HONEY DIJON
The rise of fashion and music’s most celebrated DJ.
There’s been an important cultural intersection between music and fashion for decades, but right now, no one is navigating it in a more interesting way than Honey Dijon. Or, to reference the title of her chic new collection of T-shirts, travel bags and accessories created with Comme Des Garçons, Honey Fucking Dijon. “Isn’t it amazing?” she says of her collaboration with the avant-garde fashion brand. “I haven’t had a moment to sit back and think about how crazy it is.” Honey says she can’t imagine this kind of collaboration happening with any other fashion house. “They’re all about authenticity and working with artists that are really true to who they are,” she explains. “The reason they got in bed with me is because of the culture that I come from – being a trans person and a queer person who’s made music and art and fashion such a major part of my life.”
Honey’s day job – well, night job, really – is “creating an environment in which people can lose themselves” as one of the world’s most sought-after DJs. Her impressive roll-call of recent gigs includes Manchester’s huge queer party Homobloc, glamorous Ibiza disco Glitterbox and Frankfurt’s awesomely named LGBTQ night Fries Before Guys. When I call her, she’s in an airport lounge waiting to jump on the first of two flights that will eventually take her to Brazil, where she’s due to DJ at Warung Beach Club, a super-hip house music venue. She won’t be in South America for long: the following week brings gigs in Barcelona, Madrid and of course London, where she’s gracing GAY TIMES Honours with her presence and accepting a much-deserved Outstanding Impact Honour at the ceremony. At this point, her passport must have more stamps than the Post Office.
Honey speaks articulately, with care and precision, but this doesn’t mean she’s unwilling to put forward an opinion. Though she keeps an apartment in New York, where she moved from her hometown of Chicago in the late 90s, she says Berlin feels more like home now. “New York has been so gentrified that the culture’s been sucked out of it,” she says mournfully. “It’s just a place to consume and shop and eat at fancy restaurants and things like that. With the current climate in America, I really don’t feel like it’s my home.” Berlin reminds her of late-90s New York, she says, because it’s still cheap enough for creative people to live centrally and “make all this great art and culture”. Honey says she’s been a selector – or DJ – since she was a kid. When her parents would throw basement parties, she’d be allowed to pick some of the records they’d play, at least until it was her bedtime. As she got older, she “constantly surrounded herself with music”, and considers herself “very lucky” to have grown up “during the second wave of house music culture in Chicago”. When she moved to New York, she found the club scene less musically fluid, which compelled her to start DJing “out of necessity”.
“I wanted to hear music in New York the way I had heard it in Chicago,” she recalls. “In New York, music was still segregated, whereas in Chicago it wasn’t. Because when a subculture [like house] starts, it’s a fusion of so many things.
Early house music had pop influences, electro influences, new wave, no wave, disco, industrial, punk. All of that was being played in Chicago in clubs for black kids.” When Honey arrived in New York, she realised she’d have to hop from club to club to hear such a rich mix of sounds, so she started delivering her own, musically integrated DJ sets.
“I started at a small bar – I didn’t know how to mix two records together and I got paid $50,” she says with a self-deprecating laugh. “But people started telling me I had a really great ear for music, and I started getting booked more and more, so I thought, ‘Maybe I should learn how to actually DJ?’” Honey was a super-enthusiastic student, and as she became more technically skilled behind the decks, her career soon “mushroomed”. “I got my shit together and learned how to be a proper DJ listening to Derrick Carter mixtapes and going to clubs and asking to watch the DJ in the booth,” she recalls. “Fortunately, I knew Danny Tenaglia, and he was the master of the craft, so I got a really great education.”
Honey’s been a “working artist”, as she likes to call herself, ever since. But it’s only been in the last few years that she’s become the Honey Dijon – the Honey Fucking Dijon – who’s a globe-trotting superstar with her own fashion line. What changed? “There’s not one thing. I just stuck around long enough for culture to turn,” she says modestly. At the same time, she’s clearly not lacking in self-belief. “Everything I’ve manifested creatively has come from being a fan and loving it so much that I’ve willed myself into these rooms with these people,” she says. “I just always knew somewhere in the back of my head that I was going to meet these people. I was like, ‘why haven’t I met them yet?’”
One of “these people” is Madonna; Honey’s just remixed I Don’t Search I Find, the house banger from her Madame X album. When Honey went to watch Madonna perform in Chicago recently, she got to join the singer’s pregig prayer circle. “I wasn’t expecting to be videoed [for Madonna’s Instagram],” Honey recalls, laughing. “I just had on a T-shirt and jeans and ponytail; if I’d known I was going to be videotaped I certainly would have put more effort into how I looked. I thought I was going to be sitting in the dark all night!
Honey says she’s “always been a fan” of Madonna, but “when you start getting into certain rooms, you start to bump elbows, you know?” A mutual friend mentioned Honey’s name when Madonna was recording Madame X, which led to an invitation to remix Medellín, its Latin-flavoured lead single. Rather bravely, Honey politely declined the Queen of Pop’s original offer. “I know a lot of people would have jumped at the chance to remix that song, but the song that I connected with emotionally, that I felt I could really do justice to, was I Don’t Search I Find,” she says.
