Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania–based DJ collective Honcho, a “dance music rager for homos and friends” (Qburgh n.d.), represents an exciting new wave of the American queer dance music underground. An event series, a DJ collective, as well as a legendary queer summer music festival—Honcho Campout—held in Pennsylvania at the border of West Virginia and Maryland since 2015, Honcho is part of a network of US American queer dance music collectives that are bringing sex positivity back to gay dance music. As the music critic Andrew Ryce noted in an essay for Resident Advisor in 2016, this new gay underground merges the best in electronic dance music with the sex positivity of the disco era. “These are parties built on the principles that defined the halcyon days of the gay party scene […] parties where you can hear the best in techno, house and disco, old and new, from DJs who know what they’re doing.” You can also have sex if you want (Ryce 2016).

Honcho got its start in 2012 as a warehouse party during Pittsburgh Pride that year as a counterprogram to the more run-of-the-mill “Hi, Gay!” corporate-sponsored Pride events that are usually on offer. But because this first soiree was an illegal warehouse party, plus the enormous amount of buzz they generated—“we were expecting 800, 900 people at this first warehouse party back in 2012,” Aaron Clark remembers—one of the competing gay bars down the block called the cops on them. “The cops came and shut it down before it started.”

The function was then quickly moved to a nearby gay bathhouse as a backup, and the party popped off even more than they imagined. The rest, as they say, is history. Over the past 14 years, Honcho has built a reputation for creating inclusive, diverse spaces, with an ear for bringing the best in underground dance music to queer audiences.

Beyond flashing lights, bursts of fog, and the faint smell of poppers, Honcho shows that queer nightlife is also queer history. It is the history of how queer people find each other, and it is the history of lost or forgotten venues, frozen records and archives, highlighting how communities who are already on the cusp of so much violence find ways to gather anyway.

In this conversation, Honcho (George d’Adhemar, Aaron Clark, Michael Moraine, and Clark Price) touch on their first queer nightlife experiences and queer coming of age in Pittsburgh, Columbus, Ohio, and Washington, DC, in the long 1990s and early 2000s, how PrEP changed queer nightlife, the precarity of queer nightlife as a site of cultural labor, the dramatic shift in how queer people connect today, as well as the importance of collaboration, friendship, and hanging out to creative practice. The central lesson here is that the most important aspect of queer nightlife, what keeps people coming back for more, might not be the spectacle of flashing lights and dancing bodies, but the many kinds of long lasting, queer intimacies that can unfold on, through, and beyond the dancefloor.

We met on Zoom.

MADISON MOORE: When I first started teaching an undergraduate seminar on queer nightlife in the Fall of 2018, I would have the class write brief manifestos about what they wanted or needed from queer nightlife. Many were away from home for the first time, some had never been to a gay club or bar space before, and others were very active in the local queer nightlife community as organizers, DJs, drag queens, and nightlife workers. The class almost always had critiques of these spaces and ideas about how they could be better. What would be in your manifesto?

AARON CLARK: There’s so many things. I think it’s the curiosity and the anticipation of what crazy, exciting things can happen in a space that don’t necessarily happen outside of that space. Where everyone is a little more open and vulnerable in the right environment and it creates connections you would not have otherwise. What interesting person are you going to meet tonight? What absurd characters are going to appear? And, you know, just kind of the spectacle of it all. You’re always in for a show on a good night. You’re also part of it, ideally contributing your own full self to it all.

MICHAEL MORAINE: One of the things I’m always looking for is to see what new friendships, collaborations, and partnerships can grow out of these moments where we’re hanging out and thinking together. This is how Honcho Campout has evolved over the years. I love to think back about how many things have come out of those moments and how many things are now a part of the festival that weren’t there before because of those moments and people. A few years ago, Nicholas approached me at the end of Campout and advocated on behalf of deaf campers and offered to help us bring ASL to Campout. Together we did that.

CLARK: Even at after-parties, too. I feel like everyone sits around for hours and just creates ideas.

MOORE: What you’re saying, it seems, is that queer nightlife is not only a space of entertainment and pleasure but a place where new ideas are generated collaboratively, together, by hanging out. The sociologist Elizabeth Currid-Halkett called this “The Warhol Economy” [2008] which is the idea that in the creative worlds of art, music, fashion, and nightlife, friendship and being at the party is how new collaborations and ideas emerge. Hanging out, too, becomes a form of labor.

