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23 April 2025

Tina Knowles remembers Beyoncé’s Uncle Johnny in new memoir: ‘He was the closest person in my life’

In Matriarch, Knowles writes visiting her first gay bar with Uncle Johnny and helping him design outfits for local drag queens

By Gary Grimes

Tina Knowles and Uncle Johnny
Tina Knowles and Uncle Johnny (Image: beyonce.com)

Tina Knowles, mother to Beyoncé and Solange, has detailed her close relationship with the singers’ famed Uncle Johnny, a gay relative who passed away after a battle with AIDS.

Beyoncé fans will be familiar with Uncle Johnny as he was frequently referenced during the singer’s RENAISSANCE album era, most notably in the lyrics of her song ‘HEATED’ in which she raps: “Uncle Johnny made my dress, this cheap spandex, she looks a mess!”

The star stated at the time that the album was inspired by the house music she had first encountered through her late-uncle. Johnny was a fashion designer and had designed many costumes for the aspiring singer in her pre-fame days with Destiny’s Child.

In Tina’s upcoming memoir Matriarch, the mother of two writes in detail about the special relationship she shared with Uncle Johnny. Knowles writes of the pair’s childhood growing up in Galveston, Texas, going to their first gay bar together, and the drag queens that would come in and out of his apartment for whom he was designing outfits.

Speaking to Out about her late-uncle, Knowles said: “He was the closest person in my life who understood me. I didn’t feel like anybody else understood me.”

“Saturday mornings, my daughters would put on the house music he used to play as he helped raise them”

In the book, of which an excerpt was recently published in Vogue, Knowles recalls Johnny’s battle with AIDS. In the early Nineties, he entered a long term care facility after being diagnosed with AIDS-related dementia.

“When the family wasn’t in some city with Destiny’s Child, I would bring Johnny home with me on the weekends to spend time with Solange and Beyoncé,” she writes. “Saturday mornings, my daughters would put on the house music he used to play as he helped raise them. Now they played it to him, dancing around as he bobbed his head to Robin S singing ‘Show Me Love’ or Crystal Waters going ‘la da dee, la do daa.'”

She notes that Solange, who was aged 11 at the time, found his illness especially difficult. “Watching Johnny decline was very hard on Solange. She feels things so deeply, internalizing pain until it reappears later as art or words.”

“Johnny took his last breath on July 29, 1998. He was 48,” she later writes. “We had his memorial the following Saturday at Wynn Funeral Home in Galveston. Beyoncé and Kelly [Rowland] sang with the other girls from Destiny’s Child. They had just been touring with Boyz II Men and now they were here crying. I don’t know how they got through ‘Amazing Grace,’ but they did.”

Beyoncé would later release RENAISSANCE on the anniversary of his death in 2022.

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