Why does hip hop hate gay

Back in hip-hop's adolescence — when it was as playful, juvenile, and wacky as the kids breathing life into it on the playground — hip-hop was more fluid. How do you criticize modern rap for being amoral when older rap tended to be way more amoral?

One of the many challenges of the "homo-hop" movement being accepted and popularized more broadly was its whiteness, because hip-hop was seen as both Black and straight at the time. Clubs like The LimelightCrazy Nanny'sand the Warehouse, a three-story secret Black queer wonderland tucked under a bridge in the Bronx, NY, became important places for Black and Latine hip-hop heads to flourish and continue innovating together.

Roundtable Homophobia in Hip

Not to mention the homophobia back then, that also still exists. As the article notes, "West's call for tolerance remains the highest-profile rebuke of gay-bashing that hip-hop has seen." In recent years, however, Kanye and several other rappers have embraced the use of the term "no homo," a poetic aside meant to distance the artist from any lyrics that may sound homoerotic.

Before these MCs, Smalls says, out queer people were mostly involved with the less visible aspects of hip-hop culture like graffiti, breakdancing, and DJing, including the popular house and hip-hop DJ Man Parrish.

They've been at the forefront and in the underground innovating the genre since it started. But the discussion that Offset’s lyrics provoked gave an insight to how the genre is evolving. Fifty years into hip-hop, we've gotten used to decades of headlines proclaiming the genre's culture is homophobic and misogynistic — that generations of queer talents were forced to the peripheries and why closets until today's mega star rappers like Tyler, the Creator, Lil Nas X, and Cardi B busted down the doors to a new chapter.

The documentary captures a moment in time where these MCs meet each other for the first time at festivals like Rainbow Flava, Outpunk, and PeaceOUT, with the goal of establishing the category of "gay hip-hop" sometimes called homo-hop back then.

However, going into the '90s, there were more and more out queer rappers popping up with different styles and approaches, largely in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, who built on the idea of fighting homophobia directly with their rhymes. The documentary "Pick Up the Mic" is an incredible day-in-the-life look at this pioneering community of '90s and early s out queer MCs — their struggles, goals, and triumphs.

Smalls was shocked to discover the earliest recorded out rap group they could find was a group from the early '80s with two white gay guys and a woman in Los Angeles called Age gay Consent. Alongside hop popularity of disco and the aesthetic influence of popular gay performers, there was, of course, also the vogue ballroom scene with all of its posing, dance battling, and posturing, which contributed to the cultural mix of the communities hip-hop, and especially breakdancing, was born out of.

A lot of it was about adornment and showing off your body, and that's not just a gay hate, that's part of Black diasporic culture. Most famously, Sugar Hill Gang's hit "Rapper's Delight," the hip-hop single that's largely credited with bringing the genre to the mainstream, sampled the disco record "Good Times" by Black disco legend Nile Rodgers, who's known for writing and producing gay disco anthems like Gay file Ross's "I'm Coming Out.

That fluidity, openness, and playfulness in early hip-hop also carried over into the fashion. They all had different styles and approaches to using or not using their identity in their art. Obviously I’m not directing that at you, but the sub itself.

But that's not actually the full story of queer people in hip-hop. Simultaneously, a new school of lesser-known MCs also started to emerge who were out and explicit in their music — a community of underground queer rappers and activists who were truly the first to usher in today's moment of unapologetically out rap.

Hate to say it, but frankly, there was a lack of swag. Most of the MCs weren't trying to be famous, but rather simply wanted to be real to who they were, advocate for their community, and find people who would respect them for that. Smalls postulates more people would've chosen to be out in early decades if there wasn't so much "fear-mongering" going on about what that doe mean for record deals, endorsements, and simply keeping their families financially stable.

Popular artists that weren't out yet on the global stage, like Da Brat and Queen Latifah, would still frequent these clubs — a way of being out with their community, Hip says. Kanye criticized the hip-hop community, saying, "Hip-hop seemed like it was about fighting for your rights in the beginning, about speaking your mind, and breaking down barriers or whatever, but everybody in hip-hop discriminates against gay people.

The Queer History of

Smalls grew up in New York alongside hip-hop in the '80s and has been out in Black and queer communities since they were 15 years old in the '90s. They would rap over hip-hop beats with disco samples, but they still seemed to be beaming in from a totally different culture than the kids putting out records in New York.

That's why you see the move away from disco, not just by Black culture and hip-hop, but everyone. But with the broader society still being homophobic at the time, this rise of gay culture at the start of hip-hop led to blowback.

While worshiping music from rock stars who raped underage girls? But one of the popular featured groups in the doc, Deep Dickollective, was made up of four queer Black men, one of whom was a trans man, who were rapping to empower other queer Black men.

Such casual use of a perceived anti-gay slur is not uncommon in the history of hip-hop. As one of their members, Tim'm T. West, pointed out, at this time the divide between Black and white queer communities was so deep that there were Black queer folks who didn't like to use terms like "gay" or "lesbian" because they thought it was too associated with white culture and preferred more culturally relevant terms like, "in the life.

How tf does this sub criticize modern hip hop by questioning the character of the artists. From Eminem’s repeated use of the word “f*ggot” in his music to the ubiquity of the term “no homo” in the hip-hop scene in the early s, gay people – or at least softness and.