CLARK PRICE: Yeah, 100%. I’ve thought about this a lot over the years. For as long as I’ve been going out, the way I navigate and plan my night has changed a lot. When I first started getting into this type of music in the early 2000s, there would be specific people that would be like, “Oh, so-and-so is playing and I want to go see them.” It’s not that I don’t have specific people I want to see, but I trust that wherever my friends are, the energy will be good. I know the crowd is going to be good. I navigate more towards things that are created by people I know and trust, as opposed to going to see someone like DJ Ricardo Villalobos specifically. The events my friends are throwing—the music there is going to be good. So I’m much more interested in sharing space with the community and people I know, and even if I don’t know them, I know they’re going to bring a certain level of intentionality and a certain level of music knowledge and excitement.

MOORE: You’re describing a kind of nightlife rooted in community versus a nightlife rooted in spectacle and the extractive nature of venture capital.

PRICE: Yeah, because there’s all these amazing DJs I’d love to see, but I’m like, well, I know the music will be good, but I’m going to be in a crowd of people I don’t want to be hanging out with, that I don’t want to be dancing next to. As good as the music is, if the crowd is throwing you off, the experience is vastly different.

MORAINE: I mean, I need to be in a crowd of queers at this point to be going out of the house.

If I’m going to go to a club, I’ve got to be with the queers. There’s not a bone of patience for anything but that. I’m happy to have straight allies, and we have a lot of those and I love them, but I’m not going to go hear Kim Ann Foxman play to a crowd of straight people. I’ve done that and that’s hell, so that is definitely on my manifesto. The faggots need to be there!

GEORGE D’ADHEMAR: For me, it’s about really having a moment to connect with the music to really have that chance to lose yourself. That is ultimately the most healing part of the whole experience. And I need that—it’s reenergizing. You know, I value the community aspect of it. And it kind of goes hand in hand, because in a welcoming environment you are able to experience the music in a way that is full, and that’s super important.

When I think about when I was a student, when I was first coming out and going out in the early ’90s, there were a lot of disconnects. The process of going out involved a lot of butterflies in your stomach. But that experience was something we all kind of went through. When I was going out, the music I liked and being queer really didn’t necessarily overlap in a significant way.

MOORE: What do you mean by that? Can you describe the disconnect between the music you liked and what it meant to you to be queer/go to gay bars?

D’ADHEMAR: I think we’ve gotten to a place where we all are trying to bring those two together in a really meaningful way. And, I mean, it’s been a challenge. I’m 50 now, and in the mid-“90s when I was going out in my early 20s, I would either go to a straight event to see a DJ I liked, or I would go to the gay night in DC, which was at Velvet Nation, and 9 times out of 10, the music was not. It just was not. I couldn’t. There was no vibe I could get into. I am very grateful we have this community now. It’s a special experience, but one that is born out of us wanting to see something different.

MORAINE: There really is this queer underground in the US that is now also connected internationally, where you go and meet this person and then you go from this event to that event and then you see each other in another city. This is a very unique thing. Think about all the years we would go down and play SHEaster in Atlanta and all those relationships that were forged. This has been repeated in so many cities around the US and abroad. I think that’s part of the strength of this kind of network that we are all a part of, and I think that’s what’s really unique about the moment right now.

CLARK: It’s almost like that network has shown us how to re-find community. Because if you go back to these legendary queer clubs, those were communities that sound on paper exactly like what we’re doing. But they found themselves locally without the help of the internet.

MORAINE: I mean, people used to find out about gatherings through word of mouth, mailing lists, or ads in fag rags and gay porn magazines. There was all that lag in between learning about something and then having enough guts to go on a whim and check it out without really knowing what you were getting yourself into. Then there were the personal ads in the back where you would mail in your ad with a check, wait for it to be published, and then wait for someone to reply or you’d respond to someone else’s profile. The amount of time it took to do all of those things had an impact. Today, for better and worse, everything is at hyperspeed.

MOORE: I’m living for this juicy queer history and the ways you are thinking about how we connect now. To go back to an earlier point George was making, I’m curious about what music you would have wanted to hear in these spaces instead of what was playing?

