The revolutionaries behind the Black LGBTQ hip-hop movement
Related: Billy Porter says ‘hugely, violently homophobic’ music industry sabotaged his early careerFor a long time, it seemed like Black gay hip-hop was doomed to the niche, underground environments, that it formed in.
That’s why it was a huge moment when Lil Nas X rode to number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and made history as the longest running artist with the title.I didn’t believe that a gay Black man could fuse hip-hop with country and take his song to number one.
But Lil Nas X has all the necessary components of an American music icon — he’s distinctly individual, versatile, and mixes niches so seamlessly as to defy the concept of “niche” itself.He also does what LGBTQ+ hip-hop artists have done for decades, which is to tell the hip-hop genre that you will take me — all of me — because this is my home too, regardless of who I love or how I identify.Hip-hop as the unapologetic expression of Black experiences and will always exist above the biases that individual artists have historically brought to it.Back in 2004, when Deep Dickollective released The Famous Outlaw League of Proto-Negroes, it became one of Out magazine’s Top Ten Gay Albums, it was still normal to hear a gay slur in a mainstream rap song.
Black queer people were just getting room to breathe in music because artist-scholars like Juba Kalamka, Tim’m T. West, and Phillip Atiba Goff were fighting for it.
