Frank Ocean may have come out a few days ago, but according to many, it doesn’t really count as the hip-hop-coming-out of the year since he is not a true rapper. Ok he has ties with Odd Future but he is in that fuzzy zone between rap and mostly R&B, and he has even sampled the Eagles! So the hip hop community does not truly see this as one of them coming out big time. Public Enemy’s Chuck D even declared to NME:
‘I've always thought of Frank Ocean as an R&B singer… When people say that this is a hip-hop first, it's not really because he's not a straight rapper – no pun intended. He may be part of Odd Future, but he's a singer.’
And Chuck continued explaining that ‘a true breakthrough will only come when a ‘hardcore rapper’ decides to come out’:
‘I commend Frank Ocean for coming out and saying it, but it's not a first because there's plenty of black male gay singers. Even when they don't admit it, you kind of know. If you heard somebody like… I don't want to say a name, because people will talk… but like somebody in the Wu-Tang Clan or something, if they came out then that would be groundbreaking. That would be totally challenging.'
The Wu-Tang Clan, Chuck? Ha, that would effectively be a big step, but is hip hop really ready for a strong figure, a Rick-Ross-type of persona, to be openly gay? By the way there are a few websites actually discussing Rick Ross’ sexuality, like this one and this one, whatever they are worth. But let’s take another rapper, 50 Cent, who has been rumored to be gay forever and who has recently said he supported gay marriage and same sex activity… I mean, at the condition this activity involves two women.
Paula Renfroe, editor in chief of Juicy magazine, told MTV news last Friday:
‘Hip-hop also has grown, society as a whole has grown and that’s the beauty of hip-hop, it reflects our culture and our society’
Really? So why is 50 Cents still in the closet? Or, as a matter of fact, why is there is no major rapper out? Serious studies have shown that around 10% of the population is gay, although numbers vary a lot. But let’s also say that art and music attract even more gay people than other professions, it is just a fact. I don’t know how many rappers are out there, but if you take only 100 of them, at least 10 should be gay, and if hip hop reflects our society, where are they?
Nicki Minja has been rumored to be gay (or bisexual) for a longtime especially because of lyrics like, ‘You know her last name Minaj, she a lesbian/And she ain't neva comin' out, look at currency’ ( in ‘Still I Rise’) or ‘only stops for pedestrians, or real real bad lesbian’ ( in‘Go Hard’), plus a few YouTube videos where she openly talked about her sexuality before she was famous. She even declared to Out magazine in 2010:
‘I think there have been many gay rappers, they just haven’t come out of the closet. Yup, lots of them. They’re lurking around the industry now. Obviously, the majority of the men in hip-hop don’t want you to think they’re gay. That’s just the reality of it. I’m a woman, so I have a lot more flexibility. And I don’t lose credibility in any way if I say I think girls are dope and sexy.’
Still, she is not officially out of the closet, even though she flirts with girls. But she is not the only one, in the last January issue of the LA Weekly, Odd Future’s Syd the Kid, who is openly gay, was bold enough to drop a few names, and something tells me she is not wrong:
‘There's Alicia Keys, who's married to Swizz Beatz – we know that shit ain't real. You got Queen Latifah kissing Common in movies. Missy Elliott saying she don't wanna hang with bitches. You know she loves her some bitches.’
As a matter of fact, Queen Latifah recently appeared at the 29th Annual Long Beach Lesbian & Gay Pride Festival, and said she was proud to be among ‘her people’… so you would think it is a coming out, but no, she denied the whole thing later and declared to Entertainment Weekly, ‘that definitively wasn’t the case’.
Someone like these women or even better, a male artist saying he is gay, would benefit everyone in the hip hop world, where it is still a strong taboo. A lot of people are faking it to make it in the industry and so, are not themselves. I even have a tendency to think there is a higher number of closeted gays in the hip hop population than in the general population, and rapper Game thinks so too:
‘I think there are several rappers that are in the closet and gay, and see those are the type of gay people that — the only type of gay people that I have a problem with’, he declared in 2011
Recently, a serious study has found a link between homophobia and repressed homosexuality, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this aggressively male business, and its anti-gay lyrics and public homophobia, actually would contain even more gay in the closet than we may think.