James Heath-Clark (born August 13, 1985), known professionally as Honey Davenport, is an American drag performer, singer, songwriter, actor and activist. Davenport was a longtime fixture of the New York City nightlife scene and came to international attention as a contestant on season 11 of RuPaul's Drag Race. Born in West Philadelphia, Heath-Clark attended college for musical theatre in New York, where he began his career as a backup dancer for Peppermint. He later established his own dance group, The Hunties. After taking up drag, Davenport became active in the pageant circuit of that community, winning 18 titles between 2013 and 2018. In 2013, she and her band, Electrohoney, released an eponymous album and starred in a live rock opera called The Electric Highway. She also performed in two off-Broadway shows, The Orion Experience (2013) and Trinkets (2017–2018). In the latter, she played the leading role.
While her season of Drag Race aired in 2019, Davenport released singles and music videos off of her debut EP, Raw and Unfiltered. Since then, she has launched a solo musical career; embarked on domestic and international tours; and appeared as both a host and a guest on web series about drag, culture and current events. In the second half of 2019, she starred in two off-off-Broadway shows: Raw and Unfiltered, a live adaptation of her EP, and Stocking Stuffer: A Christmas Show with Balls, a holiday-themed performance. In early 2020, she and Aja released "Draw the Blood", a song whose accompanying music video marked her first directorial credit. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Davenport has produced more songs, music videos and web content, sometimes in collaboration with other artists. Her second EP, Love Is God, was released in January 2022, and she followed this with a single and music video titled "Mighty Legendary" in 2023. In film, she co-starred in God Save the Queens, a feature-length picture that debuted at the Palm Springs International Film Festival in January 2023.
Davenport centers most of her art on social justice themes. She was motivated to take up political activism for a number of reasons: losing family and friends to gun violence as a child, being the victim of police brutality as a young adult, and experiencing incidents of racism throughout life. She has also been vocal about transgender rights, especially within the drag community. In October 2018, Davenport attracted national media attention for quitting her longtime job as a show host at The Monster, a Manhattan gay bar, in protest of racism she encountered there.
Early life
Heath-Clark was born James Clark on August 13, 1985, in West Philadelphia. He was raised primarily by his mother, who taught him to express his feelings by rapping. Of his early years, he said, "I grew up... in the projects, and I lost countless family members and friends to gun violence. I have been held at gunpoint more than once. It's the world I grew up in, [guns] were so easily accessible to my friends and to my enemies."
Affected by those experiences and by racism he encountered, Heath-Clark began writing poetry about social justice when he was 10 years old.. Also interested in music, he was a member of his church choir and started writing songs at 13.... He practiced boxing as a childhood hobby and took up spoken word poetry as a teenager.. In high school, he was in the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC), where he achieved the rank of squadron commander and served as captain of his rifle team.. While attending the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts when he was 15, Heath-Clark and a female friend went to a "come as you are not" party costumed as one another; he cites this as his first time dressing in drag. At 17, he moved to New York City to study musical theatre at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy.. For a time, he lived in Harlem, on the same block as Drag Race season 6 contestant Vivacious, season 2 contestant Sahara Davenport and season 9 runner-up Peppermint.
Path to drag
After college, Heath-Clark was in the cast of the Broadway national tour of Hairspray. It was there that he had his first experience with drag as a performance art, and this motivated him to subsequently take up work as a backup dancer for Peppermint for four years. He also danced in music videos for Sherry Vine. In anticipation of a month-long tour of Europe with Peppermint in 2008, Heath-Clark decided to earn spending money for his travels by putting on dance shows with a friend; the two called their act The Hunties. To encourage people from the drag community to attend their shows, they incorporated elements of drag into their routines. After his friend left to pursue other endeavors, Heath-Clark decided to continue performing alone as a drag queen.. Shortly before the group disbanded, he met RuPaul at a book signing, where the latter misheard the name of The Hunties and made out an autograph to "Honey". From this, Heath-Clark took Honey as his drag name, adopting the Davenport surname from his drag mother, Lady Deja Davenport, who had recently begun mentoring him. His neighbor Sahara Davenport, who had the same drag mother as Deja and was therefore his drag aunt, also taught him tricks of the trade. He credits both Sahara and her partner, Manila Luzon, as teachers who influenced his style.. He cites Kevin Aviance, Phylicia Rashad and Beyoncé as artistic inspirations. Heath-Clark's first performance in drag was on April 20, 2008, and his first paid appearance as Honey Davenport was at a show with Bob the Drag Queen. Early in his career, when his aesthetic was more androgynous, Heath-Clark went by the name Sir Honey Davenport. He dropped the "Sir" as his look became more feminine..
