Portrait of Robin Henry by Natali Bravo. Photo courtesy of the artist.
By Étienne Lavallée
In the neighbourhood of the Old East Village, on the main Dundas Street drag, is an unassuming row of storefronts. During the day, Dough EV is a quirky doughnut shop, with rotating seasonal flavours, staffed by friendly queer employees. It’s a great use for what was formerly The Root Cellar. To the left of Dough EV’s entrance is a little green door encased in brickwork. At night, this little door opens to a dark stairwell, and if you mount that staircase, it’ll take you upstairs to Honey Dip. Honey Dip is no dive bar, but a spot for local artists, musicians, creatives, and weirdos to meet, mingle, and perhaps even collaborate. There’s something different happening at the Dip every night. It might be a DJ Night, a grindcore band, a crafting night, live noise rock, a record flip. The staff tries to keep it booked every night that the space is open, Wednesday through Sunday. Come often enough, you’ll get to know the regulars.
On the dance floor, where our bodies intermingle, the distance that developed between us all during the pandemic narrows to a sliver. Strange bodies, unusual bodies, tattooed, pierced, patched and resewn, remade in their own queer image, mosh, dance, writhe and breathe together. The world becomes a little less lonely. Throbbing and laughing, dancing and touching, we’re unified. We become one again. This is our home, our world together.
Honey Dip owes a lot of its success to London’s queer community, especially queer femmes who attend Honey Dip’s many Sapphic nights. It is a queer-owned and queer-staffed establishment, and while it’s difficult for a bar to be a safe space, it is a compassionate and caring space. I had the privilege of sitting down with Honey Dip’s main founder, Robin Henry. Robin has been an active member of London’s art community through their work as The Real Antler Press, their multiple city murals, and past art exhibitions at TAP Centre and Jonathan Bancroft-Snell Gallery. We sat down together at Dough EV and chatted about it.
Photo by Justice Bekke, courtesy of Robin Henry.
Can you run me through a history of how you acquired the space?
It used to be an organic restaurant, and the upstairs was a room for rent for bridal showers and office parties. The bar that was up there, the structure was already there, and there wasn’t really a stage. You could fit maybe one acoustic musician. Dough EV took over the restaurant, the upstairs sat empty. Some of my friends and I started booking shows in Dough EV in response to the general lack of musical spaces in the city.
This was after Call the Office had shut down, right?
Yeah, we had lost the Embassy, we had lost The Salt Lounge, we had lost many of the house venues — there just weren’t a lot of places. London[‘s music scene] was just revolving around the bowling alley at that time. We started booking shows and concerts, open mics, in the doughnut shop at the time. At the time I was booking with anyone that would let me use their space –at Brown & Dickson’s, Back to the Fuchsia, in the Squeaky Wheel Bike Co-op, and those are now going strong as Gears [Concert Series] — to convince anybody I could to post a weird little artsy event. We started doing it at Dough EV regularly around the end of February 2025. The two owners of Dough EV, Aaron and Tara, approached me and said the shows had been going really great, we’re doing them all the time, and we’d like to do something more serious with that. They asked me, would you be into going in on a venue with us? We received the lease in June, so we had until June to make it a viable space. So we flipped the space and renovated it. There were three months of renovation — the community rallied to renovate it with me. We didn’t hire reno help, it was just all DIY. We flipped the stage. Girls Rock Camp donated a stage they used for an exhibition they were involved in at Museum London; the premise of the exhibition imagined if the music scene was matriarchal instead of patriarchal. They built a music venue inside of Museum London for this exhibition, and then the stage sat in a storage locker for a few years. They contacted us when we opened and asked if we wanted it. We disassembled it and re-assembled it upstairs.
Within three months we had our opening, and I had an exhibition at the same time, which was crazy. That was at Jonathan’s [Bancroft-Snell Gallery], and I would be here from waking up until 11 PM building Honey Dip, and then I would have to get home and work on paintings for the exhibition until morning. The craziest work schedule I ever had, but very fulfilling. My entire life was consumed, dawn to dusk, by making an art space and making art. I had my exhibition, and within a week of the exhibition opening was our launch of Honey Dip. Also, simultaneously was the pinnacle of MAGICAL London. That was the crescendo of MAGICAL London. MAGICAL was a collective of show promoters and queer culture creators in the city. It evolved from its original conceptualization and morphed, founded in part by Regional HIV/AIDS Connection [funded by the London Community Foundation]. It was effectively a supergroup of queer organizers. It felt like, what if all these DIY organizers who were pouring money out of pocket to make these events happen, to make music performances, open mics, dance nights — what if we all had money to work with to host these events? The initial goal was to host 12 events, but when we got some funding, it turned into 3-4 events a month for a year, and then it crescendoed with a week-long marathon of events. It ended up being roughly 30 events and a book launch. It was a bunch of people who were used to doing it with no money, finding ourselves with money, so we were able to stretch it much farther than we expected.