PRICE: Pop music is safe and familiar to a lot of people, and especially with bars, most of them don’t care about creating a specific musical experience. It’s really about getting people in there and selling them alcohol. But I think it’s okay to have these separations too. I remember having this conversation with my friend Jake a long time ago. He was asking why there wasn’t more pop music at Honcho. He was saying something about how he wants to be able to sing along and hear stuff he knows. And that’s when a light bulb went off in my head. I think we’re looking for two different things. He wants to hear things he knows and has heard. And a lot of the time, I want to hear stuff I’ve never heard before. I want to have my mind blown like, Oh, what is this track? You know what I mean? That’s kind of the experience that I want. And then there’s more of the experience Jake wants. And I think both of those are fine.

D’ADHEMAR: What we’re doing is definitely the alternative. Back in the ’90s, I gravitated towards the alternative rock scene before I got into dance music. There was a moment when it had this crossover with like The Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy.

I’m happy with it being an alternative scene. It’s more comfortable in that way. And I know that. I think the caveat here is that you could say in Europe some of this stuff does become a little more mainstream, whether or not you’re just talking about like, Berghain—the name Berghain not necessarily the experience of getting in there because that is a whole different process. It’s just a little different because Europe has a different market and the dance music scene has become a little more commercialized—or a lot more. And in that, there’s probably room for other things to manifest. But for us in the States, I think this community-driven network of folks who are looking for a shared experience and the things that make you shake, the things you didn’t know existed and you’re lost in it That’s the stuff I live for.

MOORE: What were some of your first gay club experiences?

PRICE: I was a very late bloomer. I grew up north of Pittsburgh, and I didn’t have many gay friends when I was in grade school. I knew a handful of gay people and we were friends, but we weren’t tight. I didn’t come out until my early 20s. When people tell me they went to raves when they were in middle school and high school, and when people tell me that they had boyfriends in high school, that was like on the complete opposite end of the spectrum for me personally. Nobody knew I was gay. But I think the first gay club I went to was Pegasus. I think I was 19, and it was a weird experience because I didn’t even know how to act. It wasn’t a bad experience, but it wasn’t this pivotal, light bulb moment.

CLARK: Pegasus was mine, too. I went when I was 18 when I first moved to Pittsburgh, probably 2002. And it was pretty intense. I knew I was gay and I was kind of out in Ohio earlier than that, but I never made the jump to the club. I was going to raves in Columbus, which probably I might have been in the same room as Michael at some point. But these were raves at the tail end of the ’90s “rave era,” where everyone was kind of blended. But yeah, Pegasus. There was this Wednesday or Thursday night that was 18 and up, which is really hard to do in Pennsylvania, or was back then. They would gate off the bar from anyone underage, so there’d be all these older dudes on the other side of the gate, and it was this big, basement club—it was pretty incredible, actually. Michael and George got to see it. We got a walk-through and they got to see it as it was when it closed—like it had been untouched, crumbling. There was a pile of CDs from…who was it?

D’ADHEMAR: Yeah, and someone had stubbed out a cigarette on top.

CLARK: There was a rotary mixer. It was like vinyl dance music, on a rotary mixer, but like, you know, like Billboard house charts vinyl.

MORAINE: There was a switch for bubbles! There was a whole row of light switches in the DJ booth with pieces of tape over the top labeling what they are, and one of them said bubbles. I have photos I took of the booth when we were in there, but the whole place has been flooded and water damaged. As Aaron was saying, it looks like it’s frozen in time. There are cigarette ashtrays stacked on the bar, there are CDs stacked in the corner. It’s like they just closed the doors and that was it.

CLARK: When you think about “those days” of gay clubbing, that was the last of it in my mind. It was the first and the last of its kind to me. That vibe has kinda not existed since.

MORAINE: I agree. I grew up in Columbus and was a raging faggot out of the gate. I somehow found my way to the Coffee Table, which was a queer coffee shop in the Short North. The Short North was the main gayborhood and epicenter of the art scene. Columbus had a thriving gay and punk scene. The city was edgier then, not the gentrified cleaned up version that it is now.

I would do my homework at the Coffee Table and I met a lot of people that way. You could sit there all day and your friends would come and go. A lot of my friends were older than me and people thought I was older than I was. I was already growing facial hair when I was 10.

