Honey Dijon

Jeremy: Why are you living in London?
Honey: That question is so layered. I ask myself that a lot. I had to leave Berlin.
Why though?
Berlin was just not… I lived there for six years. Traveling from Berlin is a nightmare — it’s not a hub.
Are you traveling that much?
I go to the airport like most people go to the bathroom. There are no direct flights from Berlin. Sometimes it was a disaster — I’d have to go through Munich or Frankfurt just to get to Ibiza. And I started to feel some hostility building, too.
Because of how they’re voting now?
Yeah, but I felt a little bit of that already two years ago. There was this tension in the air, like, ‘This isn’t aligning with my vibrations. I gotta go!’ Plus, the taxes in Germany are brutal. I came to London because it’s much closer to New York. My music partner’s here, there’s a big music culture in the UK. They were one of the first countries to embrace house music.
It has that history.
It’s been challenging because I haven’t really built a community of people here yet. I travel so much. Everything is so cliquey and insular. I live West. Everyone lives East… It’s challenging.
I can imagine. How do you feel going back to New York?
I love it, but I get sticker shock now. I can’t believe how expensive it’s become. It’s like the Dubai of America. I don’t know how these kids do it.
I told a bunch of my friends that I was interviewing you and asked if they had any questions. Most of the questions were dumb, but my friend Devan Díaz —
— I love Devan.
Well, she wants to know — Why is New York trying to be Berlin now? We have this one little club called Basement.
(rolls eyes) I know, girl.
Listen, Basement — keep letting me in — but what do you think this trend is all about?
New York should just be New York. Berlin should just be Berlin. In my opinion, Berlin only started having a club culture post-Berlin Wall. New York clubbing in the 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s was the Mecca. So it baffles me why New York wants to be Berlin when New York is fucking New York. We don’t need a second-hand Berlin.
(giggles) Watching a bunch of New Yorkers standing in a line outside in all black. It’s so sad.
It’s cosplay for me. The thing I loved about New York is that it’s just so distinctly New York — the sort of social mobility between classes, artistic expressions and music. There was this exchange between Williamsburg and Berlin, this hipster exchange, in the early 2000s, as a result of electroclash. But now because of the internet, everything changed. I also find it interesting because femme trans healthcare is so far behind in Germany.
Is it?
Oh my god. Yes. If you’re trans masc, then it’s great. If you’re trans femme, it’s challenging.
That’s crazy.
When I was living there, I had to go to the practices that mostly dealt with gay men’s health and sexuality, and I had to explain to them what I needed. It was wild. There was one center open in Neukölln, but then they shut that down. So if you talk to the girls now, they’ll all say it’s like how it was back in the 90s with black market hormones. It’s fucking nuts. These girls are all getting hormones from Romanian labs.
Okay, that’s wild.
When I moved to Berlin, I thought, ‘Oh, it’s gonna be so open and liberal and this and this and this.’ And then I found it to be very binary.
Wow. I wanted to ask you about drug use in clubs. As someone who’s in the club every day, what’s happening with drug use?
I believe in drug use enhancing the dancefloor, as opposed to being the sole purpose. I’m not innocent myself. As an artist or deejay, I’ve sort of dabbled and tried everything in order to be able to play to the room. I have a very hedonistic side to myself. But now the drug use doesn’t seem to be celebratory, but more escapism and numbing. Maybe it was always that way. But the drug use now, as opposed to psychedelics, you know, ecstasy, mushrooms or… There were always chems around. Now it’s just a lot of drugs you could die from like GHB and crystal meth. It’s A LOT more hardcore.

Intense.
People aren’t taking drugs in a responsible way, and it’s very much romanticized and glorified and I find THAT really disturbing. People feel the need to disconnect from not only themselves, but also from the spaces that they’re in.
I feel similar. I’ve had a very fun life, and found a liberatory space inside of the club, but I’ve definitely felt, especially as a queer man, post-pandemic, like the amount of drugs… Again, I’m not shaming anyone.