What happened to MAGICAL London then?
It was incredibly demanding; none of us were getting paid to do it. It was such a consuming and ambitious project. It just ran its course. It was proof that with support these things could happen. Anybody in the arts knows that grant money doesn’t flow like water. Everyone involved in that work is still doing it in some capacity. RHAC is still doing incredible work – Honey Dip came out of it, queer cultural forces came out of it, but we just don’t function as a collective anymore.
Everyone’s still part of the community, still organizing and gathering people.
Yeah, we just don’t have a shared budget we’re pulling from. In a way, that makes some of it easier: the fewer people you have to consult, the faster your work can go.
Willow Switch at Honey Dip. Photo by Justice Bekke, courtesy of Robin Henry.
How would you describe the unique vibe and character of Honey Dip to someone who has never climbed the stairs to visit?
The vibe is – it’s if you let a bunch of people who organize house and DIY shows take over a cocktail bar. It’s like a package of peanuts that says “may contain nuts” – we are ground up, a DIY gathering space. In spite of having a home base, we’re still running it like it’s DIY because those anarchist values are interwoven with punk, underground, queer, and drag culture.
When Honey Dip first opened, it came out of a clear need for affordable art and music spaces in OEV. Looking back at the early days, what were the biggest hurdles in turning that concept into a fully functional local bar?
It’s my hope that this is still the early days. We’re a year in. I want this to be an institution in this city. Part of my desire in founding this place is creating a space for the outcasts, the queers, the musicians, the artists. I think one of the biggest challenges is that the culture of that type of nightlife is not baked into the fabric of London the way it may be in other major art cities. [We’re creating the kind of space where] you don’t need to know what’s going on, you just show up and see what’s cool. We’re teaching a new generation of London punks and queers what it is to have a gathering space and nightlife because we’ve all become accustomed to staying home and engaging with the world through screens and social media. We need to relearn how to engage with our people, in person.
With each other, to talk to each other outside of a screen.
The truth is capitalism benefits from us not gathering.
The alienation makes more money, right?
Yeah, and I view it as a very imperfect but very political thing, to create a gathering space for people who don’t have access to that regularly. There’s plenty of bars locally that have not made it their grind to host local music events. Another challenge is that young people don’t engage with alcohol in the same way that we [millennials] do, and that’s our main revenue source, so that becomes a tricky thing. That’s why we offer alternatives and mocktails.
When I was growing up, drinking was a huge part of the punk subculture, and the way young people interact with alcohol is being approached with more moderation now, which changes how they interact with the space, right?
I think it always will be to some extent. But it’s different. I think they have a healthier relationship with alcohol. Our generation spent so much time sneaking around and hiding that we had weed because it was illegal, and now these kids can go to a dispensary, spend $5, and get an edible that will keep them high for the night. I think the biggest challenge is that alternative people, queers and punks, became accustomed to staying home. There’s nothing that’s for us, [that] lets [us] just hang out and do something on our terms.
You hosted an incredible number of events in your first year, well over 200, is that correct? Looking back, what has been the most defining or surprising moment in the bar’s history so far?
It’ll be about 227 events by the anniversary. It’s hard to place. When you do this many events, it’s no longer any specific moment. One concert can feel monumental. When you place it in a sea of events, it becomes a drop. It’s more about the entire body of work.
Does it run together for you sometimes?
Yeah, they bleed together. For me the most life breathed into this neighbourhood, and to this scene, was our Halloween run where we had four concerts back-to-back, four events back-to-back, that ranged from a folk horror night to a surf rock night, to a DJ night, to Slash Need. To me, each one of those four events was so holistically different from the previous night. I was like, holy shit, London has as much of an eclectic range of creative engagement in this conservative city, in this beat-down little neighbourhood, as there is in any other art city in Canada. I really believe it. It has everything you need, but you do need to know where to look.
Photo by Justice Bekke, courtesy of Robin Henry.
London is what you make of it, and it requires effort to find the good in it. But there’s a lot of it, is the thing. I think you and I are very much of the same mind that London has loads of potential, and it has so much good hidden within it. You’ve got to find it.