I befriended one of the club doormen at the coffee shop. He would always flirt with me and I really liked him. He would hang out with me while I would be doing my homework and everyone kind of knew him. He worked at the Garage, which was a club that was not necessarily just gay.

It was pretty mixed, but then there were Trade Winds and the Eagle, which were side-by-side. One was a Levi’s and T-shirt bar, and the other one was a leather bar and you could go between the two.

They both had dancefloors and my doorman friend from the Garage was also a doorman at other clubs. And he would let me in. I remember being 16 going into these clubs. I didn’t drink or do drugs. I just really wanted to be around other gays. He would come and check on me during his breaks. I mostly sat in the corner and watched because I wasn’t really comfortable necessarily jumping into the dancefloor at that point. It was more like an anthropological study for me. I felt a sense of community being in those spaces. I was really lucky to have someone like that, I don’t even know if that could happen today, to be honest with you. I feel fortunate to have grown up in a thriving and diverse queer club scene. It was amazing, but it’s all gone now. It feels weird to lament these things and talk about them nostalgically. I guess that’s what happens when you get older. In Pittsburgh, Hot Mass is the closest thing I’ve found to that to be honest with you.

In some ways, because Pittsburgh was somewhat behind the times, it was this intimate queer bubble that I was missing. I was struggling to find that connection in the New York clubs when I was living there. When I started going to Pittsburgh it was kind of like oh, this is amazing. There’s a sense of community. And that’s what drew me to the city.

CLARK: I think the size of the city demands it a bit to some degree, but then at the same time we’re also losing these spaces one by one. And it’s actually not even because they need to close. It’s just because like, the owners are old dumb gays that sell off to a straight person because they don’t care, which is pretty sad. Why not sell off to other queers? Where is their desire to pass the torch and keep things going?

MORAINE: Also, people don’t go out the same way anymore. Back then, if you wanted to meet someone, if you wanted to hook up and if you wanted to dance, you had to go out of the fucking house. You couldn’t just go on your phone. The apps are great and stuff if you want to order takeout. But without trying to sound like some old curmudgeon here, there is an art form to making these connections, which is what we all were talking about earlier. And it is being lost.

There is this loss of being in a bubble of a shared space like that that’s tangible and has a smell and has a touch. That is a huge missing part. And there’s even people in our community who’ve never experienced that.

I was having a conversation with a younger bestie of mine about how he didn’t grow up cruising. He didn’t have any clue how to cruise. He didn’t do any of that. His first boyfriend he met on the internet and he moved to New York to be with him without having met up with him in person one or two times. When he told me that story, I was almost upset because I felt like he’d been robbed of this experience. It’s amazing to think that there’s this whole generation of people who haven’t had that. And I guess that is what it is—they’ve had other experiences. It makes me a little sad.

D’ADHEMAR: I grew up in DC, and my first real gay club experience was Tracks, which was legendary. It was part of DC’s old red-light district, which doesn’t exist anymore, where you had a whole bunch of strip clubs, big dance music venues like Capital Ballroom—which was where the rave night was on Friday—Sting, or Buzz. And then Saturday was Velvet Nation. But Tracks was where I went. There was a wide range of people and they had a sand volleyball court outside and you could just twirl all night long! Baltimore also had some amazing clubs and so sometimes we would shuffle back and forth. But that was my initial foray into gay clubbing, and I’m very grateful for having experienced that.

MOORE: With all of your different backgrounds in queer clubbing, I’m wondering how you got interested in DJing. What were the connections for you between queer nightlife, music, and charting your own path as DJs?

CLARK: Mine was Napster, actually, in high school. I wasn’t even thinking about it as DJing. It was the file sharing era. There’d be a Mitsubishi commercial with an electronic track and then I would Google what is the song from the Mitsubishi commercial? And it would be The Chemical Brothers or something. But then you’d get on Napster, find it and there’d be all these remixes and I’d be like, what is a remix and who are these other artists?

So then you’d go down the rabbit hole and you’d think, Oh, actually Dimitri from Paris is way better than The Chemical Brothers. And then you just slowly slide into what you like over time.

