Johann Hari

Hip hop has long branded itself as the ultimate in fag-bashing, gay-trashing hate music. Listen to any album and a list of homophobic howls will hit you: DMX shrieking “Fuck you faggot, I shoot at you!”, Eminem squeaking “Hate fags? The answer’s yes!”, Masse singing “I be wastin’ em. That’s what you faggots get”, or Busta Rhymes yelling “I hate fucking faggots man!” The music’s mood was summarised in a 1992 Ice Cube hit: “True niggaz ain’t gay.” Why are these men so worked up about harmless homosexuality? What’s it to them? This year, a taboo-busting new expose from deep inside the hip hop industry has suggested an answer: hip-hop is so furious about “fags” because it is filled with men furiously suppressing their own homosexuality.

For ten years, Terrence Dean was at the heart of the hip-hop scene as a producer at MTV and Warner Brothers. His life is as ghetto as any of the big name artists; it is as 8 Mile as Eminem. His mother was a heroin-addicted, AIDS-infected prostitute whose ‘clients’ held Terrence hostage at gunpoint when he was just five. His drunken grandmother raised him in the slums of Detroit, and he eventually ended up in prison for stealing cars. But when he was 28 and released, he headed for Hollywood – and worked his way up.

Terrence soon snuffled out other ‘down low’ black men: the closet-addicts who would gather to fuck other gay men, without admitting – to themselves or anyone else – that they were gay. He was amazed to stumble into a gay underworld stocked with some of the biggest names in hip-hop.

Speaking to Attitude, he describes his first ‘down low’ house party in LA, where he was invited by a friend: “The moonlight crept inside the windows, providing enough light for me to see. In the middle of the room was a very attractive brother who was bent over with his pants at his ankles while another brother fucked him from behind. He wasn’t taking gentle strokes, either, but pounding him while the guy on the receiving end was practically screaming in pain. There were three other men who were putting condoms on their dicks, waiting for their turn. The attractive producer getting fucked had been featured in Hip Hop magazines and produced music for rap’s elite.”

Then he describes the big names he discovered were secretly gay. “This guy I’ll call Mario – because I don’t believe in outing – has been named as one of the biggest rappers of all time by MTV. He’s always trashing gay men in his lyrics. But he is surrounded by a posse of transvestites – chicks with dicks.” He runs through a list of hip-hop gays: “Corey”, who has opened for Jay-Z but blows his record-label boss, “Zach” – one half of a hit R&B duo, and more.

Terence tried to live their life. He explains: “I had to make sure people saw me as a heterosexual man; they had to see me with women. I talked the talk – cars, sports, women. When I walked, I made sure there was an extra something in my step – that swagger, that slight pimp most black men have. One misstep would have been the end of my career. Hell, it would have been the end of my life.”

But it was a miserable, bitter existence. “It’s a lonely life because we never get to fully love just one person. Our emotions are all over the place. I mentally checked out when I was with men. I had to force myself not to let my emotions get involved because when dealing with another down low man I knew I could never have a relationship.” Is this the source of so much of the rage directed at us? Dean believes so: “When the rappers rap about the hatred they have of homosexuals, I know it’s because many of them are struggling with their own sexuality. They hate what they are and in turn they spew their hatred toward men who are reflections of themselves.”

Most of the men genuinely appear to believe they aren’t gay. One lover told Dean: “Just because you are fucking me doesn’t mean I’m a bitch. I ain’t no bitch. I’m still a man.” Dean adds: “He, like so many other down low men, considers the sexual act of penetration to be the determining factor of their down-low status. If a man is a giver in the act, he doesn’t consider himself gay.” But is it really possible to have sex with men privately and savage gay people publicly without – at some level – seeing the contradiction? Terrence, at least, couldn’t live with this for long. He says: “Even as I chilled with other down-low men in the house listening to rap music, nodding our heads and rhyming the words, we knew we could never stand up and be who we truly were. None of us could. We were what rappers hated – faggots, booty bandits, homos. How could we recite their hate-filled lyrics knowing they were talking about us? But it takes a lot to get to the stage of being a gay man. You have to love and accept yourself.”

He was trapped in a sweat-drenched culture of hyper-masculinity, where being gay was seen as weak and womanly – the worst insult of all. “We developed that culture for a lot of historical reasons,” Dean says. “Slavery meant we had to be incredibly tough just to survive. And on top of that we had Christianity and fundamentalism. These things pass down the generations. If a group of people is oppressed, they generally take out their anger, frustration, hatred and oppression on another group of people, and in Hip Hop, it just happens to be the gay community and women who get the brunt of it.”

