Access at Honcho Campout 2025: An Interview with mae howard (v.197)
"Year zero" for new webs of care at the annual queer nightlife festival.
The quickest way to describe Honcho Campout is to say it’s a queer music festival. But that hardly does it. Many attend to see some of the best DJs and performers in the world. But Honcho is also part of a precious spiritual tradition of queer and trans kin gathering in the woods for short periods of time.
Ceyenne Doroshow, iconic mother of G.L.I.T.S. (Gays and Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society), closed this year’s festival with a blessing. “When I think of home,” she lip sync’d to Whitney Houston’s 1983 cover of Diana Ross, “I think of a place where there’s love overflowing.” On the mic after her performance explaining what made this feeling possible, Ceyenne put the accessibility team near the top of her list.
I had dreamt of this. Since 2023, I’ve been a part of an opening variety show program called “Campout Best Practices” curated by Anya Volz, Nika Lucia Sylvain, and Bumper. I’ve used my time to offer an idea about access as a kind of spell-casting and magic. (This year I told a ghost story.) After last year’s experience, I wrote an essay about access magic, disability justice, and Palestinian liberation that remains the most-viewed issue of Crip News.
Privately though, I’ve often worried that figuring access as a kind of magic participates in the erasure of the very real and often thankless work that goes into making, maintaining, and closing the enchanted container that Honcho is. When the status quo of our lives is constituted by the impossibility of good health, temporary escapes can feel like magical portals where it’s easy to ignore how the benefits are not equally shared.
Tamarindo/Papitropical, who worked on the Queer Aperitivo team that cooked for hundreds of attendees, recently published a beautiful reflection on this contradiction inherent to community spaces that can “replicate harm, even as they dream of liberation.”
The work is not to erase harm but to recognize it, hold it, and transform it so that what we build together isn’t just a mirror of the systems we claim to resist, but a glimpse of something freer.
From ”Returning to Eachother - Reflections on Honcho”
We must be louder in our appreciation and celebration of the people doing the work. To do that this year, I’m delighted to publish a conversation I recently recorded with disabled artist and organizer mae howard.
mae and the Honcho core team designed and inaugurated a template for access that many of us have longed for. Even in what mae is calling “year zero,” it was a revelation.
If you are moved to get involved, please consider…
Directly supporting a member of the kitchen staff who needs help while recovering from their work at the festival.
If you attended Honcho this year or if you’d like to, reach out to mae (Insta or email) with the things that would make it more accessible for you. “The more we think about it and the more aware of it, the better we are in relationship with one another and within community as well,” mae says.
Lastly, please share this post with anyone you think might find it useful.
kevin gotkin
How did you come to do access coordination at Honcho Campout 2025?
mae howard
I went to Honcho last year as a disabled person and found that I was kind of piecemealing my own access coordination together. And I realized it would be really helpful to have a framework for all sorts of attendees. So I spoke to a friend who has been on the staff for a few years and they put me in touch with one of the directors.
It came originally from my experience as someone who is autistic, partially deaf, uses a cane, from my own navigation of the space. I clocked all sorts of needs in terms of accessing the space, including with friends who see themselves as ‘able-bodied,’ but also have a hard time by the third day crossing the bridge. And queer elders blowing out a hip and needing a cane.
It started to bring up questions for me about transportation around the land, about comfort, assistive devices, low-stim versus high-stimulation areas, and things like showering. A coin that gives you four minutes to shower might be fine for one person, but it’s not enough for someone who has an entire leg cast on or someone who uses a shower chair at home.
I started to think about it from different angles. Then, as we got closer to the festival, I began to think about how access intersects with the bars, with wellness, with security, with how people arrive to Honcho, and also how people are approaching their experiences.
kg
Can you take us through what access coordination at Honcho entails?
mh
I think a part of access coordination, especially in festival and artistic spaces or land projects is understanding that our goal is to be moving as fast as our slowest comrade. And to be working with disability justice principles. To me, that includes being realistic and not promising someone that I can do something for them if I can't, which puts them in a situation where they're actually getting hurt. Part of access work is critically thinking about what can we actually achieve.
