A Celebration of Life will be held Sunday for Jewel Thais-Williams, the LGBTQ activist and original owner of LA’s landmark Jewel’s Catch One nightclub who died on July 7 at age 86.

The event takes place from 3 to 8 p.m. at the club, now known as Catch One, at 4067 W. Pico Blvd., two blocks east of Crenshaw Boulevard.

Thais-Williams opened the club in 1973 and owned it until 2015. Under her ownership, Catch One featured performances by the likes of Sammy Davis Jr., Ella Fitzgerald, Madonna, Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, Chaka Khan, Sylvester, Weather Girls, Luther Vandross, Donna Summer, Whoopi Goldberg and Rick James.

Catch One was a community center for Los Angeles’ Black, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. It grew to become known as the “unofficial Studio 54 of the West Coast” and Thais-Williams as a national role model for fighting discrimination and serving the less fortunate.

Thais-Williams co-founded the Minority AIDS Project, which aims to help blacks and Hispanics affected by the disease. She served as a board member of the AIDS Project Los Angeles, which provides HIV/AIDS care and prevention programs and seeks to improve HIV-related public policy, and with her wife Rue, co-founded Rue’s House, described as the first housing facility for women with AIDS. It later became a sober-living facility.

In 2001, Thais-Williams founded the Village Health Foundation to provide preventive health care and education to the black community for AIDS, diabetes, hypertension, high blood pressure and other high-incidence diseases among blacks in an effort to reduce the risk of disease and offer tools for learning to live with an illness.

In 2019, the intersection of Pico Boulevard and Norton Avenue was dedicated as Jewel Thais-Williams Square.

“Everybody deserves to be able to enjoy a night out where they can feel safe and welcomed, but before Jewel Thais-Williams, that was not the reality for Los Angeles’ black LGBTQ+ community,” said then-Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wesson, who authored the motion designating the intersection.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is expected to appear at Sunday’s event at about 5:30 p.m.

In a statement issued after her death, Bass described Thais-Williams as a “matriarch to the community and a Black LGBTQ+ trailblazer in our city. Ms. Thais-Williams led with warmth and compassion in a time when acceptance was not always a popular act. But Ms.Thais-Williams met hate with hospitality, disdain with dance, and suspicion with celebration — a radical act of love found in Jewel’s Catch One Disco on Pico every night and in her work on behalf of so many.

“Catch One has always been more than just a club — it’s a home and a historic center in the community — one that hosted Reverend Jesse Jackson during his historic presidential run,” the mayor continued. “Ms. Thais-Williams also co-founded the Minority AIDS Project and fought against the stigma of a disease disproportionately impacting the African American community in Los Angeles but also throughout the country. She will be missed here in Los Angeles but her legacy, undeniably, will live on forever.”