My friend Christy was dating someone who told me, you know, people DJ this stuff at parties and I have a vinyl set up at my house, I’ll show you. So I came over and he taught me how to play vinyl in high school. And so that became that. My first gig was my graduation night. I threw a party at Buffalo Wild Wings in Canton, Ohio. My dad set up two Mackie monitors, and I played to like 250 kids from my graduating class. No booze at Buffalo Wild Wings. So it all kind of like—

MORAINE: I think we have to have your birthday party at Buffalo Wild Wings this year.

CLARK: Their food has gotten better.

MORAINE: I didn’t know about the Napster part.

PRICE: I didn’t really get into electronic music until I met Aaron, and I just kind of dove right into it. It was something that clicked for me really quickly. We mentioned Pegasus earlier and I think one of the first parties I went to was a Humanaut party that Aaron did at Pegasus—it was one of the last things that happened there. It was also one of the first parties I went to, and it was the first time I took ecstasy. We went out West and saw what some of our friends out there were doing and then we started Honcho. I was not DJing initially when we first started but I bought a controller and was practicing and playing around, but I was too afraid to play live. I remember the first time I played—May 2014—I opened for Doc Sleep. I just remember being really into it immediately and it all kind of moved pretty quickly, honestly.

D’ADHEMAR: For me, it all came down to record stores. No one was DJing with CDs back then. It was all vinyl. One of my earliest friends when I moved back to DC after college, when I was working at Tower Records, was Dee Clark, and she and I connected on music so much. She had a group house with her girlfriend at the time and a bunch of other friends down on Corcoran Street, which is now just all luxury condos. But back then this was a neighborhood where you could afford to live. Dee had the entire house and she had a setup with vinyl and a mixer and we would come over, play records, and dance, and it was pretty great. She created this whole world. Once you entered the house, everything was painted. They had styled the entire place. It felt like its own little underground club. You would bring your records and you would have a moment to play certain tracks.

And then there was Music Now in Georgetown, a record store that had a lot of imported stuff. I ended up getting a job there. So I was working there and it became Yoshitoshi when they kind of flipped it to the Deep Dish group who were also part of that collective. They had their offices next door and I ended up working for their attorney, who was also next door.

My reward every day was going to the record shop and seeing what came in and talking to John Michael, who was the record buyer, and he’d always be like, I got these tracks for you. People would get to know your sound, what you gravitated towards, which is pretty amazing. And then you would spend pretty much every single penny you had and just live off of ramen noodles because you wanted to buy all the records. So that’s kind of how I got into it.

CLARK: I started playing vinyl in Canton, but there were no record stores there. So I was just buying music online. I entered as a vinyl DJ in a world where the record stores had already kind of collapsed—at least in smaller cities, which was really weird. And echoing what George said, back then there were a lot more house parties where everyone would bring their music and everyone would like be doing coke and yapping each other’s faces off and playing a couple records in between, and it would just go around and around all night, and that doesn’t happen quite as much anymore.

MORAINE: I don’t have any DJ background stories to tell you because I was just dancing and having a good time and being gay.

MOORE: Honcho is a party series, a collective of friends, a DJ squad, a festival, among other things. How did the project start? I was living in London when I first heard about Honcho.

I moved there in 2014 and the whole time I was over there I kept hearing about the Pittsburgh queer nightlife community. I kept thinking, I need to go see what these Pittsburgh queens are doing!

CLARK: Well, I was already throwing parties for a long time. I started Humanaut with a couple people in Pittsburgh in 2004. But I couldn’t get gay people to come to the parties. They just wouldn’t come. And it wasn’t until we threw it at Pegasus and took it to the gay space that we could get gay people to come. I got an invite to go play Honey Soundsystem in San Francisco and I was like whoa—Clark, I think you were with me on that trip—and we were just kind of like I cannot believe you have this music playing in this club and this gay crowd on a Sunday night!

So we kind of took that experience back to Pittsburgh with us. We gathered some people including Clark and barreled into a giant warehouse party idea for Pride as our debut in downtown Pittsburgh. We booked Mike Servito and Ben Manzone. The hype was off the charts. It was a couple blocks from all the gay bars downtown that still existed—which no longer exist. That gay bar called the cops on us before it even started; we were expecting 800, 900 people at this first warehouse party back in 2012.

