Rap music is minority music. It is the anger of marginalised youth. Yet it shits all over the LGBTQ community. This is largely the product of fear and suspicion in the ghettoised urban communities that were the crucible of hip-hop. Most homophobia is borne out of survival instincts in an atmosphere of violence where homosexuality is equated to weakness.
This is not an attempt to excuse the myriad snarls of “faggot” or the endless slurs and belittlement. In 2013, though, there is more reason than ever to hope that hip-hop’s attitude to the LGBTQ community will catch up with its approach to social justice in general.
Mainstream hip-hop is making moves in the right direction. Azealia Banks and Frank Ocean came out as bisexual and mercifully few people seemed to care. (Hip-hop behemoth Russell Simmons described Ocean as a “catalyst with courage”.) But like everything good that happens in rap music, LGBT hip-hop is primarily exploding on an underground level.
Y-Love, a rapper who hit a triple whammy of potential prejudice by being born black, homosexual and Orthodox Jewish, came out last year. “Stories like mine are happening in every club in every hood — that gay MC who walks in reluctantly, if he can hold it down on the mic, can get respect as much as his hetero counterpart,” he wrote on his blog. All positive change in hip-hop is enacted through grassroots battles and peformance, as when female rappers broke onto the scene. Hip-hop is a meritocratic culture of respect, and it is from this platform that LGBT rappers will change the culture.
Gay rappers are not a modern phenomenon. In Cali, Deep Dickollective held it down for homo hip-hop 20 years ago in the Bay Area, amongst a host of others. The PeaceOUT WorldHomo Hop Festival ran for years. But in 2013, gay rappers are not simply interacting with one another in insular communities. Social networking is facilitating far wider collusion. From the Floridian booty rap of Yo Majesty to the Canadian rap-Klezmer fusion of Socalled to Michigan’s pan-sexual prodigy Angel Haze, the scene is exploding.
Cultural interchange with the ‘ball community’, a platform for drag queens and other queer artists, is also providing a new platform for the experimental gay hip-hop scene. “Today’s queer mania for ghetto fabulousness and bling masks its elemental but silent relationship to even more queer impulses toward fabulousness in the 1960s and 1970s”, according to the excellent documentary Pick up the Mic.
A queer identity is being transformed from something to be hidden and mocked into a stimulus for creativity. Hip-hop is music for the margins, and it is from the margins that its most daring creativity bursts. LGBT rappers are not finding success as homosexual novelties, but because they are producing exceptionally experimental (and exceptionally queer) music.
Cuntry Living presents an evening of Ladies & LGBTQ hip-hop and rap this Monday at Babylove.
