But as it dawns on some of us that adding more seats to the proverbial table requires sacrificing a bit of your own elbow room, relations have gotten ugly. If we wanted, we could restructure the power dynamics that bind us.
What I’ve seen in the intervening years has made me by turns more hopeful about queer representation in hip-hop and less sure I will live to see a time when the community doesn’t excuse and ignore hateful, homophobic, transphobic rhetoric. Not everyone handled these developments very well, but it felt like progress was being made, however painstaking and slight, toward greater respect for LGBTQ hip-hop fans and artists.
iLoveMakonnen had just come out, and Young M.A was flourishing in New York. I am by turns more hopeful about queer representation in hip-hop and less sure I will live to see a time when the community doesn’t excuse and ignore hateful, homophobic, transphobic rhetoric.įour and a half years ago, I wrote about homophobia in hip-hop culture.
