Taking the Homophobia Out of Hip-Hop: A Progress Report

In 2006, the relationship between queers and hip-hop culture remains as complex as ever.

Just like mainstream society, gay culture is divided over hip hop socially, artistically, politically, economically, racially and even by generation. Gays are also divided along the same kind of lines regarding just how they perceive their own victimization from homophobia in hip-hop. For example, gay blacks can have a different set of issues than gay whites in their dealing with anti-gay discrimination from mainstream hip-hop culture.

And also like mainstream society, gays enjoy the groove, poetry, technology, and stars of hip-hop. We can especially relate to another culture's quest for respect and recognition.

And, of course, some gays can especially relate with hip-hop's aura of powerful and alluring hyper-masculinity. Some like to associate with it so strongly they are even willing to let slide hip-hop's traditional antipathy towards homosexuality.

As incredible as it may sound, many young gay men buy, and accept into their dance clubs, the music of rappers who publicly denigrate their lives. Yet many gays have also assimilated to other ever-present, super-masculine institutions like professional sports, the military, and the corporate world (which are also traditionally anti-gay). So it is not too much of a stretch to see how gays have successfully managed to integrate the now ubiquitous and institutionalized world of hip-hop into their lives.

In hip-hop culture and music, young homosexuals in particular find a kind of “straight-acting” representation of themselves that is distinct from the mainstream “gay” herd. Be it called "homothug", "downlow", or whatever, this gay younger generation sub-culture has chosen hip-hop to carve out its own contemporary social niche.

Considering how hip-hop is both so hyper-sexual and so hyper-homophobic, its current popularity with gays sometimes seems like a self-conflicted love/hate fixation. On one hand it can be enticing and empowering. But it can also be limiting and even dangerous.

The shaky peace many gays have made with often virulently anti-gay rap music can also lead to a troubling apathy. It's bad enough that so few people in the mainstream come to the defense of gays targeted by hip-hop artists. It's worse when not even gays themselves speak out.

The masculinity issue in hip-hop presents an especially challenging set of issues to blacks of all sexual orientations.

Author Keith Boykin, one of America's leading commentators on race and sexual orientation, says in his “Homos, Hot Beats, and Hip-Hop”, “Hip hop creates and reinforces exaggerated images of black masculinity and then uses its market power to regulate and restrict our perceptions of black authenticity. Those who don't fit the newly popular pimp and thug image are discredited by their own communities, creating a vicious cultural cycle that values style over substance, money over mission, and ignorance over education”.

Reporter and social commentator Jasmyne A. Cannick writes extensively on issues of importance to the gay black community. In her recent, April 2006 Gay.com article “The Silence over Hip-hop's Homophobia”, she lists the recent Busta Rhymes anti-gay incident as an example of today's dangerous apathy toward the continuing homophobia in hip-hop.

Cannick points out, “The exploitation of women and gays in today's hip-hop culture has become increasingly accepted by our own silence. Black America has an ethical and social responsibility to call out its own....No one else is going to do it for us”.

The problem is also addressed in Byron Hurt's recent documentary Beyond Beats & Rhymes: Masculinity in Hip-Hop, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival. The film dissects the violence, misogyny and warped sense of manhood in much of today's hip-hop.

As Hurt said in a March 2005 interview with Wiretap, "It's up to us as consumers to challenge some of the representations of masculinity that we see in American culture," he says. "We have to start saying, ‘I don't buy into this idea that a man is supposed to be violent or sexist or homophobic.'"