By Alexander Cheves | @badalexcheves
Jacob Meehan has been a DJ and central force in Berlin’s queer club culture for years. But this spring, the Berlin-and L.A.-based DJ and co-organiser of the legendary WHOLE Festival will release his debut EP on his new label, Gay Groove Records.
The two-track EP, Mini Revelations, features “Conjure,” a dark, hypnotic cut, and “Damier,” a nod to the Detroit sound of KMS Records. “Damier” in particular is great—sexy, perfect for a gay tea dance on Fire Island.
The EP drops on 17 April and is the first in a series of self-released EPs for Gay Groove Records that Meehan has planned in 2026. He’s been working on this project for some time, and the news finally broke on his social media just last week, on 24 March.
Advance support is strong. Nita Aviance called it “beautiful spells for our collective ecstasy.” Shaun J. Wright says both tracks “will be in regular rotation for the foreseeable future.”
Months before the release, my interview with Jacob happens on a video call—we’re both escaping the dark Berlin winter. He’s in his car, parked at a grocery store, in sunny L.A., and I’m in Ibiza. We both feel like we’re chatting on vacation. But his spot is semi-permanent; he now spends half the year there, working on projects with his partner, Bo.
On video, he wears what queer media in the U.S. now calls “slutty little glasses,” especially after out actor Jonathan Bailey began sporting them. He’s markedly handsome and as energised as someone can be from a car seat.
I double-check that the car is indeed parked—I don’t want anyone to be interviewed while driving—and launch into my questions.
What led to Gay Groove Records?
“This is the year I’m arriving as a producer!” He tells me this giddily, excited, barely contained by the seat. “I’ve been producing music for ten years. In the pandemic, I really learned Ableton, and this year, I’m finally self-releasing some things, and I’m so proud of them.”
He’s been in nightlife for a while—why did it take so long to release his own productions?
“I’m a slow burn. I needed time. But this is my year!”
How did you start DJing?
As a kid, “I bought records for years before I even had a turntable,” he tells me. “I’d go to record stores or buy them on eBay.”
“It was like I had this subconscious plan. Some part of me knew I would be a DJ.”
In his college years, Jacob Meehan’s entryway to music happened through his friend John Roberts, a Cleveland-born producer who took Jacob to Gramaphone Records in Chicago, one of the most legendary record shops in the U.S., with a direct lineage to the history of house music.
John lived “around the corner” from the shop, and on those visits, “I would take entire stacks of a section and listen to each record and be like, yes, no, yes, no.”
“I’m not the most encyclopaedic music head. It’s all just my ear. I forget names and labels, but I know what I like.”
He DJed at his university radio station for five years, digging through a library of over 10,000 CDs—mostly indie and post-punk.
But the real education, he says, came when he started playing at a small bar in Boystown on the north side of Chicago, called Wang’s. There, he and his then-partner built a tiny club—a little dance floor with a Funktion One sound system.
“In my first months of DJing, my best friend Ace, a Puerto Rican from the South Side, was the bartender. He would invite his friends to the bar, Black & Latino folks who grew up with this music. They had legendary house DJs at their eighth-grade dances. They live and breathe this culture.”
It was, he tells me, a tough education—but completely vital and instilled in him a deep respect for the culture behind the music.
“They told me, ‘Man, your tracks are good, but you are a horrible DJ. You don’t know how to mix. You don’t know what you’re doing.’ It really got me together. The bar is high in Chicago.”
What about the Men’s Room parties?
Next, Jacob Meehan and some friends threw a party called Men’s Room in Chicago from 2011 to 2016. “We produced the whole thing, this big building-wide party at Smart Bar.”
What other lessons did Chicago teach you?
The biggest: he knows how to close. “There’s a reason I get booked to close parties a lot.”
“I’m thankful to have come up in Chicago. I spent many early Sunday mornings, and early Monday mornings, at Smart Bar. Chicago knows how to close a dance floor.”
Please describe a good Chicago closer.
He smiles. “It’s, like, Derrick Carter spinning, or Michael Serafini.”
“A classic is put on, the ship is being landed very elegantly, the lights come on, and the girls are twirling in this very sensual, beautiful way. That’s a beautiful lesson to learn. Not to just bang it out into the ether. That works sometimes, but I’m a big fan of a dramatic, heartfelt closing moment.”
Any advice for younger DJs just starting?
He shrugs: “You gotta log hours,” he says. “That’s it.”
“To learn how to DJ, you gotta do it in front of people. You need to fuck up in front of people and learn how to gracefully deal with that and keep it moving.”
This, he says, is the only way to learn how to “not get hung up on your mistakes.”
With so many projects, how do you stay organised?
Jacob Meehan was diagnosed with ADHD last year. He brings this up himself, matter-of-factly, when talking about his busy work schedule.
Because of ADHD, “I struggle with organisation and logistics. I do not live for email and spreadsheets. It takes a lot of work for me to stay on top of that stuff,” he says.
“The ADHD diagnosis helped learn about myself and my chemistry. I now have a better understanding of how to work with myself. I think I can do more than I can, and now I know that will bite me in the ass.”