It required a certain type of malleability from me. Isn't that actually what access coordination is? It's trying to think as malleable as possible. And, at the same time, placing particular requests and following up on them. You want to get in touch with folks ahead of time, while also knowing that we are in the woods and I cannot promise full accommodations or access to everyone, including to myself. I'm a wheelchair user and it's not possible for me to use that at Honcho.
There’s a difference between what we could achieve this year, year zero as I'm calling it, versus five years from now when we'll have robust working relationships with the harm reduction team, with wellness, with security, with other teams.
kg
Where did you begin?
mh
We spent a year emailing and coordinating. I met with the Honcho core team in late fall or the winter. I gave a list of things that I could accomplish before and during the festival.
From there, it was a lot of independent work. For example, I thought we need chairs at the stages so I did preliminary research. And Honcho actually ended up getting even nicer chairs, which were wider and worked for a variety of needs around sitting, across age, mobility, and size. Those nicer chairs also had kind of a rock to them, so you could grind on them and really do some sexy seat dancing, which I really loved.
In the spring, I also did descriptions of what the spaces looked like so that folks could have a better idea of, for example, what it looks like to go down to the creek. I would like them to be much more robust next year with a team to build that out. I would like to have an access pamphlet like there is for wellness and harm reduction and the program schedule.
I got to camp a few days early to meet with individual teams for some trainings. Once the program started, I was checking in with the disabled folks I was meeting. I did things like reserve a more accessible campsite for someone.
kg
How did you approach mobility around the land?
mh
I designed a wristband and ride system, a multi-pronged system. It needed to ensure there would be rides for queer elders. This year, the elders had their own golf carts and that was really important to me.
There was a wristband given out to folks when they arrived and also at the wellness tents. These went to elders, fat attendees, attendees who have diabetes and needed insulin, folks who needed an ice pack or heating pad regimen, folks with mobility aids, disabled folks. It's a couple hundred people actually using that system. It's not just the 50 people who are ‘disabled’ within a particular idea or image of what a disabled person looks like.
What Ceyenne Doroshow spoke to when she closed the festival, about what made it possible for her to be there, showed so many people that access is for everyone. I talked to people who twisted their ankle and they said they weren’t thinking about access needs but then they fell down a hill and needed rides.
Someone told me they felt the ability to dance for longer because I knew they were going to have a ride home. It was incredibly beautiful to hear that people were able to do their spoon count and be able to shake ass standing up for 45 minutes, knowing that there’s an actual seat and not just having to sit on the ground. I have friends who have chronic pain or are disabled, but perhaps their disabilities are more invisible or they're used to moving through life without tapping into accessibility. There were people working to make food or at a bar or as a dishwasher who, halfway through, said, my body is really hurting and shutting down. I was able to let them know about the ride system and stress that it’s for everyone who needs it.
This ride system allowed people to think more broadly, both about disability and access in really beautiful ways.
kg
What I noticed is that some people were really shocked at how quickly they came to trust access features. It was fast trust, which isn’t always possible or ideal. But it means that trust doesn’t always have to be an arduous and slow process. Sometimes it’s an indication that the spell is going off and it’s growing with the choices to make the festival more of a reflection of the local scenes that nourish it.
mh
And that’s also about being able to receive feedback. I got feedback from a few people who said this is my autistic hell. I'm fucking hating this, I'm really overwhelmed. I received feedback from folks who showed up with injuries and were promised some things that weren’t ultimately possible. That helps me know what we can be more explicit about next year.
kg
Honcho both relies upon and diverges from the structure and status quo of queer and trans life outside of the festival. How do you think about access and labor at Honcho?
mh
I do this work and continue to do this work because I have to. I can't be in a space and see all of these access fissures and not immediately think of 10 things that I can do. It's just the organizer in me. It's the Virgo rising in me.
It’s about presence. You can’t compensate properly when it’s about presence, especially when we’re talking about the types of labor that form the backbone of the festival like the kitchen staff, security, wellness.
We have to talk about who missing in this space because a lot of people cannot afford to do that type of work to be there. For me, as I’ve been reentering nightlife and club culture, I think about how I can continue to make space for myself, alongside other disabled people, knowing that capitalism is a failed system that wants disabled people and Black and Brown people and Indigenous folks to be debilitated or die.
