Honey Dijon: Meet, Mate, and Create!

Honey Dijon—one of the main acts on the global club scene—has arrived. Arriving is a subject close to her heart, after all the years she had to spend as a DJ in bars and cruising clubs, and commercial queer discos for whites and for Black people.

In the former, all they wanted to hear was Britney Spears and Madonna, and in the latter it was Beyoncé and Rihanna. Honey Dijon often did not feel she was taken seriously and after one booking she usually didn't know when the next one would be. Arriving is a physical thing for her, too.

Honey Dijon calls it her "journey to truth," and she doesn't just mean changing her biological sex (male) to match the gender with which she identifies (female). She explains that she hates the technical term transition.

"Because everyone on this planet is in a permanent state of crazy transition." From young to old, fat to thin, happy to sad, or vice versa. Arriving means finding your place and claiming it. That's the big thing.

When she plays music, Honey Dijon prefers a productive clash of styles and moods to a so-called perfect mix, every time. Slamming on the a cappella track from Ultra Naté's trademark song Free over a Percolator-like Chicago Jack track, without adjusting the tempo first.

"In Chicago we call that flipping the track," explains Honey Dijon, "when you put two tracks together that you'd never think of combining, and it works. I learned that from Ron Hardy, from Farley Jackmaster Funk, from Derrick Carter."

Why are we talking about this? Because Honey Dijon, whose official name is Honey Redmond and who was born around 40 years ago in Chicago, has a story to tell:

About how, when she was 13 in Chicago, she got into a house club on fake ID for the first time and saw queer and trans people and thought: "this is where I belong."

About how her parents, young middle-class African Americans from South Side, Chicago, had no objections because they liked partying at home themselves, with loud music, joints, and cocktails.

And how it was then, it must have been in the mid-80s, that Honey, who would read the London-style magazine i-D from cover to cover, heard about the unconventional ballet dancer Michael Clark, who used to dance to post-punk music by The Fall wearing a kilt.

Honey Dijon also liked wearing a kilt, with the aim of exactly mimicking Michael Clark's ballet choreography in the Black house clubs of Chicago. Didn't people stare!

Honey Dijon keeps repeating her mantra, "Meet, mate, and create," meaning, meet people, team up, and get creative together. In other words, if you only ever hang out on social networks, you won't experience the things that Honey Dijon has experienced.

She arrived on the performance art scene in the East Village in New York in the 1990s and met all kinds of people: the performance artist Leigh Bowery, drag icon Lady Bunny, Andy Butler, who later founded Hercules And Love Affair, and Holly Johnson from Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

"As a teenager, I was completely obsessed with Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and now Holly Johnson is a good friend of mine. Things come full circle. It's a bit weird, but all the people whose work I really love, deeply and spiritually—sooner or later I get to meet them."

"I want to be an artist who puts together fragments of a culture that I haven't created by myself. I want to carry on the conversation, make the voices audible again of people who can no longer tell their stories themselves."

Honey Dijon is among those people who, in the 80s and 90s in the US, saw how nearly two generations of mostly gay men, many of them Black, were wiped out by HIV and AIDS.

Honey Dijon sees it as her role to use her sets and interviews, and simply her physical presence, to keep reminding people that dance culture was originally a place of refuge created by queer Black people for other queer people.

"Lots of people ask me whether the fact that I'm trans influences my work. Of course it does! If I had come into the world as a heterosexual biological woman, I would never have been so drawn to queer clubs. When I was growing up, people used to say, "House music? That's for gay people!"

Honey Dijon embodies history. She is a witness to that time, admittedly not from the front line, but unlike Larry Levan, Ron Hardy, Frankie Knuckles, and many others, she is able to talk about her experiences.

You could say that by working with so many queer, Black, and transgender artists (Nomi Ruiz, Cakes Da Killa, Shaun J. Wright, Alinka) she is reclaiming a dance culture that has become largely white and heteronormative.

However, Honey Dijon doesn't have much time for over-political interpretations of her music. "It's not that deep," she says. Honey Dijon is well-known in the fashion world, not least because, for years, she has mixed the music for shows by the British fashion designer Kim Jones.

When Jones was appointed head of menswear at Louis Vuitton, she also worked for Louis Vuitton. She acknowledges a certain mischievous pleasure in the way that she, with her history, has arrived in this luxury world of high fashion.

When the high-profile collaboration between Louis Vuitton and the New York skateboard label Supreme was presented in Paris, she mixed tracks by DJ Pierre and Chez Damier. "Sound Factory classics," she says.

Here again, there's a political element: for a Black, trans woman to be able to work and be seen in the fashion world—it certainly doesn't go without saying.

"I have often heard the word 'no' in my life. That has taught me not to make my sense of self-esteem dependent on what other people think about me. I call it my I-don’t-give-a-fuck muscle."