If you show too much queer attraction and self-expression, people get uncomfortable. If you coddle hip-hop’s cisgendered, heteronormative core, you can cook. Sometimes, we simply fuck off and do for self.
It’s not always like movies, where an existential threat to humanity forces us to settle our differences and soldier forward together, and some maudlin pop song soundtracks our unified efforts to save the future. The last four years have shown us that people don’t always band together when straits get dire. We’ve seen young men fight tooth and nail to defend their ability to transgress and offend at will, clinging desperately to the 20th-century social mores that centered their needs and wants. We’ve seen antiracism pawned off as “woke supremacy.” We’ve seen elderly men weaponize political power to legislate how women are allowed to care for and live in their bodies. But as it dawns on some of us that adding more seats to the proverbial table requires sacrificing a bit of your own elbow room, relations have gotten ugly. If we wanted, we could restructure the power dynamics that bind us.
What I’ve seen in the intervening years has made me by turns more hopeful about queer representation in hip-hop and less sure I will live to see a time when the community doesn’t excuse and ignore hateful, homophobic, transphobic rhetoric. Not everyone handled these developments very well, but it felt like progress was being made, however painstaking and slight, toward greater respect for LGBTQ hip-hop fans and artists. iLoveMakonnen had just come out, and Young M.A was flourishing in New York. I am by turns more hopeful about queer representation in hip-hop and less sure I will live to see a time when the community doesn’t excuse and ignore hateful, homophobic, transphobic rhetoric.įour and a half years ago, I wrote about homophobia in hip-hop culture.