I’m not shaming anyone either. People have the right to choose how they want to live their lives. For me drugs should be more of an enhancement, instead of the actual situation. But there’s a very fine line. What’s one person’s limit is another person’s excess. I just wish people made better choices when it came to their pleasures.
What would be your most ideal pleasure-enhancing moment, like if you could have only one club experience?
Past, present, future…?
All of that.
Oh my god. The golden era is 1969 to 1981. There’s been three markers of social change — Stonewall in ’69, AIDS in ’81 and the smartphone in 2007. In my opinion, those have been the major culture shifters in the last 50 years.
Yeah.
If you think about 1969 and the 70s in general, you had, first of all, Women’s Liberation with the pill, then we go to Stonewall and Gay Lib, then we go to the sexual revolution. And all of this is going on in the background of, like, Watergate. The music that was being made in the 70s was consciousness music. Then it was the birth of hip-hop, the birth of disco, the birth of punk, the beginnings of house music, breakdancing. You know, if you think about it, all these things happened within 10 years. Then on 3 July 1981 when they talked about the first diagnoses of a r are form of cancer.
AIDS.
So when I think about that time I think of the clubs. I wish I could have gone to the Garage. I wish I could have gone to Dance. I wish I could have gone to the Mudd Club. I wish I could have gone to Sound Factory. I wish I could have gone to Bass Line. I wish I could have gone to Tracks. I wish I could have gone to so many places! (laughs) That’s when it was really about place where marginalized people could be free. They could redefine who they were. They could…have sex without repercussions before AIDS. The music was the backdrop to liberation.
Totally.
Clubs and dancefloors are places of unity and celebration, release. And I’ve always said dancefloors bring people together in ways governments and religions can’t.
Community building.
I take this very seriously. House music culture was started by queer people of color, and house music started the same time that the AIDS epidemic began. So clubs were not only places where people went to find love and be who they are, but also get information about this rare disease. No one knew what was going on! People could go to the club to find medical care or not feel shame about having this disease. You know when AIDS first started happening, it was considered a white man’s disease for Black people.
That’s wild. I fetishize the 70s for a lot of reasons. One of the things that’s so refreshing with what you’re talking about is the smartphone as a generational shift. All people do is text now. But also people don’t know the dates. They don’t know the time. They don’t know the markers.
Oh, yes!
I hate to be like, ‘The kids these days…’, it’s literally my people, like, people in my age group don’t know the times.
I feel that it’s so reductive when we say “the kids”…
One of the markers of a generational shift is that we used to uphold our history keepers in our communities.
Our elders.
There are fewer history keepers and there’s this forgetfulness, and there’s this sense that the club is…
…the protest against forgetting. It’s so funny that you talk about timelines, because I think about, like, the law of physics — nothing ever really is old and nothing is ever really new. If we’re talking about something from the past and the present, it’s still here with us. It’s still energy. You know, I’m a researcher.
Oh?
You keep expanding this energy and these conversations. That’s what’s so great — you’re building upon things you know. And none of us are really doing anything new, but instead we are repropositioning things.
That’s one of the things that Beyoncé gets denigrated for, especially her Renaissance album, critiqued by white people especially, is her use of samples.
Well, they don’t understand. (laughs)
The idea that people don’t recognize that sampling is a way for Black people to remember the history, the building blocks of how we got here. We didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree, we exist in a context. I think queer people do that a lot with language too.
Oh my god. You know most of the language and beauty aesthetics today have come from queer culture and trans women.

Mhm.
Like the current beauty standard for a lot of women, the BBLs, the nails, the lace fronts, this exaggerated femininity has really come from trans sex workers. And trans sex workers used to have these exaggerated bodies for clients — who had the bigger ass, who had the bigger this, who had the longer that. I call it “toxic femininity”.
Yes!
I think what a lot of people are missing with the visibility of trans folk, is that they’re really breaking down these identities that are basically formed from the patriarchy, totalitarianism, imperialism, colonialism, and they’re turning it on its head.
Yeah.