Career
Nightlife and pageantry
Davenport has hosted regular drag shows in New York City, in New Jersey, on Fire Island and in Key West. She also works as a DJ. For her contributions to queer New York City nightlife, she has received six Glam Awards—prizes à la the Oscars issued to members of that community in an annual ceremony. The categories she has won include Club Party of the Year (2017), Door Goddess (2017 and 2018), Best Hostess (2019) and Best Video (2020). She was also named Music Artist of the Year at the 2020 edition of GIANT Fest, a queer music festival in Brooklyn.
Prior to appearing on Drag Race, Davenport was a frequent competitor in drag pageants, where she amassed a total of 18 titles by 2018. The first pageant she ever competed in was Miss Stonewall, which she attempted four times before winning in 2015. Fourteen of her victories fell in the three-year period between 2013 and 2016. Notable among these was the national crown of Miss'd America 2015. Concurrent with that reign, she held seven other titles. In February 2018, Davenport won the Miss Paradise pageant in Asbury Park, New Jersey. She had been performing at Paradise, the nightclub that hosts that pageant, since Sahara Davenport first brought her there years earlier.
Early music, theatre and television work
In the early 2010s, Davenport fronted Electrohoney, a synth-pop band that released an eponymous album in 2013... Shortly after the album's completion, the band created and starred in The Electric Highway, a live, interactive rock opera featuring a soundtrack of their songs. Set in 2092 New York, The Electric Highways narrative focuses on Davenport (playing herself) as she embarks on a quest to become a legend. The production explores themes related to gender and sexuality in a dystopian future. All three members of Electrohoney—Davenport, SteveX and Jesse Gray—as well as Deja Davenport, Sherry Vine and Jeremy Xtravaganza, played major roles. J. C. Alvarez of EDGE Media Network reviewed the show favorably, also noting that its opening night suffered from technical problems. Of the musical as a whole, he said, "What Electrohoney and company deliver with their musical rock-opera is a joyful reminder of the creativity that once thrived on the Lower East Side's underground club scene of the 80's, which disappeared into the mass consumer-driven 90's, and totally vanished during the height of the AIDS epidemic."
In summer 2013, Davenport acted in the off-Broadway show The Orion Experience, a sci-fi musical directed by Travis Greisler and set to a glam rock soundtrack by The Orion Experience. In its plot, that band's lead singer, Orion Simprini, goes on an intergalactic journey wherein he encounters various fantastical characters, including Davenport in her role of The Queen of White Lies. The play was well received both by critics and by the audience. A Theater Mania review summarized the show as being "like Here Lies Love or Fuerza Bruta, but with robots and space aliens instead of Filipina dictators or sexually ambiguous Argentineans." Greg Solomon of Theasy.com wrote, "The Orion Experience would appeal to anyone who is out to have a good time, regardless of their walk of life. The age range [of the audience] was from early 20s to late 70s and no one seemed out of place. The only complaint I can muster is that it could have lasted longer." Both The Electric Highway and The Orion Experience ran at the XL Nightclub in New York City.
In 2015, Davenport and Orion collaborated again, this time producing a single called "T.R.O.U.B.L.E".. The same year, she appeared on an episode of Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen as a Whitney Houston impersonator. From 2017 to 2018, Davenport had the leading role in Trinkets, an off-Broadway play about the lives of transsexual sex workers in Manhattan's Meatpacking District in the 1990s. She portrayed Diva, a veteran prostitute who takes another character under her wing. The show was directed by Paul E. Alexander of The Ones, also starred Kevin Aviance, and ran at the Gene Frankel Theatre. Reviews were mixed: Adrienne Sowers of The Reviews Hub criticized Trinkets as lacking energy and plot cohesion, but she said the script had promise. Gay City News called the play "an ultimately euphoric but often sobering musical that shines a well-lit, long-overdue spotlight on drag and transsexual prostitutes during an era of uneasy cultural visibility".
RuPaul's Drag Race
After auditioning for RuPaul's Drag Race eight times, Davenport was selected as one of 15 contestants for the show's 11th season, which premiered on February 28, 2019. The invitation to compete came at a difficult time for her: she was homeless and having troubles in her marriage, and one of her mentors was in a coma. She borrowed about $20,000 from friends in order to commission the runway outfits she brought to the competition. For the season's first main challenge, a photo shoot, she was paired with her mentor Manila Luzon, who placed as runner-up on the third season of Drag Race and competed on the first and fourth seasons of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars. Davenport was eliminated in the series' first-ever six-way Lip Sync for Your Life, exiting in season 11's third episode as the 13th-place finisher.
One of Davenport's drag daughters, Monét X Change, competed on the 10th season of RuPaul's Drag Race and won the fourth season of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars. Two of Davenport's drag aunts have also appeared on the show: Sahara Davenport, who competed on season 2 of the regular series, and Kennedy Davenport, who competed on season 7 of the regular series and placed as runner-up on season 3 of All Stars. Fellow season 11 contestants Ra'Jah O'Hara and A'keria C. Davenport are also members of the Davenport drag family.
Raw and Unfiltered