NOT A PHASE
Lil Nas X is among black male rappers defying hip-hop’s macho culture
On June 30, the final day of Pride Month, the young country-rap sensation Lil Nas X came out to his 2.2 million Twitter followers.
“Some of y’all already know, some of y’all don’t care, some of y’all not gone fwm no more. but before this month ends i want y’all to listen closely to ‘c7osure’ ” he wrote, referring to a track from his debut EP “7,” then the No. 1 rap album in the country. “Embracin’ this news I behold unfolding … I know it don’t feel like it’s time,” he raps. “But I look back at this moment, I’ll see that I’m fine.”
Overnight, the Atlantan born Montero Lamar Hill became the biggest gay pop star in the world. That he did so in the orbit of hip-hop and country, genres that have historically snubbed queer artists, was groundbreaking.
“Lil Nas X re-imagined an image of the Wrangler-wearing, horseback-riding man’s man into a young black representative of youth culture, got the attention of two traditionally macho cultures and then came out on the last day of Pride,” says rapper and librarian Roy Kinsey, at the fore of Chicago’s queer rap scene. “It was genius.”
“It’s hard to be out in genres where being gay, or expressing your sexuality, is frowned upon,” adds iLove-Makonnen, born Makonnen Sheran, a protégé of Drake who came out in 2017. “We are finally starting to see queer black men celebrated in the genre. But this is still a genre that has never been supportive of change.”
Before the viral sensation “Old Town Road” turned Hill, 20, into a pop star and gay icon, hip-hop was already at a turning point, with more black musicians interrogating masculinity in their work getting
mainstream attention.
“I feel like I’m opening the doors for more people,” Hill told the BBC. “That they feel more comfortable [being out]. Especially in the … hiphop community. It’s still not accepted …” (Hill declined to comment for this piece.) Hip-hop’s refusal to embrace anything queer has been a longtime blemish. Rap culture has always been powered by unbridled machismo; one would be hard pressed to not find a gay slur embedded in the lyrics of any of the genre’s most famous architects. Slang such as “sus” and “No homo” and “Pause” that use queerness as a punchline have been thrown around casually for years.
But as the old guard is replaced with a generation unconcerned with rigid labels, today’s rap and R&B scene isn’t as exclusively heteronormative as it was.
“We know folks in our community have always been religiously conservative, and being gay is still seen as taboo,” says Ebro Darden, Apple Music’s editorial head of hiphop and R&B, and Hot 97’s “Ebro in the Morning” host. “But with entertainment becoming more accepting, music [will] be right there. This moment isn’t some blip, because it’s not a blip in society.”
No more secrets to keep
In 2012, avant-garde R&B-hiphop singer Frank Ocean broke ground by boldly writing about falling in love with a man on the eve of releasing his hyped debut album “Channel Orange.” “I don’t know what happens now, and that’s alrite. I don’t have any secrets I need kept anymore,” he wrote.
Ocean, who sprung from the rowdy, L.A.-based hip-hop collective Odd Future, went on to become a Grammy-winning star and in-demand collaborator for Jay-Z, ASAP Rocky and Travis Scott.
“Frank Ocean was the beginning of the revolution. But people had to warm up to it, and sometimes the collective warm-up can take more time than we think,” says singer-songwriter Iman Jordan (Rihanna, “Empire”). “We’ve gotten used to seeing white queer men become megastars. I’m looking forward to the day when [more] black queer men are seen.”
Over the last couple of years, Ocean’s former Odd Future collaborator, Tyler, the Creator, has transitioned from a bratty provocateur who hurled gay slurs with reckless abandon into a thoughtful confessionalist, who surprisingly and rather matter-of-factly raps about his own attraction to men. His latest, “Igor,” is ostensibly a funky soap opera about a boy who loves a boy who loves a girl. It is the first Billboard No. 1 album of his career and his most acclaimed.
A diverse array of talents such as Brockhampton frontman Kevin Abstract, Steve Lacy (also formerly affiliated with Odd Future) and Skype Williams have all presented works this year freely crafted through a black queer lens.