Something that helps: Google Tasks, a task-management app built into Google’s suite of tools, that lets users make to-do lists, set deadlines, and organise tasks into separate, scrollable columns.
“I think in different brains. There’s the festival organiser, the artist, and day-to-day stuff. Having a place to write it all down and keep track of these different headspaces helps.”
In Google Tasks, he has a column for “personal stuff, a column for my work as an artist, a column for festivals, and a column for gigs. I can see everything in one place. You can assign times and deadlines, and just tick things off.”
This brings me his biggest annual project:
WHOLE Festival is huge. How does that work go?
WHOLE Festival is an annual, multi-day outdoor queer music festival held at Ferropolis, an open-air industrial heritage site on a lake near Gräfenhainichen, Germany, about two hours southwest of Berlin.
It’s been running since 2017. Because of the COVID-19 gap years, the 2026 festival is the eighth edition.
The event—which draws an increasingly international group of ravers—is organised by a rotating coalition of collectives, with a core group that includes Berlin-based collectives Pornceptual (led by Raquel Fedato), Cocktail d’Amore, GEGEN, and Jacob’s own Buttons.
Shortly before this interview is set to go live, Jacob tells me that the 2026 lineup of collectives finally dropped—an impressive, international list.
Jacob Meehan will play one of the last slots at the beach stage late Sunday night, followed by OK Williams b2b Gabrielle Kwarteng for the final closing Monday morning.
The international collectives this year include KORGY from Finland, Group Therapy from Denmark, Fiesta Dame from Chile, Eau de Cologne from Georgia, Anti Mass from Uganda, Zvuk from Kazakhstan, and Gaze from Austria.
He laughs:
“WHOLE is a monster.”
Any acts from the 2026 festival you want to highlight?
His passion is palpable as he runs through acts he’s excited for. Octo Octa will do a live set of new material at the beach stage. Stacey Hotwaxx Hale, an “OG Detroit house legend,” is on the lineup, Jacob tells me with pride, along with Jaye Ward, a “trans icon from London who’s been DJing since before acid house in the 80s,” who will play on the “ambient” stage, which Jacob Meehan curates.
Describing the planning, he says there are “weeks of intense work, then it will calm down a bit. We’re a relatively small group.”
“This does not pay our bills. We’re all freelancers, all creatives, all working on other things. Considering that, what we achieve is amazing.”
How has WHOLE Festival changed over the years from the organising side?
He thinks about it. “Looking at everyone involved, I’d say we’re growing. We’re learning how to be a stronger and better organisation.”
“I think we’re learning how to take care of each other a bit better.”
Any best memories from WHOLE Festival?
He recalls a standout, a small moment:
“A couple of years ago, Madalba was playing at six in the morning at the main stage,” he says.
“I remember the front row of dancers was very young. Like, they looked eighteen. And the sun was coming up. And I was like, oh my god, this is their Woodstock.”
In that moment, he thought: “This is a foundational experience for them. What an honour to facilitate that.”
Why does WHOLE mean so much to you?
He didn’t have anything like it growing up.
“I’m from a town of under 2,000 people,” Jacob Meehan tells me.
I ask about growing up gay in a small town, and his words ring painfully familiar—Jacob and I are both American, both gay men from conservative, rural places, far from the queer meccas we later journeyed to as adults.
His voice gets softer here: “I was fully gay-bashed,” he says. “Even though I was not even out. I was not sexual at all.”
“I grew up feeling unaccepted and got threatened a lot. I had zero examples of happy gay people around me and really had to figure things out on my own. That’s why these events matter.”
Jacob seems a little triggered—in a sense, we both are. Those ghosts never die. So I bring our talk back to the queer collective and party series he co-founded in Berlin, Buttons, which ran for over a decade and has, now, he admits, ended “gently.”
Why is it time for Buttons to end?
As a co-organiser, Jacob Meehan helped shape the party alongside his then-partner Danilo Rosato, who initiated it out of Homopatik, a monthly queer party that ended in 2016.
Jacob tells me Rosato “played a central role” in his move to Berlin.
“When Danilo and I first met and fell in love, the party was such a reflection of that. There was so much collaboration and support and experimentation. That’s when I first moved to Berlin, so I got to bring all these things I’d learned from organising parties in Chicago and see where there was room for it in the landscape in Berlin.”
Buttons was intended to be different from other Berlin queer parties, Jacob Meehan says. In Berlin, many events are “plug-and-play,” which means “it’s a crew, a label, a group of DJs, they’re showing up at the club and doing their night.”
This is often different, he says, from the U.S., where “you’re typically forced to produce more because you’re at a place that isn’t really a club. You have to reconfigure the room, hide shit behind fabric, and bring in your own sound.”
He leaned on that experience. When Buttons happened at club ://about blank in Friedrichshain, “we had this big, beautiful garden, so I thought, why not hand out free barbecue? Why not have performances out there?”
He says Buttons hasn’t ended so much as “tapered” and “won’t have a formal finale.” He tells me it “just feels finished.”
“There was so much beauty in that project, but everything ends.”
