of God, including the idea of sickness being sinfullness.
“I’m still trying to figure out how to think about how cancer becomes the language that people use to not talk about AIDS,” Crawley said. “Cancer becomes a catch-all because there is such a shame around the meaning of AIDS―because it means queerness. And I’m trying to reckon with the fact that I think that there is a deep fear of thinking about God. And the idea of the Black church, for so many people, is predicated upon the ideas of liberation, and that God is on our side. And if that’s true, then why are all these people dying?”
As a result, so many Black queer people never received homegoing ceremonies–a key part of Black communities–and as Crawley believes they still linger in their communities. “By confronting this history,” Crawley said, “I hope people remember folks who they lose in their own life and figure out ways to honor them.”
Cheeks’ church intentionally strives to include radically welcoming religion and diverse religious traditions-from the African traditions of Akan and Ga, African American rituals, meditation, yoga, to Black Christianity — in political and social activism, understanding that faith remains or sometimes becomes an important part of many Black queer peoples’ lives. Cheeks refuses to give up the identity of a Black gay affirming church for community members who are seeking out spaces created by and for their communities, just like The ClubHouse in the 1970s and 1980s,when the Black LGBTQ+ community came together to support the many members dying from HIV/AIDS.
Today, Cheeks serves as Senior Pastor of Inner Light Ministries in Washington, DC, and continues his activism during a time of intense persecution of the LGBTQ+ community. When religion–particularly white Christian nationalism remains a key force against LGBTQ+ rights, gender affirming care, and queer representation, Cheeks stands defiantly as an Black, openly gay faith leader opening the door to everyone in need.
Emma Cieslik is a volunteer at Rainbow History Project. For her instagram posts on Cheeks, click here.