Gay hip hop
Eric Nord article
Eric Nord has written [2003Aug06] a piece on gay hip hop:
"Let me officially start the countdown to when the first gay hip hop artist comes out of the closet. Are you a famous gay hip hop artist? Send me an email and I will tell the world your story. To find out if I am hip hop's most famous gay writer... keep reading.
This past Sunday, the New York Times Magazine ran a very illuminating article on the "Down Low" subculture. Basically, the jist of the article is that there are a bunch of black guys out there who take a thug approach to being gay. These "DL" guys look like your typical extra in a David Banner video. They have girlfriends, don't talk with lisps, and avoid tight-fitting clothes. But note the enthusiasm when "Baby Got Back" comes on."
NY Times "Double Lives on the Down Low"
And there is a an article at gayhiphop.com. Gayhiphop.com is somewhat deceptive. Like most people, I was hoping to find out whether Redman, Method Man, Keith Murray, and Eminem are actually gay. Alas, no one has been brave enough to come out with it."Rejecting a gay culture they perceive as white and effeminate, many black men have settled on a new identity, with its own vocabulary and customs and its own name: Down Low. There have always been men -- black and white -- who have had secret sexual lives with men. But the creation of an organized, underground subculture largely made up of black men who otherwise live straight lives is a phenomenon of the last decade. Many of the men at Flex tonight -- and many of the black men I met these past months in Cleveland, Atlanta, Florida, New York and Boston -- are on the Down Low, or on the DL, as they more often call it. Most date or marry women and engage sexually with men they meet only in anonymous settings like bathhouses and parks or through the Internet. Many of these men are young and from the inner city, where they live in a hypermasculine ''thug'' culture. Other DL men form romantic relationships with men and may even be peripheral participants in mainstream gay culture, all unknown to their colleagues and families. Most DL men identify themselves not as gay or bisexual but first and foremost as black. To them, as to many blacks, that equates to being inherently masculine."
"Am I gay?" you ask.
No. But hip hop is. --Eric Nord via http://www.stinkzone.com/cgi-bin/archives/000038.html
Homophobia
[...] What hasn't changed is the gap between rap and house, an antipathy which exists between these two forms of soul music. [...] According to Frankie Knuckles, this goes to the core of attitudes towards gays, especially amongst the black community. "The fact that house got started in the gay clubs makes it tough for some of them to deal with it." This is about more than musical taste; for Frankie, it goes to the core of the future of minority groups in the US. And, ironically, it's rap, with all of its violence and too-frequent lapses into intolerance and homophobia, that has pushed things along. --Frankie KnucklesExternal links
http://www.stinkzone.com/cgi-bin/archives/000038.html
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