The cops came and shut it down before it started. Luckily, for some reason in a moment of preplanning I’d reserved the space in Club Pittsburgh, the local bathhouse, just to put it aside just in case, so we quickly moved the party over there and honored presale tickets only. We threw a card table up, put the turntables on that in front of the elevator. Drag queens were literally pulling whatever booze they had out of the basement and made it work. So that’s how it was born—through that failed warehouse party. And maybe we had these grand ideas, but it was actually better in this little bathhouse space.

MORAINE: I was a theatre kid in high school, and I loved being in that world because I felt like I was a part of something—making, producing, putting on this show. We were all working on pulling this thing off, whether that meant building sets or getting props. A lot of this stems from my theatre experience in high school—playing host and putting on a show.

MOORE: It reminds me of what you were saying earlier about collaboration and bringing in different people to work together on something. I think that collaborative spirit of queer nightlife is important, maybe as a way to push against everything else around us that wants to extract and extract and take and take.

MORAINE: Yeah, I mean a lot of this wouldn’t be where it is today without all that collaboration. The Honcho Campout Zine was an idea that our friend Kathi came to us with. She was like, what about a zine? We’re always looking for ways to archive and document the festival that aren’t like videos and things that are going to kind of make people feel uncomfortable and break the atmosphere of the actual experience.

MOORE: I think the question of archiving queer nightlife is so interesting. Even the Paradise Garage, one of the most famous gay clubs, had a no-photo policy, which is something we typically associate with clubs of today. The thing is, queer nightlife produces or is a kind of spectacle, but it also wants to resist documentation or find ways to escape being documented. If you take a picture of a party, is that the party or is it some other thing? With that in mind, how do you think about archiving practices and queer nightlife?

MORAINE: I think oral history is super important. I think these stories, even just doing this with you, is one of those things that helps archive queer nightlife. I actually studied art history and worked in archives for years, so I have an archivist background and mentality. I love history and I love ephemera. It’s something we’ve talked quite a bit about and we’ve tried different things. For instance, we partnered with Jacob Sperber and Imani Leonard to do field recordings and interviews at Campout, which produced the Camp Cast podcast. We’ve done a zine. We have an immense photo archive at this point. There’s all the printed ephemera, art installations, and lore.

CLARK: And all the recordings with crowd noise.

MORAINE: Yeah. This is something that’s been front of mind for us as we’ve continued down this path. There are moments when we’re like, do we have photos of that? It’s surprising how few good images we have of certain things.

D’ADHEMAR: Video is an interesting one. There’s not a lot of video documentation of what we do, but it does communicate. Watching clips of The New Dance Show [1988-1994]… I don’t think anyone would ever know exactly what Detroit in that moment was like without those clips because it was like nothing else. I don’t know if you could communicate that in a different way. It’s tricky to find the balance because I think back then, having a video camera on you meant it probably couldn’t get shared immediately. Now people are aware of phones and those video clips can get uploaded quickly, and that kind of invades a little bit of the intimacy and the kind of moment that people are trying to live in.

MOORE: Can you talk about why the name Honcho?

CLARK: We all pooled a bunch of names together at the beginning and it was Edgar who suggested the Honcho, and we all chose that one. It means leader—well, it has a lot of different layers. There’s the porn magazine called Honcho that everyone most closely knows, and we were trying to push more sex positivity in Pittsburgh. Back then it was pretty shamey and not sex positive at all in the gay scene.

D’ADHEMAR: The advent of PrEP played a part in this because it was just kind of beginning to show up on the scene, but all of a sudden, if you became aware of it you realized you don’t have to be fearful about what sex could potentially mean for you. Literally my entire upbringing was the specter of HIV/AIDS and all of a sudden this happened right at the same time that you guys started doing the Honcho party.

MORAINE: PrEP was definitely a game changer. I remember growing up thinking the same thing as George. When we started dating, we were telling stories and hanging out with friends and we just assumed we were all going to die. Aaron and Clark’s generation was obviously on the tail end of that and had a slightly different experience. But we were all on these cusps of the end of the HIV and AIDS crisis, or not the end but like it tapering to be more where we are today. And then with PrEP coming online, I think that changed things for sure. It’s interesting how all of us were on all these cusps of the end of all that. I was very active in the AIDS Task Force in Columbus, and it was just as people were starting to be able to survive and carry through.

