By Jude Jones
With the release of Tyler, the Creator’s eighth studio album CHROMAKOPIA, GAY45 takes a moment to stop and reflect on the queer history of rap and hip hop music, from Deep Dickollective in the early 2000s to Frank Ocean’s “thank you’s”, the soft-spoken masculinity of Drain Gang to the flamboyant gayness of Lil Nas X.
‘I feel like a free man. If I listen closely… I can hear the sky falling too.’
In 2012, Frank Ocean posted a simple, typewriter-print post to his Tumblr blog. It was visually simple, words strewn onto TextEdit like the sinews of a heart, then signed monogamously: ‘- Frank.’
Yet this aesthetic simplicity, intimate and candid, held in it a gently-rocking sea of emotions, Ocean’s poetic, pixel-born confession that the inspiration behind his hazy ode to heartbreak in Channel Orange had been a boy.
‘4 summers ago, I met somebody. I was 19 years old. He was too […] It was my first love, it changed my life.’
The moment – minimalist and soft-spoken – still glows as a cultural watershed, some twelve years on. At the time, The New York Times reported on the letter as ‘a giant risk with [Ocean’s] career.’ At the time, gay marriage still was not a federal right in the United States.
Reading it still floats me back to that strange, mid-Internet, pre-Obergefell era of the 2010s, when any public admission of queerness felt like a revelation, a revolution. But there was Frank Ocean, musing tenderly, ‘I don’t have any secrets I need kept anymore… I feel like a free man.’ There’s a power in the simultaneous intentionality and incidentalism of the admission, as if it’s not a confession but a sidenote. As if he neither wanted nor intended the media storm that the post unfurled.
Hip hop’s history is complex. It developed out of funk, blues, jazz, and R&B as part of a communitarian and anti-violence politics. It also took notes on disco, historically one of music’s queerest corners. Yet, as the softer sounds of its precursors evolved into a musicscape of breaks, scratches, disses, and box beats, a coarser machismo accompanied this more challenging sound.
Hip hop, in this swelling form, was politically confrontational. Work such as N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton(1988) was the blood of a righteous, anti-establishment anger, aimed against the institutional racism of the United States, against the realities of urban poverty and systematic social deprivation. However, its masculinist positioning also digested and regurgitated broader hetero-patriarchal social values, particularly those of misogyny and queerphobia. According to a quantitative 2001 study, 22 per cent of gangsta rap lyrics glorified and described grievous acts of anti-woman violence. The open use of homophobic slurs was made a similarly banal motif.
However, queer representation existed from hip hop’s earliest days (admittedly, though, as part of its weirder underground). As early as 1981 there was the LA-based rap group Age of Consent, whose track “Fight Back” proclaimed such messianic gospel as ‘bad rap is spreading around […] we’re here to say it’s OK, for anybody to rap, Black, white, or gay.’
In the 1990s, neo-soul pioneer Meshell Ndegeocello – signed to Madonna’s Maverick Records – was openly bisexual, in a relationship with third-wave feminist writer Rebecca Walker. Then, in 2000, the spunky gay rap group Deep Dickollective formed in San Francisco and christened a “homohop” subgenre, releasing four albums before disbanding in 2008. They were, according to Michal Emil Delost, ‘founded upon a postmodernist critique of heteronormativity and race theory […] That their inspiration was drawn from niche political and poetic circles made no difference as they spoke to and for their own communities.’
The story of queer acceptance in hip hop, however, has predominantly been one of acts of allyship attempting to normalise those identities precariously hidden within the culture. In 1991, N.W.A founding member Ice-T released O.G. Original Gangster, which included two tracks out-right denouncing homophobia. And, in 2004, Kanye West condemned hip-hop’s homophobia in an interview and discussed his personal evolution on the topic, prompted by a cousin’s coming out. Rap duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis perhaps best summarised the state of the industry in their single 2012 “Same Love”: ‘If I was gay, I would think hip-hop hates me.’
The topic nonetheless remained contested terrain. Throughout the 2000s, Eminem attracted repeated criticism for his use of the slur “faggot” and lyrical threats of anti-queer violence. (Elton John might have given the rapper the “f-pass” in 2013, but the performative stunt inevitably fell on deaf ears and prompted a Huffpost open letter condemning them both). Tyler, the Creator found himself in the same boat and was even banned from the UK in 2015 for ‘inciting terrorism’, speculated to be in-part a response to the homophobic and misogynist content of his provocative, horrorcore tracks.