On his “Arizona Baby” album, Abstract reflects on growing up gay in Corpus Christi. “Back home ain’t even proud of me,” he raps on opener “Big Wheels.” “They think I’m a bitch, just queer-baiting.”
And on his introspective new album, “Apollo XXI,” Lacy confronts his struggles to accept his bisexuality over groovy guitar riffs. “Coming into my understanding of my sexuality helped shaped the record to be carefree, human, fun and honest. I didn’t care to say I’m anything because straight artists don’t. This album represents sexual liberation for me,” Lacy told The Times earlier this year.
While queer female performers such as Janelle Monae, Halsey, Young M.A. and Kehlani have been accepted with little fuss, there’s now a growing surge of queer black male voices that are cutting through a genre built on heteronormative ideals.
We’re in a moment when Big Freedia — the vibrant, gender non-confirming talent who put New Orleans bounce music on the map — has been called on by Drake and Beyoncé for hits, and a young black gay man has the No. 1 song in America. Hill’s “Old Town Road,” which just eclipsed a chart record that Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men set 23 years ago with “One Sweet Day,” is a song inspired by the AIDS crisis and the tragic peril it brought to so many black gay men in this country.
“[Black] queer women are having a better time than men right now, creatively,” says New Yorkbased DJ, producer and rapper Skype Williams. “But male representation is moving in the right direction. The catalyst for this shift though? I think when people in political power are [threatening] our basic rights, art and music gets more interesting.”
It helps that the streaming era has disrupted how stars are created. Artists are no longer beholden to an ecosystem ruled by gatekeepers and pop music has gotten far less homogenized.
No genre of music offers better proof of this than hip-hop, where Generation Z rap stars are born on Soundcloud and TikTok and not radio. “Old Town Road” was a meme on TikTok — a popular lipsync social media app — well before it was the inescapable radio earworm that reignited old debates about race and genre.
Artists are playing to a generation more open-minded when it comes to gender and sexuality than older millennials. Back in 2016, J. Walter Thompson Innovation Group found 48% of 13- to 20year-olds identified as exclusively heterosexual, compared to 65% of the generation before them.
Pop music had lacked an openly gay superstar before Adam Lambert and Sam Smith made history with their chart debuts and Grammy victories, respectively. And despite their statuses as legendary rock hitmakers and gay icons, there was much hand-wringing over how biopics for Queen and Elton John would handle the queerness of its subjects.
The evolution in hip-hop is significant, but less pronounced than the larger shift in pop culture over representations of black male queerness. There was Fox’s hiphop drama “Empire,” which made a powerful statement by making one of its leads a gay black R&B singer (for a time, the records released by the character — played by Jussie Smollett — were the only music by an out gay black man getting mainstream radio play.)
“Moonlight,” a coming of age tale about a gay black boy, won the best picture Oscar in 2017 and for the first time queer people of color outnumbered their white counterparts on TV, according to GLAAD’s annual TV diversity report. Series such as “Queen Sugar,” “Dear White People” and “This Is Us” feature storylines abound nuanced black LGBTQ characters; meanwhile, Ryan Murphy’s “Pose,” which has exposed the world to a part of black queer culture that has inspired pop divas for decades, is up for two Emmys, including one for Billy Porter, the first openly gay black man to receive a lead actor nod. And a quarter-century after “you better work,” RuPaul has turned drag into a multi-million-dollar empire.
But is all this enough to swing the pendulum toward permanent change in R&B and hip-hop?
History of homophobia
Since the genre’s dawn, nearly five decades ago, homophobia in hip-hop has been the norm. N.W.A and the Beastie Boys boasted about their disdain for gay people in lyrics. 50 Cent said it wasn’t OK for men to be gay, but women who like women? “That’s cool.”
Nicki Minaj incited her sizable queer fanbase by using a gay slur on her latest album. The late XXXTentacion was as famous for his contemplative music as the violent mythology he constructed to sell it, including gleefully boasting about beating a man because he looked at him too long. Just last year, Migos’ Offset rapped, “I cannot vibe with queers.” And Eminem has yet to retire his usage of “faggot” in the 18 years since he famously performed with Elton John at the Grammys as a PR-orchestrated act of good will against his viciously homophobic lyrics.