D’ADHEMAR: When it comes to Honcho, I think originally Honcho had more of a sex focus because it was started by guys and it was in a bathhouse. It was definitely a more dude-centric thing. When I first started going, though, what I loved about it was not just that it was a sex-positive experience, but that the crowd was a mix of queer people from all different backgrounds. Drag queens, trans folk. I was coming from DC where at gay bars, people wore collared shirts whereas Honcho was all let’s look as fabulously trashy as we possibly can. I think that was where Honcho kind of started.

And, in 2015, we got the opportunity to throw a party at a gay camping resort at Roseland in West Virginia. It was male only. At the time we thought, let’s just do this party. And after the first year, we realized that everyone viewed it as a successful event. It certainly was a great experience, and we wanted to do more of it. We wanted to have our friends DJ and our friends are a mix of people that are femme and trans, but the venue wouldn’t let us bring a mixed crowd. So after the second year we made a very conscious decision to look for a new venue because we knew that having a male-only environment was not something we wanted to continue to do.

The new venue, Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary, didn’t have any of the amenities we were used to. We couldn’t just show up with a sound system and our friends. We had to do a lot more legwork, but the payoff was immense because now all our friends could show up. Octo Octa and Eris Drew were there our first year there in 2017 and they played along with Vicki Powell. This was a huge change for us. I certainly think in the process of doing this, there was some degree of evolution of what Honcho was about. It has continued to evolve over the years as we connect with more people, as we get feedback. We value that feedback, and sometimes that feedback is critical. At the end of the day, that’s part of how we’re gonna learn. I’m a cis white dude who’s gay and I’ve had my own experiences and those are valid, but I also know that my experience is not unique. We need to hear from other people as we evolve what Honcho is, and that process of moving really taught us to learn from our community. Again, it comes back to community.

MORAINE: I wasn’t at the first Honcho Campout [2015] but I was at the second one. And one of my first moments working with you guys was helping facilitate that conversation with the Roseland Resort + Campground owners. I remember thinking, we can convince them a mixed-gender festival will be fine. We can negotiate this. We sell this place out, they’re not going to walk away from that. And it was an eye-opening conversation, because that campground was a campground I used to go to from Ohio when I was 17, 18, 19. But they just were very stuck in their ways. And we’ve run into that many times. We’ve run into these old white fags who are latched onto ideas of what these spaces need to be. I think we’ve also had to grow our idea of what those spaces are and who we want to have in those spaces. Our ability to be scared of taking chances, but also to be willing to jump off cliffs together and grow and change has been one of our strong suits over the years.

MOORE: My first time at the festival, I loved being offline. I loved that there was basically no reception so you couldn’t scroll on social media, you had to connect with people face to face. That feeling of being offline also slowed everything down and that made it a really beautiful experience. I still remember the phrase you used to remind us not to litter: “The only trash is you!” You all have done so much to create these important queer spaces of gathering, but what are some of the barriers, problems, or things that get in the way when you are bringing these kinds of community-minded spaces to life?

CLARK: Capitalist problems.

MORAINE: Yeah, capitalist problems. We all want to do this as a living and we all want to be able to pay ourselves. I think there’s plenty of people out there that think we are capitalist pigs based on the pricing of tickets and things like that. Maybe they just aren’t as tapped into all the intention that we put into these things. But it’s always a struggle to try to balance that.

CLARK: I don’t think people understand the time commitment this requires. If you think about it in terms of time spent on work, nobody would ever work a job for nothing. But sometimes, I think there’s this expectation that we should be doing this for free. And there’s also this thing that happened a couple of years ago when we realized, fuck, some of us can’t have day jobs anymore because we’re not getting things done. How do we give everyone the experience we want them to have while still being true to our ideals of what it should be? You don’t want it to get too big, but you have to pay for things somehow. Do you raise the ticket price? Do you add more people? Do you cut something? Do you have to sell more alcohol? We have to remember that community has to drive it, but we’re always trying to balance feeding ourselves and, you know, we’re all getting older. What does that look like when you have an empty bank account at 60?

MORAINE: I don’t want to just feed myself. I want to be able to have some creature comforts and for us to have health insurance and to also settle into some sort of old age doing this. If we can do all those things, then I’ll be happy.

