"This dude is too great and too funny..Peep it"
[Rapping just like LL col j, Snoop Dogg, DMX & Jay-z]
[Does Denzel Washington Impersonation, Roasts On Shaq's Slow Talking, Charles Barkley & More]
Juba: It wasn’t until commercial viability became an issue for the record industry at large did the need for a categoric and hard-line heterosexualization and hypermasculine posturing come front and center. Hip-hop’s racial contextualization has been similar to that of early rock ‘n roll - the sale of scart, titillating, and ultimately Otherizing fantasy images of nonwhite people that fit into that same old boxes of “frightening yet sexy.” So, no, maybe a “gay” identity wouldn’t fit as a component of a “hip-hop” identity if you understand “gay” as a code for “weak” or “feminized” and therefore undesirable to a media machine selling a particular kind of Scary Negro Drag, or someone who’s performing it and unable or unwilling to interrogate their positionality.
At the same time, there’s the issue of “gay” or “Queer” being yet another identity marker that had already been co-opted by white middle-class institutions by the time hip-hop was beginning to receive mainstream attention. An authentic b-boy (read: Black) would have had a difficult time integrating a gay or bisexual identity into his pose, as “gay” was something he would know he was racially, economically, and socially excluded from.
Tim’m: But even this undermines a rich legacy of gays and lesbians in Black communities that had little to no interaction with white gay culture. Culturally speaking, Black gays have always preferred to abide alongside their Black communities rather than “ghettoize” their sexualities into geographic “safe spaces.” This isn’t a criticism, just an observation.
Juba: I agree. There is the assumption by Black straights and white gays that Black Queers were somehow automatically interested in participating in white gay culture - which also assumes an uncomplicated relationship to being “out” in the way most people understand that. That is extremely problematic and, as you have said, lazy thinking.
Growing up in Chicago and attending high school in the early and mid-1980s there was no real distinction between straight and gay in the house music scene, though it was overwhelmingly Black and Latino. My high school reflected this dynamic as well as that of the white gay kids never really expressing any interest in what we were doing.
[…]
Juba: Don’t get me wrong. I’m not using the notion that critics have largely ignored nonwhite gay aesthetics inside of hip-hop culture as an excuse for the homophobia I or others have experienced within the African American community. I just think it’s a much more complicated conversation than Black people - especially Black men, critics, artists, and consumers alike - want to have because it would require an examination of the way partiarchy functions intracommunally. Open conversations about homophobia as an extension of sexism and misogyny would put a lot of stuff on the table that gets dismissed in the name of silencing and the erasure of inappropriate faggotry.
Tim’m: You said “inappropriate faggotry.” Let’s not get it twisted. Hip-hop heteros rely heavily on the inappropriate faggot in order to even exist. In a really twisted sort of way, they rely on the verbal bashing of fags in order to substantiate their manhood. Which backpacking love, peace, and justice MCs have ever been regarded as “hard?” None. In fact, many of them are so often suspected of being “fags” that they go to sometimes great and awkward lengths to say: “Hey, I’m for peace and love but fuck a faggot.” It’s really funny, actually. Sadly, hard edge and masculinity almost always means you hate fags. We can imagine Eminem doing a song on stage with Elton John, but that’ll be the day when Dre kicks it with Little Richard, “good lawdy.”
I think there’s also an assumption that people who seem to fag-bash in their lyrics are necessarily homophobic in the ways people normally think about homophobia. It’s one thing to say you “don’t like faggots” or “that’s so gay,” but, in reality, you love your lesbian mother or look out for your baby brother or cousin who you know ain’t never had a girlfriend. It’s another thing altogether to be raising megabucks to stop gay people from getting married or finance the Republican candidate for president. Sometimes I think I prefer the homophobic remarks I can strategically counter over the subtle, polite, smiling-in-my-face white (or Black) Christians who want to relinquish my most basic human rights. Generally, I just don’t think there’s ever been a thorough assessment of Black people’s perspectives on Black people in their community who are gay or lesbian, unless produced by the Christian right as a political scare tactic. Nobody’s interviewing my mama or straight brothers. They aren’t talking with the first (straight) emcees I ever rhymed with or people I collaborate with who still don’t care ’cause they see talent. This may sound a bit off, but I’ve been in a lot of Black setting where people know I like boys and ain’t a damn person tripped. […]
Juba: Thanks for touching on something I hadn’t addressed directly - power, specifically the institutional power or the ability to create and effect public policy around one’s prejudices, global, white-supremacist, patriarchal capitalism - something that Black people do not possess. People do indeed get it twisted. Hip-hop didn’t draft the Defense of Marriage Act, or create “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” or murder young folks like Sakia Gunn, Matthew Shepard, Gwen Araujo, Brandon Teena, and Rashawn Brazell. What happened to those young people was allowed to happen, and encouraged. I too get tired of the onus and responsibility for interrogating and eradicating homophobia being laid at the feet of poor and/or nonwhite people.