“The industry is full of queer black men, yet some of hip-hop loudest voices won’t speak up and support us because they don’t want a target on their back,” says iLoveMakonnen. “How can we get the acceptance of people who haven’t accepted themselves?”
Queer black folks are still last in line when it comes to representation across a mainstream pop culture zeitgeist heavily informed by black queer creatives.
A wave of black queer rap artists, including Le1f, Zebra Katz, Cakes Da Killa, Mykki Blanco and House of LaDosha, broke out of New York at the start of the decade with music and visuals that upended the same gender constructs that have been weaponized against gay men by pairing hyper-feminine aesthetics — high fashion looks, weave, manicured fingertips — with braggadocios’ rhymes. They proved that men in baggy jeans and fitted caps weren’t the only ones with biting flows and, yes, queens could do it better.
But the wave of New York queer rap and the coming out of Ocean and iLoveMakonnen, for many, felt like false starts. Queer rappers hardly got the attention needed to break into mainstream consciousness and if they did, they most certainly were never men — a reminder that a divide still remains on acceptance. There’s limits on how queer black men can be seen, and the line is sex.
“Black male images are often connected to the sex he has — how many women he can acquire, his virility,” said Roy Kinsey. “And rap caters to that image. As a queer man, I have to constantly wonder if people will be more or less likely to buy my record if they knew how [I had sex].”
Even as Hill was celebrated for breaking rap’s gay glass ceiling, the jokes about his sex life also made it into the news coverage. When asked about Hill’s coming out, Young Thug — a rapper who jumped on an “Old Town Road” remix and has toyed with gender norms by dressing in couture gowns — said that Hill “probably shouldn’t have told the world” he was gay.
“It ain’t even about the music no more. Soon as the song comes on, everybody’s like, ‘This gay ass ... [Dudes] don’t even care to listen to the song no more,” Thug said during an interview with hip-hop influencer Adam 22. “Just to certain people. He’s young, and backlash can come behind anything.”
Thug isn’t entirely off-base. While queer representation has improved, there’s still a calculation being made by artists. How many acts who get mainstream attention are as sexually explicit as their straight counterparts? And how many approach discussing their sexuality in the media with the same transparency as their personalities suggest?
“I wasn’t ready to test the waters back then, even with the support of my label,” said Jordan, who is releasing his first EP since coming out in 2016 and exiting his former label Interscope. “I felt constant pressure to be more macho and fit in by not being too feminine or differently dressed. The optimist in me sees Lil Nas X as an example of mainstream acceptance. But on the other hand, he came out after already having a No. 1, and I do wonder if coming out before he was famous would’ve changed his trajectory.”
“Artists don’t want to become a spokesperson, or be seen as a gimmick,” says Darden. “Especially when it relates to their sexuality. It’s still their life.”
Williams’ debut EP, “Sorry I’m Late,” a sizzling collection of boom-bap rap, syrupy pop and soulful funk released independently last month, is a bright mediation on living and dating in New York City. It’s just one in a string of recent releases from young black men rapping and singing about love, and sex, between two men with straightforward transparency.
Describing the inspiration behind “Sorry,” he declared that “work made by gay people doesn’t necessarily need to be like Troye-Sivan-twink-lily-white-lithe-pastel-pink-pop ... but it doesn’t have to be turbo-homo-DL-thug [stuff], either,” a snipe at the realities that face black queer artists when trying to get their music heard.
“It’s easy to digest non-threatening, f laming, skinny gay men. It’s as simple as that,” said Williams. “Some people have a hard time imagining anyone ‘other’ being complex.”
Hip-hop is at its queerest right now. Whether or not that moves beyond this moment is yet to be seen.
“The labels are being supportive of our art,” says iLoveMakonnen. “Now, it’s on listeners and the media to keep embracing us.”