CLARK: There’s this thing I’ve seen on social media with some queer events where they comment on how much they don’t pay themselves. And I think that’s really toxic. Unfortunately, we do live in a capitalist society, but we shouldn’t be looking at effort and art and creative work that way. Isn’t this nice? I did this for free for you.

MORAINE: It’s about transparency, and it’s great in theory. But what is your value? You should be paying yourselves. People should be paid.

People have a lot of expectations of us that sometimes I get frustrated with. But I also realize we’re in a position where we have to navigate and put up with that frustration. Sometimes it feels unfair, but I also understand it. I think sometimes people forget that we are four humans behind Honcho.

MOORE: Most people don’t think about the intense labor or financial stresses that go into making queer nightlife or any artistic venture possible. There’s an idea that folks who throw parties are loaded, come from money, or that they are making a ton of money from their parties. And while that is definitely true for some, the other reality is that if you are a small DIY queer nightlife collective like Honcho, queer nightlife is extremely precarious work—whether you are a DJ, performer, or event curator.

D’ADHEMAR: For the first five years of Honcho Campout, we either had a loss or we barely broke even. And the amount of work that we were putting into doing this was becoming greater and greater and greater and greater. And then after all the wonderful things people say on the internet about their experience, we are kind of glowing from that. But then we go through the books, and it’s like…oh. We basically could pay ourselves maybe like a couple hundred dollars each for almost a year’s worth of work.

As the festival grew larger, from 250 at the first Campout to 2,500 at the most recent, we started having experiences where it wasn’t this small group of people any longer, more like an extended family. But once you get to a certain size there are things that go wrong. People have health issues. People take too much of something. And we need to be able to take care of them. We need the additional resources to have a staff that can be able to help with that.

MOORE: Everything you’re saying is making me think about queer nightlife as a service economy. You’ve just talked so powerfully about all the labor that goes into putting on Campout and I think we should be talking more about the sacrifices we make to try and build queer community.

PRICE: We started doing group therapy, the four of us, because you’re working very closely with three or four other people who are your friends. And as we’re taking on a lot more we need to navigate some of the things that come along with that as a group: making decisions, how we treat each other, how we talk to each other, how we take all of this on ourselves. We had to start to learn how to navigate some of that stuff and how to treat each other. There’s a lot that I think people don’t think about in that regard, too.

MORAINE: One of the things that we talk about with having moved the festival from Roseland to Four Quarters is that the land and nature are very much an important part of the experience. We talk about the music and we talk about dancing and partying and gathering and stuff. But for me, nature is one of the reasons I want to be a part of this. I was a nature kid. I was in the creek catching tadpoles and it was weird trying to understand where I fit in the gay community with that, because I also love what the gay community was offering, but I was like, how do these things mesh?

MOORE: With nature in mind, what are some songs that really come alive for you in nature?

CLARK: Literally any Dorisburg track. That’s why we keep having him back to play Campout!

PRICE: Mine would be Chez Damier, “Morning Factory” [2017]; Frankie Knuckles, “Baby Wants to Ride” [1989].

D’ADHEMAR: “I’m Big Freak (R*U*1*2)” by Phreek [1978]. At the first Honcho this was played after the sun came up for all those still standing at the Afters. It’s such a bonkers disco track, like a semi swerving down the road at full speed. What really set it off was how its off-kilter funk, complete with the crack of whips and moans, filled the woods and charged the morning with a sense of pure and unadulterated faggotry.

Atlantic Fusion “Sanctuary” [2002]—a lush and bumping Chicago house number that samples the movie Logan’s Run. It works on so many levels: as a direct reference to our venue, Four Quarters, which is a sanctuary; as a nod to spirituality, which many attendees experience during the course of the festival; and as parallel to the plot of Logan’s Run, where the protagonists escape the confines of their city to find refuge in the “off limits” natural world. No wonder it’s gotten some time on the decks, including as the closing track at Campout this past year.

MORAINE: Moving to Four Quarters really changed Campout. We were able to be more inclusive with having our whole queer family there, but it also centered nature in a way that the old venue didn’t. We are pretty detached from nature on a day-to-day basis. Coming to Campout is about getting off your phone and having these moments together and partying, but it’s also about existing in nature in ways that most of us do not on a day-to-day basis.