Imagine you're on a dance floor... at a club where your pulsating body is just one of hundreds. You're feeling 'it' - the energy, the heat, the excitement. Sweat is pouring down and your hair is a mess and the muscles in your body feel so weak. But they're still moving, seemingly without any input from your brain, and you have forgotten everything else but this exact moment. jamé foks (pronounced Jamie Fox) is the woman who brought you to this moment. jamé is that anonymous presence in the DJ booth watching you...your every move...your every breath and determining where she'd like to take you next. She's done her homework. She knows the best music to play to get your heart pumping faster and faster. She knows what music you want to hear. She knows how to make you forget about the fight with your lover, your boss getting on you at work, the traffic on the way to the club.

"I consider myself an 'entertainer'," says jamé, "because really, being an entertainer, well, there's an art to it. Some people are born to be policemen or bartenders. Some people just have a natural knack for something. My knack is to be an entertainer because I think when people come out and they spend their hard-earned money, they want to forget about all the BS that goes on in their week, in their daily lives, they want entertainment. I think one of the reasons I've become a fairly popular promoter and disc jockey is because I simply give people what they want. If somebody likes chocolate, give 'em chocolate."

jamé has worked enough clubs and bars and parties to know her crowds. Here's the goods on jamé: she loves playing for gay men, hates line dances but will concede and play them for the ladies at certain venues. She's been in the disc jockey business long before remixes existed and DJs were speeding up and slowing down records with their fingers to create intro and outros. She's a spiritual person with a confidence that she has found exactly what she was meant to do on this earth. Through it all she has managed to create a sound, a party, an atmosphere that is all her own.

"It's quite an elevating feeling to be in the DJ booth and watch hundreds of people dancing to my music," explains jamé. "To facilitate this 'thing', this feeling...the ambience, it really gets me high. It's a symbiotic relationship because everybody's getting high with me, we're reciprocating. It's very lifting. To me, it's as close to heaven as I'll ever get on earth."

And to think, little jamé started out writing poetry and songs, sitting on her porch practicing her guitar when her talent was 'discovered' by her mailman, a guy with a band and his own recording equipment. He needed someone to record his band and found the perfect student in jamé. And that's pretty much how the story of jamé foks continues.

Opportunities arose and jamé took advantage of them. When she was ready to start college, the admissions folks helped her pick a profession: radio disc jockey. While in school, she met a guy who was a mobile DJ. He took her under his wing and made her his sidekick. When she began exploring her sexuality in gay bars, she met gay male DJs who taught her how to spin vinyl. And then she met up with now famous DJ Danny Teneglia who showed her the effect of the application of sound on the human body. Who knew there was so much going on in that DJ booth?

"You know it's a very psychological thing to generate a dance floor. Music and sound can transform people physiologically. Because we are made mostly of water, a DJ can actually use sound to create a state, if you will, of higher being. It's a beautiful thing to go into an empty space, have an idea, develop that idea and then watch your hard work come to fruition," she says.

The DC area has been home to jamé for 11 years now, the longest amount of time she's spent anywhere! Growing up in a military family and being an explorer by nature, jamé never spent a lot of time in one place, but for now, she's settled here in DC. Will she be here for the long run? She doesn't know; but for now, she's here and you should take advantage of it and go see her.

"I owe everything I have accomplished to the G/L/B/T community because it supports me and I'm very grateful. There are people out there who support me tirelessly and I appreciate that. It is incredibly wonderful to be able to be who I am, to be open about it, and to have a vocation where I can actually experience it with my peers. I couldn't do it without, them. It would be awfully boring to play to an empty dance floor."

jamé is an instructor at Metatrack Studios in Washington, DC. She was the DJ and guest emcee for the Capital Pride Festival 2002, 1998 & 1997 in Washington, D.C. (over 150,000 people attended). She was the DJ for the HRC National Dinner featuring keynote speaker President William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton and award recipient Ellen DeGeneres. jamé is a South Florida Dixie Award Winner for "Outstanding Club DJ" and she is also a DMC award winning DJ. jamé is a seasoned entertainment veteran with over two decades of radio and professional club experience. Her unique blend of high energy and originality has inspired thousands of undulating bodies to an incredibly high state of euphoria.

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MW MAGAZINE - FOKS-Y LADY