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.