This was coming from Black women, trans people, and queer people, specifically queer people of color. But circling back to Renaissance — I didn’t find it so much as sampling. I found it more celebratory.
Exactly!
It was really interesting that a Black female artist — not that we needed it, because I think a lot of times queer art is invalidated unless it’s presented through the heterosexual gaze — but I think for someone like Beyoncé, you know, giving light and saying Black queer culture is a big part of Black music culture, and I think she was presenting to the world and specifically to her audience, and celebrating that because she’s a very smart woman, and she knows how many queer people support and love her for who she is. You know, the diva.
We love the diva.
Queer people LOVE the diva. The strong female power, which is so funny because there’s so much misogyny in queer culture, but then they celebrate the divas.
Well, that’s a whole other podcast.
(giggles)
But it wasn’t just queer music culture she was celebrating, but also a lot of different Black art forms. And now it’s the country thing, and I’m not sure what the next will be, but I think it’s just more about celebrating the rich history, which queer Black people have been a part of since the Harlem Renaissance and before.
Yeah.
I mean, shit, the Harlem Renaissance was all queer.
Would you ever move back to America? Or are you done?
Nothing is ever done until death.
There are so many Black people who leave and find their way to Berlin or Paris or London, and I keep flirting with the idea of doing it too. Then I also feel like I should stay and fight to make home better.
That’s such a layered question. Because I live in countries that have a notorious history of colonization…
I’m not the first person to say this, but being a Black expat in these places, there’s a different level of safety, community and upward mobility than in America.
For sure. I think there’s many more ways to be a Black artist in Europe than there is in America. Especially for what I do. I don’t make hip-hop. I’m not a singer. I don’t do R&B. I’m a house music artist and a lot of people don’t even understand what that is.
Yeah.
They confuse house with techno. Like, google techno. Kick drum is a kick drum is a kick drum. I feel that there’s a lot more freedom to express your Blackness in Europe than there is in America. You still get very pigeonholed. I don’t know if you feel that.

I definitely feel that.
But yeah, if and when I move back, it depends on what happens in November.
Have you seen the meme about the illegal trans aliens in jails that Kamala is trying to give sex operations to?
Really. Where’s John Waters when you need him?
It’s really crazy how many people really hate women.
Including women.
As a writer who wrote a play that was very, like, sexual, Black, queer and whatever…
I’m so happy you wrote ‘Slave Play’. It’s good to touch on the topic of porn.
Mhm.
You know, nothing has ever been made for trans people. It’s always from someone else’s gaze and someone else’s posture. I talk to my sisters all the time. It’s like no one ever bothers to ask trans women what their sexual health is, how they find pleasure with their bodies, if they’ve had bottom surgery or not. We only sort of talk about our sexuality in relation to heteronormative stuff, or for the male gaze.
Yeah.
But I don’t even know any trans people of color making erotic art. For us and by us. That, to me, is the next frontier. So I love that through your work, you’re talking about Black morality, because not only is our sexuality a topic of conversation when it’s in relation to others, instead of existing on its own. And the complexities of it all. I love this quote from Laverne Cox that says, like, we’re all a little bit racist and we’re all a little bit sexist because of the white patriarchal systems that we grew up in.
Mhm.
So I look less at behavior and more at the systems that we have grown up in. It’s about dismantling these systems and understanding those systems.
As a Black trans woman leaving Chicago and then traveling the world, how did that affect your sexuality?
I’ve had a very complex relationship with sex. One of the things about trans women is that you’re reduced to your genitals a lot of the time. Instead of the full human being that you are. It’s hard navigating. I’ll give you the best example — dating, having sex as a trans woman. It’s always: ‘Oh, you have a penis? No thanks.’ ‘Oh, you have a pussy? No thanks.’ But things are opening up now. I’m starting to see a lot of butch queens and trans women having relationships with other trans women. I mean, it seems like there’s this renaissance of sexual expressions with this new generation.
But has it opened up?
It’s having more options.
Oh, I see.
