You could be sick or feel how you feel
or think that you're this way,
but you can go to this club
and be with the people who understand that
and who love you and care about you,
even if it's your last time.
Club Heaven was a magical place of freedom and liberation.
Being in a place with that size sound system,
operating at its peak.
like literally [you] couldn't look straight
because the low frequency made your retinas wiggle.
Inside of Club Heaven, it was two rooms,
There were — one was the room where you, kind of,
sat in and, you know, talked
and showed off your fashions and was with your cliques.
In the other, bigger room,
that was a dance floor.
Got off the bus stop right there,
like the bus would come to my — where I lived at like 1:30 [am].
So I'd have to, kind of walk around, you know, hiding, 'cuz I was, you know, 19.
Our goal is to use the asset in an outreach aspect
in order to draw attention to places like Heaven
that are lost safe places and spaces in the LGBTQ community.
So we're physically taking the sound system from being a third complete
and turning it into an operational representation of that system as it was in the club during the heydey of the club.
Back then, for that time period, you know it was already criminal enough
to be black and gay, especially, you know, in Detroit. Detroit is a very religious city.
I used to have somewhere to go every night, you know, when I was in my 20s.
Like now, it's just like there's nowhere to go
and it's just kind of like, erasure of community, you know, erasure of spaces helps diminish who we are.
What happened was that when AIDS and HIV started ravaging the community, it divided us.
So we weren't dancing with the straight people like that anymore.
So we needed something for us. So house music was essentially, you know, for the gay community.
People who were sick or positive, or whatever the case was, we all went to the club together.
But you found out — that's how you found out when people weren't there anymore.
You lost all types of people.
He made it to 30 and then, he passed away right after that.
You know, and it's just, you know, I think about him every day.
He was like my partner in crime at Club Heaven.
He moved to Atlanta and he said, well, we gotta go out to Heaven before I leave.
That night, somebody took a picture, let me get you both. As you see, it was freezing 'cuz Detroit winters.
I feel good that me dancing on the speaker, you know, nearly 30 years ago has come to this point where we're discussing
that whole period, and the people, and what took place.
We have primarily the 4 original subwoofers. We have the 2 original Community mid bass horns.
We have the 4 original Altec Lansing horns, with no drivers on them. And then, we have 3 amplifiers.