Yeah, these things don’t happen overnight. I think this vague idea of community is impossible to pin down, but you know it when you see it. There’s more to it than just talking about it.
Between live music and queer events to 16mm film screenings and creative workshops, Honey Dip is incredibly multi-faceted. What is the long-term vision for the types of programming you want to bring into the space?
Honey Dip feels like a blank slate; it takes a tremendous amount of effort to make this happen. It’s a lot of hard work on myself, the owners, the staff’s part. It is a lot of people coming to us with crazy, weird ideas. The vision is that we have more people coming to us with crazy weird ideas than we can handle, and it has to start existing in other places in the city in a major way as well.
I want our cup to be so full it floods the city around us, with queer culture and love, with dirty punks, and anarchism, and lowdown commies everywhere.
It has to overflow.
Yeah, I want our cup to be so full it floods the city around us, with queer culture and love, with dirty punks, and anarchism, and lowdown commies everywhere.
You’re seeking a very Ace of Cups situation.
It has to be! What’s the alternative? We wait for other people to do it? We wait for corporations to realize there’s potential for profit, so they target us, like they do with Pride, and then they withdraw when it stops being profitable? It has to come from the ground up. Seeds break through the concrete; no amount of concrete is going to stop that. I don’t care how cringe it is to be holistically sincere and optimistic. Being relentlessly optimistic and passionate has to be part of it, because if we want to believe in a better future, we have to believe in a better right now.
We have to put in the work on it.
It’s easier to believe in a better right now than ever, when you open up a space like this, and you see this many people gathering. It’s easy to believe in a better right now when the community has shown up as they have.
The timing on this has been kind of amazing. You managed to fill a cultural void at a post-quarantine period when we didn’t have a lot going on. Call the Office had closed, and you managed to fill something that was quite vacant. I think anyone here who’s part of the music, performance, and art scenes were really craving this.
The community was ready for it. See a need, fill a need – that very DIY punk ethos. When you can’t find a venue, you get a generator and have a show under a bridge. You can’t find a gallery that will exhibit your work, so you talk a coffee shop into hosting your exhibition opening. That fundamental leftist principle that you have to build the world around you.
Nobody’s going to save us but ourselves, right?
Right, no one’s going to do it for you. We’ve watched so many new bands form, new forms of cultural promotion like Sapphire 519, like Stompbox. These are all new in our community. We can’t skip over these other spaces that are also filling the need.
Sapphic Invasion at Honey Dip, organized by Sapphire 519. Photo by Justice Bekke, courtesy of Robin Henry.
Do you think that the close-knit nature of our London community helped Honey Dip succeed?
Everyone in Southern Ontario uses Toronto as a measuring stick to determine whether their culture is successful, relevant, up-to-date, but if we opened Honey Dip in Toronto, it’s a drop in the bucket. If we opened it in Toronto, it might not be meaningful or a force that can affect a whole city. In London, due to scale alone, a 65-person capacity room can have a massive impact on the music scene. It can be powerful enough that many of the queers and punks in my age group had to move away from London to seek cultural fulfillment. [They moved] to seek out queer community, artists with vision in alignment with their own, and now people can access that here. I would rather do this in London, Ontario than any of the major cities. I’d rather do this here than Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal – because it is deeply impactful here.
Because of our size, and because of London’s unique, gritty atmosphere, it’s more meaningful.
London is a corporate city in a lot of ways –a lot of corporate enterprises, factories, malls, corporate restaurants. These corporations have abandoned the downtown core, saturated the suburbs, but there’s an entire populace of working-class people who make the city run, a working class that keeps these restaurants staffed, that keeps our city working. And punk music always needs to be connected to the working class. When it’s not, it’s no longer authentic; it’s a product. Those are the people who gather here, those are who we’re here for.
As the bar grows, how do you plan to balance keeping the space accessible and affordable for local DIY promoters while ensuring the venue itself remains sustainable?
The premise is that we always want it to be ground up – that is our hope as we build this culture in the city. I want a noise show with a full room, but I’ll book it either way. I just want to see the art happen, and I want to contribute to the legacy of noise music in the city.