The people doing certain types of labor, especially racialized labor of care work, including food preparation, are going to be debilitated by this experience just as they are anywhere else. White supremacy and ableism produce racialized capitalism together because of the ways that labor is read and valued, and clout is read and valued. You can’t remove Honcho from the context of racialized capitalism.
We should be compensating each other when we're learning from each other. Your mutual aid practice should be a weekly and monthly practice, something that you're budgeting for. If you used someone’s book, find their Venmo handle. This should be something that occurs not just when people are in emergency, but also when you benefit from their work. If we started to do that, bouncing vibrancy off of each other, we wouldn’t only be supporting folks when they cannot pay rent again.
More than anything, I'm doing this because I want more disabled community to feel like they can go to Honcho. I actually think that Honcho can accommodate disabled people much more than they think they can. It's a matter of us putting in the work, the consideration, and the time and the energy to do so. And knowing that it's going to take many years to get to where we want to be.
kg
What comes next?
mh
I really want to shout out that the ASL team, because it was really revolutionary for me to see that. I learned so much from them. It broadened and deepened how I’m thinking about access. Thinking about how awesome their team was, a big team with the right cultural competencies, I started dreaming with some other disabled attendees about a crip club as part of the programming. What if there was an ASL slam one night? And a disabled drag-type program another night? Is it possible to build up programming that is for Deaf and disabled attendees in a way that I think Honcho already feeds, but to be even more explicit about that?
For me, one of the most important moments at Honcho was seeing one of my close friends perform in the cabaret space with ASL happening right next to her performance. I was standing on the very back riser when Ceyenne was performing at the end of the festival and got to see the ASL interpreter right next to her, and I was just sobbing. There are decades’ worth of work from crip ancestors, crip elders, and those of us who are just now starting to do access coordination because we can't be in these spaces without it.
I also want to shout out the harm reduction team as another example of folks who were just going to Honcho for a few years, who are passionate about harm reduction, and wanted it on a larger level.
Something that I'm curious about, in terms of harm reduction, is how it specifically relates to folks who are disabled, who are d/Deaf, who have autism. Can being in the woods and having access to people with medical training and harm reduction training allow folks to try something that would be impossible if they were going to a park or the beach where they live? How are we amping up the relationship between access, harm reduction, and wellness, both in terms of what the access team looks like and how they're available? The ways that our bodies are responding and the types of communication that we're needing are different. That is something I want to bring into next year. I think it's about communal encouragement across teams for all of us to be doing that work beforehand.
Not just nightlife spaces but arts and culture spaces generally need much more active and preventative measures. This is a necessity for folks from a lot of different lived experiences. People are waiting until really dire moments to seek help. And if we’re thinking about folks who have never had access to care and to harm reduction in these ways, we need people who are able to meet them closer to their lived experience. How are we approaching horizontal leadership versus this task needs to get done?
I was blown away by all of the different moments that incorporated support for Palestine. There was the lighting on the Palestinian flag during Huny XO’s set, alongside the Pan-African flag behind the stage, the moments when Free Palestine was being chanted, there was the performance by Anya Kneez, food by Baba’s Pantry again this year. All of that encourages people to think about politicization a little bit more.
kg
What are some of the specific things that you would want to document for folks who want to conjure what we’re talking about here?
mh
Accessibility and harm reduction benefits everyone, whether you're disabled or not, whether you're a drug user or not. Whether it's parties or arts and cultural centers, everyone needs to be doing a much better job with access.
If you're running an event and you're not disabled, hire a disabled person to be an access consultant. Or several.
The dust at Honcho was a reminder of the importance of masks. Covid is still very much active. Have masks widely available. Advertise that working with other disabled folks and mask blocs to also distribute rapid tests.
If you've been running a space for a really long time, thinking about whether it's time to pass the baton to someone else. Maybe it's the time to step back, or step to the side. Think about who is in leadership positions. I'm really wanting to see more Black, Brown, and Indigenous disabled leadership. I'm kind of sick of just learning from QTBIPOC crip elders because of book readings or online queer forums. I think there are ways that we can make in-person spaces safer so that more disabled folks can be there.