When Ocean’s letter came out in 2012, a new discourse opened about what kinds of hip hop music would be able to tolerate queerness. Although Nicki Minaj affirmed that, ‘we’ll see [a mainstream queer rapper] in my lifetime,’ she voiced her concern that ‘people view gay men as having no street credibility.’
Snoop Dogg similarly celebrated Ocean’s statement, but prefaced by saying, ‘Frank Ocean ain’t no rapper. He’s a singer. It’s acceptable in the singing world, but in the rap world I don’t know if it will ever be acceptable because rap is so masculine.’ Ice-T, for his part, agreed. ‘I’ve done hardcore hip-hop in my life where masculinity is at a premium… being in pop and gay is OK. It would be difficult to listen to a gay gangster rapper.’
Against this, music critic dream hampton (stylised in lower-case in ode to bell hooks) pointed to hip-hop’s queer, sentimental histories in a response letter to Ocean’s “thank you’s” posted by Jay-Z to his “Life and Times” website:
‘Your letter is revolutionary not least of all because it is about love […] You fulfil hip-hop’s early promise to not give a fuck about what others think of you […] Syd the Kid’s sexy stud profile and her confusing, misogynistic videos speak to the many contradictions and posturing your generation inherited from the hip-hop generation before you. I’m sure you know a rumour about Big Daddy Kane having AIDS and with it, the suggestion that he was bisexual, effectively ended his career […] I know as a singer you love Rahsaan Patterson and bemoan the fact that homophobia prevented him from being the huge star his talents deserve […] Imagine if Luther [Vandross] had been able to write, as you closed your letter, “I don’t have any secrets I need kept anymore… I feel like a free man.”’
Significant in this cultural moment, and cited elsewhere in hampton’s letter, was Tyler, the Creator’s own penitential reckoning with his homophobic past in its wake. The artist, a longtime Ocean collaborator, became one of the biggest names in the industry to voice his support, Tweeting soon afterwards:
‘Fucking Finally Sus Boy @frank_ocean Hahahaha, You Still Aint Got No Bitches Hahaha My N**** Dawg.’
‘My Big Brother Finally Fucking Did that. Proud Of That N**** Cause I Know That Shit Is Difficult Or Whatever…’
As always, half-ironic humour shone through as the language of male intimacy. However, Ocean’s letter also paved the way for Tyler’s own coming out with the decade’s progression: calling himself ‘gay as fuck’ in a Rolling Stone interview the following year, announcing he’d had a boyfriend by 15 in 2017, opening himself to more queer lyricism in 2017’s Flower Boy, then discussing more directly male intimacy in 2019’s Igor, whose promotional material featured a Tyler in gaudy, blonde-wig (kinda) drag.
And although hip hop that decade – and within Tyler’s personal brand of sound – would be defined by a transition to a more introspective, confessional, and melodic R&B style, Tyler’s increasing openness on his sexuality represented what industry voices had earlier said might never happen: the coming out of an artist who had cut his teeth in hip-hop’s more abrasive, “hypermasculine” sounds.
The explosive rise of Brockhampton in the mid-2010s offered another case study in queer rap. Originally formed online out of a Kanye West discussion forum, the Texas-born, California-based collective was founded by Kevin Abstract, who centred his sexuality in much of his lyrics. ‘Why you always rap about being gay?’, he spits in 2016 single “Junky”, ‘Cause not enough n****’s rap and be gay. Where I come from, n*****’s get called “faggot” and killed, So I’ma get head from a n**** right here.’
Brockhampton broke breakneck into the mainstream and self-styled in homoerotic undertones, describing themselves as the ‘best boy band since One Direction.’ And, although their sound could be and often was gentler and more ruminative, some of their biggest hits assimilated, albeit with sizeable pop-world refraction, that traditional rap sound that Ice-T and Snoop Dogg would have insisted could never hold queerness.
From there, queer rap music splintered. Ocean’s 2016 follow-up to Channel Orange, Blonde, became the best album of the 2010s, yet the queerness of its maker still remained a novelty in the media. Esquire even proclaimed astounded, ‘A Gay Man Is Making the Most Anticipated Album of the Year’ as it readied for release (Ocean, it should be noted, declines to label himself as gay).
The cultural image of a hegemonic, heterosexual Black masculinity was simultaneously being unsettled on cinema and TV screens. In 2016, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, the story of a gay Black drug kingpin working in Atlanta, won Best Film at the Oscars. This followed from the subversive successes of HBO’s The Wire and trickled into more nuanced, less stereotyped media portrayals of male Black queerness, such as Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Raymond Holt.
