Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious” was the no. 1 song in the country on the day that Honey Gonzales, also known as Honey Balenciaga.

Was born to a Nuyorican mother and Honduran immigrant father in New York City. It was August 15, 2001, to be exact. 

(Yes, she’s a Leo, and on the set of her Teen Vogue shoot, yes, she is a Leo — effortlessly working the room, dancing around set, and commanding attention with a lighthearted touch.)

Twenty-two years later, Honey would vogue alongside Beyoncé on the Renaissance World Tour.

Helping Queen Bey highlight the queer roots of her genre-bending album, Renaissance. 

On and off stage, Honey was enkindling her own movement, inspired to pay flowers to her own roots and unexplored dimensions. 

As she grows as a person and performer, she’s expanding her own concept of who she can be and what she can do. She might even be falling out of love with voguing.

“I think the reason for that is,” she says, “I’m falling in love with so many different fields of creativity and artistry where it’s like, vogue is not the only place where I could put my creativity.” Honey Balenciaga is ready for her own Act II.

Growing up, Honey studied jazz, contemporary, tap, and ballet. During the summers, she began learning how to vogue through a free program at The Door in Manhattan. Honey was raised in Brooklyn (“Don’t play with me,” she says as she gives me the rundown on her bodega order) and went to high school in Jamaica, Queens. In school, she focused her attention on acting; out of the classroom, Honey dug for underground dance scenes, like Jessica Alba’s character in the Honey film series, movies she binge-watched in her teens.

I’ve always wanted to be in that position,” Honey says, laughing. “I was always that girl that found underground dancers and was looking for love and then did dance competitions.” (And no, she was never looking for love with Les Twins, addressing the internet rumors that she was supposedly romantically involved with Beyoncé’s beloved dancing duo while on tour.)

When Honey laughs, she cackles, often so freely that she ends up falling over in faux-drama. She cackles at silly things, reminding you that you’re in the same universe, on the same ground. You’re in on the joke, trying to hold in the laughter together at the back of the class.

Honey first found stardom in the New York ballroom scene for her martial arts-like stunts and spins. In the summertime, she and the voguing girls would often go to Pier 46, to have sessions and balls. One hot day, when she was at the pier with her trans-mother — as Honey refers to her motherly figure in the dance community — Honey began to vogue down.

“I did something crazy, I did a stunt, I did a flip… I was voguing,” Honey recalls. “And she was like, ‘B*tch, that was sweet. B*tch, that was sweet like honey. You’re Miss Honey.”

In the drag and ballroom communities, performers come up with original characters and name their energies or personas. “You have the opportunity to be whoever you want to be,” says Honey. “And so this is how you introduce yourself.” Before finding her name, she considered going by Aurora, like the princess, or Ingrid, unique like “that’s what you are.” They never stuck. “I had two ballroom names because I didn’t know who I wanted to be.”

Honey has always known she could never be anyone but herself. She projects a softness, juxtaposed by a steely personality and a flirty, knowing smile; she reads as a modern-day Daisy Buchanan, graceful with her pixie cut, petite frame, and pink, femme spirit. Her name, too, sounds soft. While some may consider 22-year-old Honey a baby in the industry, the non-binary voguing diva, who uses she/her pronouns, is also recognized as an experienced mother by many. Though, if you ask Honey, she identifies as “c**t.”

Joining the House of LaBeija in 2017 and later co-joining the Houses of Juicy Couture and Balenciaga, Honey has been carrying the pseudo-surname Balenciaga for years. But, now, she says she fears that the name is pigeonholing her into one dimension of her persona. She’d like to respectfully let the public know that while she is a proud member of the House of Balenciaga, her birth surname is not Balenciaga, but rather, Gonzales. (Although, she notes, if Balenciaga would like to collaborate with her, she is available and awaiting her invitation.) She’s in the process of not only changing her Instagram handle, but also her legal name. While she chooses not to share her birth name, she’ll, soon, legally go by Honey Valentín Gonzales.

Before the Renaissance World Tour, Honey appeared on multiple seasons of Legendary, the Max series where voguing teams challenge each other to dance competitions for a chance to win a cash prize. But her career leveled up once she became a dance soloist for Beyoncé.

Honey remembers she was in the middle of her first New York Fashion Week when she first heard from Beyoncé’s team about the tour. Cosmically, or comically, the same day she had been invited to sit in her first “front row,” Honey would receive an even more exclusive invitation: a DM from Beyoncé’s team, saying they needed her in Los Angeles “ASAP” to audition the next day.

When she got the DM, she and her best friend were in Honey’s childhood bedroom, once decorated with Winnie the Pooh jars of honey; it’s the same room where she now sits in a black hoodie with glass skin and a beat face. Honey tells me that they read the message together and screamed out loud. “Okay, I have to literally leave in the next hour,” Honey told her friend, “And I left.”

That night, she flew to LA, returning to the same city the New York native moved to on her own when she was just 17. At the time, she was a teenager battling rejection, gender dysphoria, and body dysphoria She was also dealing with a father who didn’t accept her sexuality. Four years later, in late February 2023, Honey was back to audition for a tour dedicated to celebrating the queer community — she was also headed there with a mended relationship with her father. Honey believes in the power of prayer, “how destiny aligns right on time.”