In order to hide their sexuality, hip-hops artists have developed all sorts of tricks. “Many down-low artists have their lovers in their entourage,” Deans says. “We blend in well with everyone. We never display signs of public affection. We may make eye contact and share a smile, but nothing further. We befriend the girlfriend. The entertainment industry is all about illusions. You keep your discretions discreet.”

But Terrence reached a turning point three years ago – when one of his closest down-low friends died of AIDS. He became suicidal under the deadening weight of the closet door. “Things started to change for me after that,” he says. “I looked at everything differently. I wanted and needed to find some sense of purpose for my life.” At first it was tough. “I searched to find gay men who looked and acted like I did. The images we generally see of gay men are flamboyant, over-the-top, finger-snapping men who I could not identify with.” When he first went to a gay club, “I would have anxiety attacks, and still do. My heart races, palms get sweaty, mouth becomes dry, and I feel heavy and can’t walk.”

He decided he had to speak out – and reveal that hip-hop hate was built on hip-hop repression. His autobiography ‘Hiding in Hip-Hop: One the Down-low in the Entertainment Industry – From Music to Hollywood’ has become a best-seller – and let some air blow into the closet. He hasn’t outed anyone, but nonetheless he has been attacked by rappers like Young Berg, who said he could “destroy a good family” by making wives wonder if their husbands are gay. “But I think the effect of the book has been positive,” he says. “Some day a major rapper is going to come out. To date, there has not been one black man in any area of entertainment who has come forward and admitted to being gay. I think that’s going to change soon.”

There is some scientific evidence that the most vehement homophobes are repressing homosexual feelings. Professor Henry Adams at the University of Georgia conducted a major study in the 1990s. He took several groups of ‘straight’ homophobic men and wired them up so the blood flow to their penises could be monitored. He then showed them gay porn. Some 80 percent started to get errections. He concluded that since “most homophobes demonstrate significant sexual arousal to homosexual erotic stimuli”, anti-gay hatred is probably “a form of latent homosexuality.” It makes intuitive sense. Why would they get so worked up about it otherwise? What possible harm do we do?

But a movement of young men and women has swelled up to smash through this wall of repression-hate – by declaring themselves the first wave of “homo hop”. This small battalion of openly gay hip hop artists have – in the past five years – produced some slap-in-the-face tracks that defy the closeted hip-hop stars to face the truth. The homo-hop artist Scott Free raps: “When queers become rock stars they turn straight they spit in our face and we take it/ Their agents and managers say what they can and they can’t do/ They tell them their candour will hinder their chances, they’ll lose all their fans, so they stand back and rake in the cash ‘till they get caught in a bathroom.”

Others are even more blatant: soce (pronounced so-say) raps: “I am a homo. That’s what I do/ I’m feeling kind of hot. What’s up with you?/ You wanna suck my dick? You wanna ass fuck?/ But never sixty-nine. That number is bad luck. I really am so gay… I really am… I really am… I really am so gay.” They are well outside hip hop’s mainstream. But the gay artist Deadlee says: “If openly gay rappers aren’t invited, then we’re kicking down the door and inviting ourselves. It’s our turn, and about time.”

In Britain, Marcos Brito – known as Q Boy – has become Europe’s biggest gay hip hop act. He declares on one track: “I’m the crest of this gay hip-hop wave media hype/ You can say “fuck fags!” and you can screw me too/ I think it’s wonderful to be me, the Supa-Boy Q.” He perches on his settee in South London – white and slim in tracksuit bottoms and a green t-shirt – and explains to me when he first started listening to hip-hop. “I was eleven, and the first wave of mainstream accessible hip-hop was in the charts. All the boys in my school listened to it; it was totally normal to. And I liked the poetry of it, I had always written poetry as a kid.” He was being bullied for being gay – “being spat on and intimidated, so I just didn’t want to go to school” – and it provided a release-valve. “I listened mostly to female hip-hop artists. My Madonna was Lil’ Kim. I wasn’t drawn to the macho bravado of the male rappers. I didn’t naturally empathize with a big black guy with a gun. But I really liked the female rappers, and especially their sexual lyrics.”

But Marcos didn’t think he could become a rapper: “It didn’t even occur to me at that time. But I was obsessed with Salt N Pepper and I would write lyrics in their style, as extra verses for their sons at first.” In 2000, he graduated from De Montford University and moved to London. He was keen to find a gay club that played hip hop “but there was virtually none. So I started googling gay hip hop, and I found a website called gayhiphop.com. It was mostly message boards where gay people – in America mainly – posted their rhymes. I thought – my god, other gay people into hip-hop! I was so happy.” He e-mailed the site’s owner, Mr Marker, assuming he would be in the US – but it turned out he lived near London. They met up, went to a rare gay hip hop night – and before he knew it, Marcos was the website’s on-line manager.

