Photo by Erez Avissar
How are we supposed to talk about "queer rap", if at all? Is it a scene? A genre? A burgeoning movement? Or, perhaps none of the above? Is this just a case of a handful of incredibly disparate artists unwittingly (some unhappily) being grouped together for the sake of the convenience of labeling? "Labeling something [for it] to be found is sometimes for the betterment of society when it can allow outsiders to gain the ability of looking in," says Contessa "Cunt Mafia" Stuto, who is sometimes categorized this way. With that in mind, it seems an important juncture in our cultural history to at this moment re-evaluate the ways that music created by LGBT artists are consumed and discussed.
Despite the convenience of the label, it’s crucial to reiterate that "queer rap" is not a thing. Of course there is some benefit to emerging, queer artists who are discovered because of their association, but the problem is that certain kinds of classifications absolutely work towards further marginalizing the artists, and relegate them to a kind of sub-altern obscurity. Being a "queer rapper" obfuscates their own personal narratives and the dynamics of their musical output.
Purely for argument's sake, it wouldn't be too hard to make the case for "queer rap" as a musical genre. According to this logic: Queer rap does have an incredibly unique sound, with its own set of slang, linguistic tricks, sonic influences, and cultural image repertoires that often stand out starkly from the rap more regularly heard on the radio or in the hip-hop underground. Many rappers who are queer feel pretty comfortable talking about queer sex in their music, a seemingly still-taboo topic everywhere else. The proclivity for video game references and chiptune-styled synthesizers, the love of Paris Is Burning samples, and borrowings of the beat structures of ballroom music: do these similarities somehow coalesce to form a coherent genre or sub-genre?
This line of reasoning has some unpleasant (if not outright pernicious) results. One would think that appreciating "queer rap" as a genre would perhaps allow for more nuanced evaluations by critics of the music being produced, but, according to Cakes Da Killa, it reaps the opposite result: "I include a lyric booklet with every thing I release. Let's focus on the overall narrative of my work as opposed to a bar where I talk about giving a blow job."
In the three years since Pitchfork posted a look at queer rap as a genre/trend, the LGBT artists featured have popped off; it has only grown easier to identify a new wave of outre artists creating rap and rap-adjacent music. Yet, all the while, the same artists have had to fight consistently with and against their LGBT categorizations, with Zebra Katz most vociferously speaking out against the classification. "I've been against the whole coinage [of the term queer hip-hop] since it happened … I've been trying to work my way outside of that," said Katz to Rosenberg on Hot97. Meanwhile Le1f and Mykki Blanco have rightfully and repeatedly complained about undue comparisons to other LGBT artists, calling out the homophobia of that critical shorthand. Resistance to and suspicion of the label is understandable considering the ways non-white LGBT culture has been borrowed, stolen, appropriated, and transformed by (sometimes well-intentioned) straight white culture for decades. From Madonna's wholesale lifting of vogue to more present-day battles about the invention of vernacular like "shade"—non-white gay culture is seemingly always on the verge of a breakthrough, that is until something more accessible and Macklemorian comes along.
Still, the reason these queer hip hop artists are held up to a different standard has little to do with their generic classification and their talent and way more to do with homophobia and racism. By many metrics, these artists are better than what passes for, ostensibly, their mainstream competition, but their success is not proportional. With all this talk about how to talk about these artists, it's easy to forget the quality and subtleties of the music itself. It's also important to remember that discussions of rap by queer or gay artists tend to be unfairly focused on queer and gay men. Says Contessa Stuto: "These writers are writing pieces that promote patriarchy; when they even interview a female subject it's always about fucking girl power, on the assumption this is a male centered issue [to begin with]." The term "gay" rap in particular usually refers to people identified as male and ignores the vast diversity of sexual identities available (as if sexual identity was a stable category to begin with)—many of the "gay" artists culled into this category barely identify as "gay". In fact, it is this very conundrum that some of these artists are toying with. Rapper Big Dipper comments: "I try to play with gender, to present sometimes feminine looks on my body which is big and burly and hairy, to strip down to underwear—something normally saved for muscle twinks—and to rap honestly about my life." These kinds of genderqueering nuances are lost on audiences who are more interested in the pure shock value, aesthetic audacity, or humor of this brand of art.
In the three years that have passed it's become way easier to talk about these issues now that the supposedly-applicable artists have more considerable (and entirely impressive) bodies of work, many of them veering much more towards the avant-garde than the accessible. From Le1f's somewhat Björkian soundscapes in his Tree House mixtape, to Mykki Blanco's aggressively experimental industrial rap on Gay Dog Food, to Zebra Katz's minimal masterpiece DRKLNG, to Cakes' deeply personal #IMF EP, to Big Momma's hyper-violent and transgressive album The Plague, it might seem hard (if not impossible) to see these works as massively divergent from the narrative of mainstream hip-hop. (The term "art-rap" has been thrown around as an alternative, an unfortunate specification that implies that the rest of rap isn't art.)
The situation puts many gay artists and their audiences in a tough bind. Those who are genuinely interested in the artists must be careful not to fetishize these rappers based on their sexualities, all the while recognizing the artists' ingenuity within the rap genre at large. The artists themselves can and do display righteous indignation when they are addressed in a creepily pejorative or demeaning way, which dampens interest in what becomes unfortunately and incorrectly known as a "scene" too sensitive for its own good. Straights less familiar with radical queer politics (preferred gender pronouns, the ever-changing list of what words are considered derogatory, etc.) could be quickly put off.
That being said, the conversation about "when a gay rapper will achieve mainstream success" is quite simply insulting, and comparisons between gay and straight rap (as if they were two distinct genres) simply don't make sense without implied bigotry. From Cakes, on this point: "What is straight rap? This question is a carry! If I rented you a loft space in gentrified Bushwick would the heat feel any different if I was a straight or gay landlord?" Similarly, the fact that LGBT rappers from a diversity of gender identifications and sexualities can't be talked about without the simultaneous invocation of other non-heterosexual artists speaks to a larger problem in our culture. In the words of rapper Dai Burger: "Straight or gay it's all sexually driven. So long as you got the bars, I’m all ears for it." How, then, is one to balance the desire to both appreciate the complex narrative of a queer artist's life in the scope of their work while simultaneously not relegating them to the role of victim of systematized prejudices?
The best solution to the problem of "gay rap", is to stop thinking about the classification itself and start listening harder to the (often outstanding) quality of the music being produced. Start booking queer artists alongside straight ones and pay them just as much. Ultimately, this is asking listeners to put aside whatever thoughts and feelings they have about queer sexuality, if only momentarily, to better evaluate certain aspects of these works. If that eventually means more thinking about the similarities and differences between texts by queer and straight artists rather than endless condescending comparisons of "fierce" or "brave" gay musicians, so be it. This task seems easier said than done in the almost obsessively taxonomic landscape of the internet, and yet it shouldn't actually be harder to pay more attention to the lyrical content and production values of music created by queer people. Anything else is just bigotry.