It wasn’t just the song’s lyrics that Honey responded to, but its sound. “It reminded me of an early New York house record. I was like, ‘Oh my God, this shit is me‘,” she explains. “My favourite moment in New York is the early 80s, that post-disco period, when music and art and fashion all collided and you had
artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring and Andy Warhol. Madonna was a part of that.” Remixing the pop icon’s song was an “honour”, Honey says, “because I felt like I got so close to the source of everything that inspires me and has given me so much joy in my life”. Honey says she’s also inspired by the LGBTQ activism of the 80s, when the grassroots political organisation ACT UP was formed to fight the AIDS epidemic at a time when the US government was turning a blind eye. For Honey, the highlight of Manchester’s Homobloc festival was “being asked to read a speech about the persecution of gay people in Poland”. She adds passionately: “I think it’s really important to bring a bit more activism into these spaces. We need to stop waiting for someone else to green light or give permission or validate our fights. It’s time for the community to start taking matters into our own hands again.”
Does she consider herself an activist? “Not personally,” she replies. “I feel that’s a bit... being put on a pedestal, a bit of a role model [thing]”. Still, Honey says that for her, “the personal is political”; she acknowledges that “we’re all activists in some form or another – just by living our truths and being present and confrontational to other people who may not understand us, I think that’s a form of activism”.
I suest that the way Honey lives her truth – as a black trans woman who’s become an incredibly successful DJ – is inherently political. “Exactly,” she says. “The fact that I’ve been able to manifest all of these really highly creative opportunities for myself is political in itself. I mean, five years ago that wouldn’t have been possible – two years ago, it wouldn’t have been possible.” Honey says she thinks “the only way I can really help the world is by being visible and doing things that I think will inspire or help other people”.
A couple of years ago, the singer-songwriter Shamir Bailey, who identifies as queer and non-binary, lamented the fact that certain sections of the mainstream media only wanted to talk about his gender identity; in the process, his music and other aspects of his life got overlooked. I ask Honey if she’s ever experienced this kind of reductive press treatment. “I think there are so many more important things about me as a human being than what my gender expression or identity is,” she says. “I think my music is more important, and I think the way I choose to navigate the world is much more interesting. The fact I can go and do a Dior [show], and then do something like a [leading British house label] Defective party or an all-queer party, that’s much more interesting than the fact I’m trans. I hate the word ‘transition’; I like the idea of people evolving into their truth”.
Honey says that because she uses her “creative artistry” for change, rather than her identity, “I don’t feel like [being trans] is something that I constantly need to ram down people’s throats”. At the same time, she recognises that it’s important for her to talk about it. “I would be remiss,” she adds, “to say that my identity isn’t something that could be inspiring for other people who are trying to find their voice and their truth”. Her overall hope, I glean, is to be perceived as the multi-talented, fully evolved being that she clearly is. “I do hope that it’s not just one specific part of me that inspires people,” she says. “I hope it’s the sum of the parts.”
Besides, Honey says, being trans is only one layer of her identity. “Before we talk about gender, we need to talk about race,” she explains. “I exist as a person of colour in the world; I exist as a black woman in the world. And I exist at the intersection of gender identity and sexual orientation. So for me, there are so many different things that I engage with as soon as I step out of my door and into the world.”
Honey is equally candid when I ask about the way Instagram has affected club culture. “I wouldn’t have the career I have now without it – but like anything in life, it’s a conflict,” she says. Though she’d prefer not to DJ for clubbers filming everything on their smartphones instead of losing themselves in the music, she concedes that “it’s how the current generation socialises and parties, so what are you gonna do?” Still, she’s come up with a clever alternative by creating Blackout, a party concept where the DJ performs in complete darkness so that clubbers have to focus on the music. “I want people to dance and have fun and try to get laid,” she says. “That’s what being in a club is all about for me.”
Whatever kind of space she’s DJing in, Honey says she plays records with “emotion, energy, aesthetics and fun”. She’s always looking for “specific sounds and moods” that might take people on a journey. She thinks contemporary club music is actually “more conservative” than the house records she grew up with and the great disco records she loves. “People were singing about sex and partying and style and one-night stands and love and the loss of love,” she says. “Now we have too many songs where it’s like ‘We’re going to the club, see you at the club, we’re at the club’. No one’s talking about life,” she says with a laugh. “They’re just talking about the club!”
With our time almost up as her flight is called for boarding I ask what she wants people to think when they hear the name Honey Dijon. “Freedom,” she says, before pausing. “Because if I can do it,” she continues, “you can go ahead and do it too”.
“I EXIST AS A PERSON OF COLOUR IN THE WORLD I EXIST AS A BLACK WOMAN IN THE WORLD. AND I EXIST AT THE INTERSECTION OF GENDER IDENTITY AND SEXUAL ORIENTATION. SO FOR ME, THERE ARE SO MANY DIFFERENT THINGS THAT I ENGAGE WITH AS SOON AS I STEP OUT OF MY DOOR AND INTO THE WORLD. ”