Somehow we drift to the COVID-19 pandemic and what a combustive, catalysing force it was—positively and negatively—for many who live and work in nightlife.
Where did you spend lockdown?
Jacob Meehan was in New York when it happened. He was supposed to play The Carry Nation, a party run by New York-based DJ duo Will Automagic and Nita Aviance, known for their long, deeply musical DJ sets and devoted following in queer dance culture.
“It was a big deal”—then the city shut down.
“I lived with my parents during the pandemic for a year. They live on fifty-five acres outside Roodhouse, Illinois. I’m so thankful for that time because it allowed me to just sit with them. It made me realise my whole adult relationship with them revolved around a few days at a time. Holiday, visit, go. It was beautiful to unfold over the course of a year with them, really slowly.”
It also allowed some old friction to dissolve.
“My relationship with my dad was heated at one point, and in that year home, we were able to have triggering conversations and trigger the fuck out of each other, and then get past that and come together.” Jacob felt like he was “finally able to grow up after that and let go of things I didn’t realise I was holding on to.”
One reason he stayed longer was to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, held at a local bowling alley—the graduating class of 2001.
“It was great because it was people I had not talked to for twenty years, people I spent the first eighteen years of my life with. Suddenly, I was bowling next to this guy I grew up with, who’s now a farmer, a sweet, quiet guy. It was comforting. Like, I’ve known him all my life, and here we were, having this moment. As adults, we were able to show up and really be levelled out.”
Why has your journey taken you to Los Angeles?
“I met my boyfriend, Bo, on Grindr two years ago when I was here for a gig. Doing long distance with someone nine time zones away is difficult.”
It strained both sides, and with the frequent travel and hopping around, his connections in Berlin suffered too.
“People in Berlin didn’t know when I was there and when I was not. For the sake of our relationship and my friendships, I realised it’s better to sink into bigger chunks of time. Half the year in LA, half in Berlin. It’s more stable.”
Funnily, they’re both originally from Chicago but never properly met there, despite sharing some mutual friends and overlapping life details. But one time, Bo had a flash of memory—he remembered he had encountered Jacob before, years before they started dating.
Jacob describes it: “One day, Bo had a flash of memory and was like, I remember meeting you on this day, on this street, in front of this restaurant, with this person, you were wearing this shirt. I went through old photos and saw it. Oh my god, that’s the shirt.”
Jacob says it’s “deeply meaningful” how they both needed to wander the earth some before finding each other—they met and fell in love far from where they started.
“When I met Bo, it was powerful. It had this serendipitous feeling. If we had met in the past, we wouldn’t have been mature enough. It has that ‘swirly universe bringing us together’ feeling.”
What are the biggest differences between Berlin and LA?
He laughs. Of all cities, he muses, he could not have chosen two places more different. In LA, there are “taco stands everywhere,” he says. “Really good spicy salsa. The food in LA is so good. The sunshine. We have a yard.”
“I’m able to wake up in the morning and go stretch naked in the yard and get the sun on my face.”
And, of course, the culture is different. “In Berlin, some neighbours don’t even look me in the eye.”
“On the street in Berlin, you don’t know who’s open and who wants to be left alone, but most, I think, are the latter. In the US, there’s more openness. Some mornings, I pass a school crossing guard, and when I tell her ‘good morning,’ I know I’ll get a really warm, genuine ‘good morning’ back. Compared to Germany, it almost feels like being in a musical.”
What issues are firing you up right now?
He exhales: “Obviously, the world’s a fucked up place right now and there’s just so much injustice everywhere.”
“Here in L.A., immigration is something you see very visibly, and for people to still be showing up, contributing, and organising, despite the daily threat of ICE raids, risking their lives just to go to work and be kind, it’s a fucking honour that we have them, and a fucking disgrace how we treat them.”
He shares a story: “The other day, we bought fruit from a woman on the street, and it brought us to tears. She was so kind. This was in an area where there are known ICE sweeps happening all the time. She inspired me to keep showing up.”
He pauses for a bit, then drives the point home. “Stay kind. It matters.”
I realised I’ve led this conversation to a heavy place again, but with Jacob Meehan, it’s easy: he’s heartfelt, open, fully able to bounce between sorrow and laughter. So I ask:
What is bringing you joy now?
He thinks on it for some time—because, he admits, “Many things are bringing me joy right now. How to choose just one?”
Then he lands on one: “I just got a new computer!” He laughs. “It’s my first one in ten years. And it is fully giving me life! I realised how much I was accepting my old, slow computer and didn’t see how slow it was. I’ve been downloading new software, and I have the newest version of Ableton, so I can work really quickly now. So that’s the mission now. Just dig into the work.” ★
Mini Revelations by Jacob Meehan is out April 17 on Gay Groove Records. Pre-order on Bandcamp now.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Alexander Cheves is an author and essayist exploring sex, culture, art, and music. Winner of the Geoff Mains Prize and an NLGJA journalism award, he can usually be found dancing shirtless in Berlin or working on his next book.
Words: Alexander Cheves
Images: courtesy of the artist; first image by Gabriel Strobel
