Author Spotlight
Peyton Moore
2022 East alum June Hyde spent her quarantine on her floor writing indie pop songs on his off-tuned guitar. Her little sister, junior Greta Hyde, is used to the noise reverberating between the paper-thin walls of their bedrooms.
Greta was used to it, as she’s basically grown up at the Lawrence Replay lounge and has been surrounded by June’s music her whole life. June’s 18,590 monthly listeners hear the same tunes released under his artist name, June Henry, streaming on Spotify.
June pours her multifaceted soul into his lyrics as a form of catharsis, according to her friend, senior Tatum Aikin. Music is June’s artistic outlet, allowing for unrestricted self-expression describing her life as a self described “boy-girl” — and Tatum and her other fans hear that.
June has recorded and released three albums for a total of 38 tracks that feature acoustic voice memos edited on Garageband. For June, songwriting evolved from a quarantine hobby into a daily routine, and she now writes at least one song a day.
“I would not be able to function on a day-to-day basis without what I do,” June said. “If people asked me how I can write so many songs, my question would be: ‘How could I not?’ Because I would honestly explode and die. I’ve been without my guitar for stretches of time before and like had genuine mental health crises. I cannot handle it.”
June’s professional career started in March of 2022 with a 13-song album inspired by the teenage heartaches and boosts of estrogen that comes with medically transitioning from male to female and back again over four years. The nights of the sickness that come with transitioning and detransitioning birthed “Class Pet,” June’s very first published project.
Themes of uncertainty surrounding gender identity, fear of the future and feelings of unrequited love echo in each voice-memo-recorded track. It was a period of vulnerability for June — the early stages of questioning her gender identity, her own queerness and the future.
“It’s also showing me that it’s really powerful to be visible like this, specifically with queerness,” June said. “The way that people interact with my work that’s about gender and sexuality is so meaningful to me. Like, I’ve gotten so many inspiring messages and made so many friends through my music [as they] finally feel like they can relate too.”
After “Class Pet” dropped, June’s now-professional career gained momentum. His fans reached out on Instagram and TikTok for more songs with lyrics that reminded them of their own struggles. After “Class Pet,” he realized his fans weren’t looking for polished-professional tracks — they just wanted music they could relate to.
“Music about not being a boy or being a girl or very aggressively being both a boy and a girl isn’t really out there,” June said. “So it’s a very under-saturated market. So if you have a song that you vaguely like that’s about being trans and you’re a trans person, you listen to it over and over.”
A lot of June’s fans are fellow trans people, who, like June, use music as an outlet for expressing themselves and their identity. Some fans are even inspired by June’s tracks to sing covers or tangible art pieces like drawings, poems and clothing patches.
“The first song that I really wrote and cared about, ‘cure all,’ was about being trans, but also about the idea that transitioning wouldn’t cure every problem in my life,” June said. “Like that it’s not a ‘one size fits all.’”
June’s next album was a mesh of nine songs from the more playful and lighthearted times of 2022. “Somethingfriend,” a 14-minute album, includes a song about the emptiness non-binary people can feel as they can’t fully relate to one gender or the other. The song, titled “void-adjacent,” hit 100,000 streams on Christmas Eve.
June responded by texting her family: “Guys, ‘void-adjacent’ just hit 100k. Life is crazy.”
June’s fans, or the June Henriators, tag June in covers of themselves singing “void-adjacent” or figuring out how to un-tune their guitars like his. But “void-adjacent” specifically has reached more people than June ever imagined, with now over 18,590 monthly listeners.
June is trying to keep up with her music and is releasing her new project, “the light i choke down,” on Feb. 14 — featuring a chronological order of events with his most recent misadventure searching for a companion.
As he finds more success in songwriting, June wants to continue learning about music and the production process but still wants to keep her un-tuned guitar and voice memo recording style to keep it real — like she always has. June descried the June Henriators as a young group of trans people who are creative, queer and would be his friends in real life.
“I get messages like every day at this point that are people telling me that my music has helped them with some aspects of their identity,” June said. “Which is insane to read things like that and to be like. ‘Something that came from my suffering has helped other people hurt less.’”
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