Perhaps. But I still deal with the same stuff. How do you have a healthy sexual relationship with yourself and with others when there’s so much shame attached? And then people that are trans-attracted aren’t always out about it.
Mhm.
There’s so little information about trans women and sexuality. How do you navigate a relationship with someone that objectifies you — what my therapist calls “parts people” — just because of these different body parts. But then you think about how everyone objectifies and fetishizes everyone. It’s a universal thing. But then it starts to become these micro-levels of shame.
Totally.
But I always live my life from an artist’s point of view, because before I had all the other identity politics attached to me. When you ask: ‘How do I navigate the world as a trans woman?’ Well, girl, I have to navigate the world as a Black person first!

You were hitting on the T4T relationship thing. I feel like a lot of my friends are now engaging in that.
Mhm, yeah. Sexuality is complex. And I have a broad range of girlfriends, from Arca to TS Madison to Hari Nef to Laverne Cox. And even though we have some similarities in common, all of our sexual expressions are so uniquely different. We’re not the same at all.
But have you ever had a T4T moment?
A kai kai moment? I’ve been approached, yes.
Do you identify as heterosexual?
First of all, I identify as Honey.
Okay, love that.
I always say sexual orientation and sexual practice are two different things. You can’t just run one way. If a straight person can have sex with a trans person, then, why can’t a trans person have sex with a gay person? People are fucking. I have my things that give me pleasure, but if I have to go into the alphabet…
Go into the alphabet!
I would probably say I’m a queer, trans woman of color who is kind of heteroflexible.
Love that. Let’s talk about the gram. What does your explore page look like right now?
Dick prints, haircuts and chia seed pudding recipes.
(cover of Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn plays overhead)
Wait, how do you sit in this restaurant and listen to this music?
We’re talking, I’m not listening.
When I was in Poland, this is how the music was…
Easy listening covers?
Yeah, but covers of bad American songs. Like why did you cover this? It’s not even worth the cover.
Child, a lot of things aren’t worth the price of admission.
(laughs) Wait, as the diva are there any places that still make you pay a cover or wait in line?
I don’t use the Honey Dijon card until I have to. It depends on where it is, but I’m a bitch that calls ahead.
Exactly.
I don’t show up without reservations. Is there any place I’d wait in line for? No.
No?
Not out of arrogance or ego. I’d rather use my time doing something else. I got shit to do. Fun though. No one has ever asked me that question — is there somewhere around the world that I would wait in line for? No.
One of my favorite quotes of Hari Nef is, ‘Sometimes, girl, you just gotta be regular degular.’ Do you ascribe to that? Or do you prefer the VIP?
My definition of quiet luxury is no stress. (laughs) I’m regular degular, sure. I still clean my toilet and do my own laundry and go to the grocery store and cook for myself. But when I’m out, no, girl, it has to be easy, peasy, breezy.
Yeah.
It’s because of my life. The constant travel. I’m in front of thousands of people every weekend. So I like to go stealth when I’m out. Get me in the back door, through the side hatch, whatever you got to give me.
I like that. What’s your ideal date?
Sex date or romantic date?

Both.
But what kind of date? Like a shopping date? Okay, if it’s a romantic date, then a nice dinner and jazz.
What jazz club?
There’s a really nice one in Soho called Ronnie Scott’s. It’s really lovely. So going to dinner, maybe see some art. I’m a bit of a sapiosexual, so for me, conversation is the turn on. That’s lubricant for me — what you say and how you say it turns me on.
That’s why sex dates don’t work for me, because I need to really talk.
For sex dates, my ideal would be to have a regular lover.
Mhm.
And then taking mushrooms, and let’s get to it. I love having sexual connections on psychedelics.
That’s fun.
I need incense and satin sheets, and I need my playlist going. I can’t have sex without my music. I gotta feel it.
Yeah, yeah.
Sex is not just the genitals, it’s the environment, it’s the music, it’s the scent. Everything. That’s my idea of sex.
What are your top five countries for sex?
Spain, Brazil, Italy, Turkey and the US.
And what about the UK?
It’s not on the list.