The hypocrisy on both Black and white media outlets is so glaring as to be comical. Even the majority of white LGBT media outlets are steeped in and driven by middle-class economic and cultural privilege. They maintain and invest in these conversations about hip-hop - seen as a poor, urban, nonwhite youth culture - as the apex, if not the genesis, of all pop-cultural homophobic notions. We get the attendant ridiculously satirical or frightened and aghast puff pieces about b-boys and b-girls pushing against-all-odds at some huge wall of nigga antagonism.
Then a movie like Brokeback Mountain becomes successful, and all of a sudden, you see articles outlining the long history of Hollywood’s homophobia and how these invariably white actors can’t get jobs after playing fag on film. Huh?! What happened? Where did the b-boys disappear to - or is this our fault as well? Did Run-DMC secretly concoct some scheme to keep Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean from getting feature film leads after they did Making Love in 1982? Where we at?
We’re exactly where you say, Tim’m - invisible, trotted out when needed to create some furor or sell some magazines or some cable shows. Poor and nonwhite folks (and yes, this includes Eminem’s authenticated wiggerisms) become these abject, mythological characters. This is the genesis of my reference to the frightening, “inappropriate” faggot - by which I mean the real, the living, the breathing, fucking, fighting, loving, shit-talking faggot (and by extension the even more frightening, emasculating bulldagga/dyke) as opposed to the erstaz, apolitical, defenseless “Men on Film” incarnation of the “sissy bitch-nigga” (wow, there goes that misogyny again.)
I mean, really, could you watch Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied and come away with a notion that queeny Black gay men were afraid of straight people or somehow necessarily co-opted and conscripted by a whitewashed notion of “gay” culture? How does a straight Black man look at himself after reading Essex Hemphill’s interrogations of his brothers’ sexism toward Black women or deconstructions of how the white gaze had complicated his notions of what his desires should be? How do white and nonwhite men deal when confronted with Pat Parker’s dialogues on female masculinity and butch identity?
Heteronormative culture, white and nonwhite, doesn’t want to deal with the issues they discuss. It’s all too scary. So they start making up these mythologies, these ghosts to go “Ooooh, boogedy boogedy!” […]
1. Dora Ratjen
[For the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, Adolf Hitler wanted to show the world the supremacy of the Aryan race. German, Dora Ratjen, notable for her deep voice and her refusal to share the shower room with the other female athletes, was Germany's entry for the women's high jump. She came in fourth. Britain's competitor, Dorothy Tyler, who won a silver medal, remembers her. “I had competed against Dora and I knew she was a man,” she says. “You could tell by the voice and the build.” Ratjen was discovered to be a man on his way back from the European Championships at a train station in Germany. Although Ratjen was wearing a skirt, two women spotted him with a five o'clock shadow. A doctor was summoned and Ratjen's sex was revealed. In 1938 Ratjen was barred from further competition. ]
2. Stella Walsh
[At one point, Stella Walsh, a Polish-American sprinter, was the fastest woman in the world. She won gold in 1932 and silver in 1936 for the 100m sprint. During her career, she set more than 100 national and world records and was inducted into the American Track and Field Hall of Fame. She lived her entire life as a woman, and even had a short-lived marriage to an American man. In 1980, Walsh was killed by mistake during an armed robbery at a shopping mall in Cleveland, Ohio. The postmortem revealed she had male genitalia. She was also found to have both male and female chromosomes.]
3. Sin Kim Dan
[Dan broke the women's records for 400m and 800m in 1961/62. She was the first woman to run 400m in less than 52 seconds. In 1963 in Moscow, other female sprinters refused to run against her because she looked like a man. At that same time a South Korean man claimed that she was his son who had disappeared during the war. Obligatory sex-testing for international athletics was introduced in 1966, and for whatever reason, Sin did not compete after that.]
4. Tamara and Irina Press
[Sisters Tamara and Irina Press won five track and field Olympic gold medals for the Soviet Union, and set 26 world records in the 1960s. Their careers suddenly ended at the time that gender verification was introduced. Critics have suggested that the Presses were actually male, or perhaps hermaphrodites.]
5. Santhi Soundarajan
[Santhi Soundarajan, a middle distance runner from India, won a silver medal at the 2006 Asia Games. She was stripped of her medal after she failed a verification test.]