“It was great because the first wave of gay hip-hop was emerging in the States, and I got to know them all,” he says now. “And Mr marker said – well, you have to be the British equivalent. I had only ever rapped before imitating the people I liked. I had just used an American accent. I didn’t even know what rapping in a British accent would sound like. So I adopted a sort of cockney accent. I was like – I’m from Essex, there’s plenty of commonness in me. I used that. It took a while to relax into my own voice, but I found it.” He got together with a group in Brighton called PacMan and they became Britain’s first homo hop collective – and splashed onto the cover of the Pink Paper.

“That’s when it really took off,” he says. “We got booked for Pride events and all sorts of places.” The reaction from the hip hop world was limited, beyond a few producers congratulating him on his ability to garner publicity. But Marcos expected that; he was more shocked by the reaction of other people in the gay community. “It was quite negative. We still buy into a stereotype of what being gay is – if you’re not a clone, you don’t belong, you’re not part of our community. But I’m not covered in glitter or off my face on K; I wear baseball caps and act different. I had people coming up to me quite angrily and saying ‘Why are you dressed like that?’ It was like me being different was a challenge to their sexuality.”

He couldn’t get booked by any gay clubs at first. If they had music acts, it would either be drag, cabaret or a big diva; hip hop seemed like something from another world. “I had to break a lot of walls down in the gay community,” he says, “and it was hard. It’s changing massively in London now. But then hip-hop is much more mainstream anyway – Missy Elliot and Jay-Z are considered pop music now.” But it’s clear he is still stung by that initial response: “I don’t live in the hip-hop community; I don’t live in the housing projects in Compton, so what they think about me doesn’t matter very much. I live in the gay community, so their reaction mattered a lot. And it hurt.”

When I ask Marcos how he feels when he hears hate-lyrics in hip hop, his answer is nuanced. “It depends who’s doing it,” he says. “If it’s 50 Cent – he’s not very intelligent, so I don’t really expect any better from him. I can appreciate gangsta hip-hop to a degree but it’s quite shallow. Its value is in your ability to dance to it, not its insights. But I do get upset when I hear somebody like Lil Kim – who should know better – using the word ‘faggot’. She has a lot of gay fans, and she blatantly has a lot of gay men working for her. I know she’d say ‘faggot’ is just a general insult. But it’s not. It’s obviously homophobic.”

Why is there so much anti-gay bile in hip hop? “It’s partly to do with slavery,” he says. “That’s why no black man ever wants to be seen as weak or subservient. They had to be strong. It was essential. And it’s also really connected to the sexism and hatred of women in hip-hop. Women are seen as less than men, the people you define yourselves against. And gay men are seen as like women: effeminate and prissy. So to act like a woman is to be beneath yourself, to not really be a man, to be a girl.”

But he believes there are other reasons. “Since the mid-1990s, all the independent studios have been swallowed up by the big labels. So the creative progressive hip hop you used to hear – like Arrested Development, who I loved as a kid – are gone. It’s no coincidence it’s a bunch of rich white men encouraging this idea that all rappers are shallow warped gangstas. They want the worst perspective on black people to be pushed forward.” And he agrees with Terrence Dean’s core thesis – that lots of them are gay. He names a list of rappers who dress in absurdly camp styles while saying gay men should be burned alive. “What’s going on there? Some of them are obviously gay. They’re really self-hating. It’s sad.” He is sick of the obsession with ‘being a man. “To be a man, all you need is a penis,” he says. “It’s not complicated.”

But despite that, he insists it is “repulsive” to out gay hip hop artists. Even if they are calling for gay people to be shot? “Even then. If you want to take on their homophobia, then do it by all means – but take on the issue. You don’t know why people don’t come out. Some of them have very religious parents, or they’re scared. It’s just not right. I have black friends who tried to tell their family they were gay and were beaten up for it.”

In the past, Marcos has admitted he would be “too scared” to perform in a straight hip hop venue. But – a little defensively – he says now: “I wouldn’t feel safe in any club that was straight. I’m from Basildon, which is rough as fuck. I’m scared in any situation where I’m with people I can’t reason with. You can’t reason with a lion, it’ll just eat you. Of course there are really good straight people too, but you can’t rely on them being the people in the club that night.”

It seemed like a bleak place to end my journey into the world of the homie-sexuals. True, there have been a few flickers of progress lately. The mega-star Kayne West recently called for hip hop homophobia to be stamped out, after his cousin came out, and he was forced to look again at his own gay-bashing lyrics. He said on MTV: “It was kind of like a turning point when I was like, ‘Yo, this is my cousin. I love him and I’ve been discriminating against gays.” But when it comes to mainstream hip-hop, he has been a voice in the void. In a genre that constantly brags about Keeping It Real, it looks like gay people are still too real for hip-hop.