We have such a rich history of noise music here, due to the Nihilist Spasm Band and the Regionalist Movement. It’s baked into London’s punk culture. But I want to be at a point where it becomes more sustainable and viable because it’s part of the fabric of the scene, not just the fringes. In a world that is always going to be more expensive than the working class makes, it’s important that we always lead with it being affordable. That’s why we have NOTAFLOF (No one Turned Away for Lack of Funds) as an evolution of PWYC (Pay What You Can). I would rather have you in the room than your ten dollars. I want to start offering larger events which will mean larger ticket prices, but hopefully with the support of a blooming scene and maybe some sweet government money – some grants – I can go a little farther. I always want to be able to offer local tier shows and DJ nights. If this place becomes only touring bands for thirty dollars, we’ve lost sight of what we’re about. The goal is to always include and prioritize the local scene and then have keystone events that might be a little pricier. There are so many ways to get into a show for free — if you work doors, if you go postering. I’ve even told people if they can bring three friends who can pay, then I’ll get you in free. I just want bodies in here celebrating our culture. If someone can’t get in, there are a ton of ways to get in that make the space better, and you get to go in for free, so you have ownership of the event.
You’re a part of it at that point, and you’ve given a little bit of yourself to the space.
Yeah! The scene is most powerful when it is run by the people who participate in it, not when it is a booking agency or LiveNation, or something like that, dictating and pricing what the culture should be.
Given London’s history of losing punk and DIY spaces such as The Embassy and Call the Office, what can our community do to strengthen and further entrench these spaces into our everyday lives? What can we as community members do to make it last?
Take ownership of it. Take ownership over the future of the space so it becomes sustainable. Call the Office was able to last 30-40 years, and it did music events as the York Hotel did before that. The Embassy was around for nearly 50 years because people were deeply passionate about the space, in addition to a deeply passionate group of people behind the scenes, steering the direction. It’s about getting involved. If you want to see a queer grindcore [band], book them. Be the reason. Or even better, start one. If you want to support your favourite band coming to town, poster around town so no one misses it and the room gets full. Be the reason a bunch of people gather.
I love how many community members have contributed to raising awareness of these events. Knowing it’s difficult to get people to leave their enclaves, I really appreciate the community members who have stepped forward to promote these events and gatherings. I love walking around the core and knowing what comes next. This way people know there are options other than staying in and endlessly scrolling their phone.
I’m a deep believer in the culture of postering – creating physical media and creating an archive of these posters. I’ve designed as many of the posters for these events as I can because I love poster art. I try not to compare cities, but I love walking through Montreal and seeing rows of event posters on every storefront and [every] telephone pole plastered with art made by a human being. I love this physical media.
There’s something very special about ephemerality, isn’t there?
We talk about a show poster like it’s an ephemeral thing: you do a poster, the poster goes up, the event happens, and the art is dead. But the truth is it lives on, on the wall of a teenager’s room, it exists in the archive of a small DIY gallery, it exists in a zine. We talk about how the internet is forever, but the internet is not forever. The internet is new, and vast, and things get lost easily. Some of my favourite bands in the world, I cannot find their music for the life of me, and they were only around ten years ago. To me, that cassette, vinyl, poster, is forever. To circle back to the question, the best way to get involved is to take ownership over the archiving. People like Nat Bravo, Justice Bekke, like Ruby, show up and document the happenings. Every time that somebody documents and makes a zine, that’s evidence that queer culture exists, that a counterculture existed in that year, in our city. So show up, take pictures, start a blog, start a distro. There are so many ways to get involved. Start a band. If you don’t play an instrument, draw a poster. If you don’t draw, take pictures. Organize a queer potluck. It’s all part of something larger.
It’s part of our culture that’s constantly growing and changing. It may not even seem like something right now, but there will come a time, years down the line, where we’ll want to be able to see that growth and be able to say ‘What a unique moment in London’s life.’ Taking ownership of that is part of making sure it lasts, right?
It’s one of the things I struggle with and have a fear around. My focus is that I am great at making it happen, but I’m not good at archiving. That is not my strong suit. It needs to be on other people to document these things and take these things from ephemeral to permanent.
What does community mean to you?
It used to mean just going to a punk show, a gathering of friends. Now it’s about showing up for those friends until you get to see them grow as people. It’s hosting enough shows to see them going from shaking with fear for their first time on stage to now fronting a band and being a total rock star up on that stage. It’s not just the show, it’s the human element. It’s the sitting on the sidewalk for the last two hours after the show has ended because you don’t want to stop talking with your friends, so you’re sitting and smoking and laughing. Those are the things that define it for me, how we show up for each other at the gathering space and beyond. Being queer is a radical thing in a world that doesn’t want you, that desires you to be so definable. I feel it’s inevitable that we’re all going to change the world a little bit. Perhaps not the whole world, but our little piece of it. That’s how I think of community.