2016 also saw Beyoncé sample the genderfluid rapper Big Freedia in her chart-topping song “Formation”, who then further went on to collaborate with the likes of Kesha, Lizzo, and Drake. It also saw the crystallisation of the melancholic SoundCloud rap niche, whose transgressive, soppy masculinity has ushered in its own queer hermeneutics.
To an older generation of hip-hop listeners, the genre’s mumble and Soundcloud variants are an anathemic part of the new generation’s online brain rot, ancillary to Internet absurdism and skibidi surrealism. These tensions became so heated in music’s discursive zeitgeist that an SNL parody of rappers of the Lil Uzi Vert and Lil Peep ilk – starring Timothée Chalamet and Pete Davidson alongside Questlove and “Queen Latifah” – went viral, amassing some 31 million YouTube views.
However, these subgenres have evidently played their own role – however esoteric – in creating new spaces for queernesses and alternative expressions of gender inside the broader hip-hop umbrella. For example, in a profile on the cult Swedish Soundcloud rap collective Drain Gang in 2023, music journalist Cassidy George noted:
‘[A]s [Drain Gang members] Bladee and Ecco2K have increasingly incorporated more queer themes into their work […] the visibility of their LGBTQ+ listenership has increased online. Their queer, trans, and nonbinary fans now use the same forums as incels to discuss the ways that Drain Gang has helped them to identify gender dysphoria [… and] articulate a strain of suffering that is specific to the Internet age.’
The deconstructionist potential – however lo-fi, however arcane – of this music is somewhere in its sad-boi framing of masculinity (Drain Gang-adjacent rapper and Charli XCX collaborator Yung Lean even won a mention in this year’s queer-coded “Cute” exhibition at London’s Somerset House) and its distorted, transcendentalist sound. Music theorist Max Schaffer’s concept of the ‘chaos-trans voice’, an attempt to explain the inherent queerness of another Internet-born micro-genre in hyperpop, may help a little way in elucidating this.
For Schaffer, vocal technologies like autotune, another touchstone of Soundcloud, mumble, and drain, have an inherently gender-troubling potentiality. ‘In “queering” the voice [through autotune],’ they write, ‘you’re tearing it up until its unrecognizable, then putting it back together’ to create ‘something far more expansive [and] evolved than a human voice.’ The subsequent sounds do not only move post-gender but into the post-human as well, glitching the “natural” musical voice into new, technologically-mediated spaces of self-expression. Such a drive makes sense for a generation of artists raised on and by the Internet, where the elaborate construction and projection of a multitude of customisable, digital, data-built selves is all part and parcel, where selfhood literally extends out of the body and into the Web.
The devotees of these genres may not themselves always be queer. A running joke in the Drain cult is that it is for queers and mentally-ill straight men, or otherwise ‘queer-adjacent straight people’. But there is certainly work being done, between the gloomy ambiance, uncanny-valley vocals, and androgynous fashion sense, to soften hetero-patriarchal masculinity’s sharper edges. And even then, the connections between the genre and queerness are sometimes rendered explicitly. In 2022, founding Soundcloud figure Lil Uzi Vert came out as non-binary genderfluid. And, for all his undeniable flaws, the extensive history of domestic abuse and violent battery, rapper XXXTentacion has been praised as a renegade in trans rights, his posthumous biography including a litany of thank you’s and personal stories shared by trans musicians.
From there, the genre has only splintered further, to the extent that bracketing everything into “hip-hop” seems a ham-handed and disingenuous feat. However, the groundwork done in the genre has clearly affected today’s musical landscape, including the ability of openly gay pop stars to step into the limelight.
Lil Nas X, perhaps at the forefront of this new, queer musical vanguard, thanked his 2010s idols for how they shifted the landscape. ‘I think artists like Frank, in general, and like Tyler […] they made it easier for me to be where I am, comfortably.’ From there, he has predicted a much brighter future. ‘Change is happening. There’s going to be so many gay rappers. There’s going to be more trans people in the industry and whatnot. Ten years from now, everything that I’m doing won’t even seem like it was shocking.’ The tone, less than a decade later, was lightyears from the forecasts being made at the time of Frank Ocean’s letter.
But to assess the culture’s future directions, maybe it’s best to go back to hip hop’s roots. ‘Hip-hop culture,’ noted Freedom Moves editor H. Samy Alim, ‘comes from communities that were meant to be decimated, not just marginalized: communities that were destroyed, abandoned, intentionally robbed of resources. If hip-hop culture in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s were decentering white supremacy, recent hip-hop culture and hip-hop of the future is decentering sexism (and) heteronormativity, along with white supremacy (and) capitalism.’
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