The timing was important. Honey left the audition thinking she hadn’t booked it. To pile on, a day later Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed a ban on drag shows in public spaces, as well as a ban on gender-affirming healthcare for youth in the state. “Me and friends spoke on the phone on how tragic it is that a law like that can pass after years of fighting,” Honey says, “and how important this moment would be for any queer dancer auditioning for the spot.”

Days later, Honey was rehearsing for the tour, having learned both the male and female in order to maximize her chances of getting the spot. Honey debuted on Beyoncé’s catwalk at the first show of the world tour in Stockholm. In the next 24 hours, hundreds of reaction videos to her performance would garner thousands of likes and views on TikTok, X, and YouTube.

At 22, Honey has completed a world tour with one of the most successful entertainers in history, made a name for herself in the New York ballroom scene, as well as the national community, modeled in major fashion campaigns, and signed deals to two major talent agencies. Now, Honey’s a fashion girl, but if you ask her to try her hardest to remember what New York fashion show she was invited to sit in the front row for the same day she was asked to audition for Beyoncé, she can’t recall.

What she and millions of others do have etched in their minds is Miss Honey crawling down the Renaissance Tour’s stage steps before beginning to death drop and duck-walk up and down the catwalk to the song “Pure/Honey.”

Honey says she still dreams vividly about the moment. “I see the crowd,” Honey says, “I see the stadium. I see everybody. Sometimes it’ll be me voguing, coming down the steps, and I can see myself. Sometimes it’s me, actually, in my body…One time, I dreamt about me actually doing the cat crawl again. I guess I just thought about it so much that I just kept reliving that moment in my dreams.”

And she’s already served as a bit of inspiration for Beyoncé’s children. Fans know from viral TikToks that the Renaissance dance crew was an important support system for Beyoncé’s oldest daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, to confidently perform onstage for the first time. “I love Blue. I think Blue, for all of us, she was like a little sister for sure,” says Honey. “Blue would have her friends around and they loved me.”

In Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé, there is a scene where Beyoncé’s daughter, Rumi Carter, is captured duck-walking and voguing in front of Honey. “I’m like, oh my God, what is happening right now? Beyoncé’s walking towards me. Her daughter and her friend are voguing in front of me. This is insane.” Honey says Beyoncé apologized and told her how the kids were big fans of her. In the moment, all Honey could produce as a response was gratitude, thanking Beyoncé and telling her that the love meant everything. “Rumi literally vogues everywhere. Duck-walk is her favorite,” says Honey. “I was like, what? Not they watching my videos.”

Dancers are not often appreciated as star performers a la carte, Honey says. After all, they are usually referred to as “backup” dancers, dismissed as beautifully-trained props that help reinforce the power of the main act by mimicking or accenting their steps.

The Renaissance World Tour was different. “I felt recognized like a star. I felt so appreciated. Being one of her dancers is very, very hard,” she says. “You have to push through it.”

For Honey, standing on the Renaissance stage was not just a personal accomplishment, but a powerful statement of visibility and representation. “I am a living testament to the resilience, pride, and defiance of queer people,” says Honey. “We fought for too long to take steps back.”

In August 2023, O’Shae Sibley, a known member of New York City’s ballroom community, was killed during a stop at a Brooklyn gas station with friends. Playing Renaissance from inside the car, Sibley got out to vogue along to the music; Sibley was then accosted by a group of young men yelling homophobic slurs, and one of the men fatally stabbed him.

Although Honey did not know Sibley personally, she was familiar with him — he had attended some of the events she had hosted in the city. Since Honey was one of the few dancers on tour that hailed from New York’s ballroom community, word of Sibley’s murder reached her through local Facebook ballroom group chats before it became mainstream news. Honey says she was the one that notified Beyoncé’s team about the alleged hate crime. Later, Beyoncé’s website would honor Sibley with a post that said, “Rest in Power, O’Shae Sibley.”

Although Honey was healing from an ACL tear that happened while touring, she still decided to attend one of the many protests that followed Sibley’s death in New York to vogue in honor of his life — she says that she was not going to miss the opportunity to tribute Sibley.

It’s a mindset she’s taking into her next era — always following her heart, determined to be herself, to never be swayed by people who might wish her or her community harm.

Creatively, Beyoncé has inspired Honey to tap into her own artistry, an intentional shift that inspired Honey to dye her pixie cut from blond to jet black. Beyoncé gave multiple dancers, including Honey, time on stage to be appreciated as individuals. During the Renaissance World Tour, Honey says her solos matured each night, growing darker, more sultry, and more feline-like with every performance. “I’ve always wanted to get into my sexy, dark, grown, fashion era,” says Honey. “This is my restart, my new era.”

Honey is modeling, rolling out her own video series called Hidden Gems, as well as recording original ballroom/house music albums. Most importantly for her, she’s working on garnering acting opportunities, the art she originally studied and wanted to focus on in high school.

“Vogue is just the fire inside of me that is fueling all of that creativity,” says Honey. “I want to be able to do it all and be able to say that a voguing b*tch did it. Yeah, a voguing b*tch did make it on the cover. A voguing b*tch did get to teach a class. A voguing b*tch did perform with Beyoncé. I did that. She did that.”

And although Honey tells me she knows nothing about a possible tour for Cowboy Carter, she feels she’s “saving her body for something.” She adds, “If she calls your girl, I’m coming.”

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Source: Tampa Bay Times