I was a weird kid growing up — or so I was told. You never feel weird as a child. I thought everyone obsessed over Prince’s, Janet Jackson’s, and Bobby Brown’s outfits and dance moves. I thought all the other kids knew every breath and beat of Lisa Stansfield’s “Been Around the World.” They … did not. My first sense of being “different” arrived at age 6, when I showed up to the first year of grade school months younger than everyone else, quiet and bookish, and picked up slang and mispronunciations I had no practical use for, to keep from coming off as a smart-ass. The feeling never left. The urge to be more like the other boys would drive me through a string of feigned interests — I still keep tabs on the exploits of players for sports teams I don’t care about in the slightest — that never quite seemed to fit. I got by on trash talk and fistfights, as one did in those cagey Dinkins and Giuliani years, and the notion that soldiering through the end of high school with my own tribe of weirdos would get me to a point where it didn’t matter what the masculine norms were, or at least keep toxic ideas about manhood out of my line of vision.
Every few months I’m reminded that my old dream of normalcy, or at least persecution-free eccentricity, is a lie. Atlanta rapper iLoveMakonnen came out as gay late last month in a series of tweets that fought back years of speculation about his sexual orientation in the press and elsewhere. It’s a request most rappers don’t field in a lifetime, this urge to have him qualify his sexual identity beyond what he presents to listeners on record, and a curiosity borne out of a set of standards for manhood that are unique and, I maintain, injurious to rap. It upsets rap’s streetwise hypermasculinity to have a cherubic, eccentric drug dealer turned cosmetologist turned rapper crooning and rhyming his way through songs about drugs and women. “A lot of times, we hear a dude going to cosmetology school, we think … he’s gay,” Hot 97 morning-show host Ebro Darden ineloquently remarked in an early interview. The overwhelming fan response to Makonnen’s revelation has struck the same balance of acceptance and brutish prejudgment.
Rolling Stone recently ran a lengthy profile on the Migos, Atlanta rap peers of Makonnen’s and guests on his triumphant “Whip It (Remix),” following the trio through a hectic January studio day. At one point, the group praises the diversity of the Atlanta rap scene, and the interviewer brings up Makonnen coming out, news the Migos had not been privy to beforehand. Quavo suggests that it’s a knock against his credibility to come out as gay after blowing up behind trap anthems like “I Don’t Sell Molly No More” and “Look at Wrist,” echoing a cruder wing of the response to Makonnen’s announcement that posited him as a liar and a fake, since he simply can’t have been a gay criminal. This line of thinking is unfortunate and unsurprising, but above all, goofy, since Makonnen’s record was once a point of terrible controversy in his home state. The rapper-singer beat a murder rap in 2008, after a tussle with a loaded gun in a younger friend’s car accidentally left the young man shot dead. Clayton News Daily, a community paper in Jonesboro, Georgia, covered the case, and a few stories made it online. This lines up with early interviews where Makonnen talks about first dabbling in rap during a seven-year house arrest. This stuff shouldn’t be up for review. It’s public record.
To be a rap fan that identifies as anything other than male and straight is to wade against a current pushing back at your very being, to be constantly driven by your heart to decisions your mind ought to reject. Artists accept your patronage, but twist the knife by peppering music with insults and slurs, and interviews with attempts to create distance from hate and discrimination even as they flirt with the very linguistics of the stuff. When J. Cole uses “faggot” three times in a song, he says he did it to “spawn better conversations” about homophobia in hip-hop. Travis Scott called a hometown audience “a bunch of queers” for being too quiet at a show and explained that he was just “a li’l turnt up.” The Migos quickly issued a sizable note of apology after the Rolling Stone flap — “We are all fans of Makonnens music and we wish he didn’t feel like he ever had to hide himself” — leaving the dart about Makonnen’s sexuality undermining his credibility, the very remark they’re in hot water for, unchallenged.
Rap masculinity is equal parts machismo and tower defense; it has to be. The culture of hip-hop is a haven for castaways. It rose up from burned-out, bombed-out 1970s New York City, where young Black and Latin men denied opportunities and even simple infrastructure rerouted their pride through ostentatious dress and braggadocio. If your manhood was all you had, the worst thing you could paint anyone else out to be was something less than virile, less than strong. (This mindset is not specific to rap; it also rears its head in a dozen guitar-based music scenes, although hip-hop shoulders more of the burden for being more pridefully brutal about it on record.) Old-fashioned homophobia provided easy targets even our most righteous minds had a go at: A Tribe Called Quest’s vile anti-gay track “Georgie Porgie” narrowly missed inclusion on the classic Low End Theory. Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet includes “Meet the G That Killed Me,” which, in under a minute, posits gay sex as a slippery slope toward intravenous drug use and AIDS.
An industry witch hunt for closeted mainstream rappers would last as long as the mid-2000s, but the tone and texture of homophobia in the business began to change as record sales dwindled, and with the rise of lucrative endorsement deals that laid A-list rappers’ millions at the whim of corporations sensitive to the slightest hint of consumer backlash. Suddenly, 50 Cent, who famously told Playboy, “I don’t like gay people around me, because I’m not comfortable with what their thoughts are,” is a supporter of same-sex marriage; and T.I., who snarked, “If you can take a dick, you can take a joke,” after Tracy Morgan was blasted for a stand-up bit about stabbing a fictional gay son to death in 2011, changed his tune, too. (The only rapper I remember standing up for his gay fans before everyone got suspiciously “woke” was Kanye West. True to form, 50 snapped back with gay jokes about him too.)
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