Queering Unrequited Love Stories

Hip Hop, Hollywood, and the Artists Within

by vanessa huang

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Illustration by Josh Lerner
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Watch out for that queer-bashing hater rolling through town. Weeks in anticipation of Lupo's booking Beenie Man to bring his dancehall beats to Providence this week, gay and lesbian listservs strategized about what to do about this homophobe's lyrics promoting violence against queer folk. Letters and emails were sent (and not sent), flyers went up around town, and community organizations received door-to-door visits requesting their participation in the protests. In response, Lupo's owner defended himself by claiming to be anti-censorship.

Meanwhile, on the West Coast, JB Rap, a queer African American male MC and member of Deep Dickollective, hollered at me through a text message, reminding me of the then upcoming Homohop festival. That's right, Homohop: At the end of last month, Oakland saw the convergence of queer hip hop artists from around the world for the fifth year in a row since 2001, when the movement emerged to "celebrate and insist on something so often denied in the Hip Hop Nation: that gay hip hop is not an oxymoron," according to the festival's own recounting of its story online. (To my agony I was unable to return the love by attending.)

I'm still vibing on that California love, but the contrast between hater lyrics and Homohop was a reminder of the painful universality of unrequited love stories in the lives of queer folk, at home, on the streets, and on the airwaves.

From Sappho To Homohop

These painful tales include those of queer artists negotiating the boundaries of outness in whatever business they're in. For as long as people have been negotiating and rewriting our lives through story, queer people have taken part, carefully injecting queer narratives into the larger flow of image and word.

The television series Queer As Folk is a "meta" meditation on (white) queer artists negotiating the heteronormative context of their lives and audiences. QAF meditates on this dilemma when Justin's violinist boyfriend is faced with a record deal marketing him to the rhythm of the purse-strings of presumably young straight women. In another meditation, Michael mourns the death of his beloved comic book hero, Captain Astro, rumored to have been slain by the comic's distributors responding to public displeasure with Astro's ambiguous sexuality. Stories containing such sexual ambiguities, such strayings from boy-lusts-after-girl or girl-lusts-after-boy narratives, seem to receive these kinds of responses.

Some episodes later, Michael and Justin resurrect Astro's spirit into an unambiguously out-and-proud gay superhero, Rage, created in Brian's image. Through what later becomes a Rage comic book series, the two do what all of us artists seem to be doing, revising the realities of our lives (Their series draws from their collective unrequited love for Brian, as well as the painful realities of gay bashing, in Justin's case). Rage (like QAF) cultivates quite a following, and the two masterminds behind Rage are eventually approached by Hollywood to adapt Rage into moving pictures. Michael and Justin are then faced with the pressure from a heteronormative market to unqueer Rage, a pressure to they refuse to succumb. They insist upon Rage's specificity as a queer narrative born of queer experience—what, would Hollywood have Rage save survivors of straight bashings? (Actually, as the story line progresses, Justin does get involved with a DIY, the-cops-don't-care-about-hate crimes, reclaim-our-white queer-streets straight-bashing group: the Pink Posse.)

For The Love Of Money

The hype over Astro reflects how queer folk in the public eye are policed in real life, from the stories they tell to the lives that inspire them. America, in all its flag-waving glory, seems to rather not have their children grow up bombarded with graphic novels or anything else presenting alternative workings of family and love. Flag-waving Americans also seem to prefer to not have to see the reflection of cultural values and policies they sanction—pushing queer folk out of childhood homes and schools, out of housing, healthcare and employment—instead policing them into jails and prisons.

In the meantime, the advertising industry which so heavily influences middle-of-the-road America certainly loves the "disposable income" they've identified burning holes in the pockets of (white) queers. For queer folk in the business of money, the temptation is often too much. QAF's Brian, who maintains his loft apartment lifestyle as an advertising executive, happily takes the money of a homophobe cop running for mayor to work on his political campaign, even though the cop plans to kill Brian's Liberty Avenue lifestyle by closing the clubs and bathhouses. The cop happily reciprocated Brian's love, since he conveniently filled the role of the Gay Man in his lineup. (To his credit, Brian invests some major dough to buy out some commercial TV time to out-do the ads he'd originally created.)

Once queer folks attain a critical mass of viewers who are paying big bucks—or who promoters anticipate could be paying big or bigger bucks—it seems that industry love can be requited, so long as you ain't out and proud. On the courts, Sheryl Swoopes' recent coming out in ESPN The Magazine makes her the second openly queer player in the WNBA. On the screen, Tom Cruise, long rumored to be masking his sexuality behind the scenes, has denied being gay since the 1990s, and has since then initiated lawsuits against people claiming possession of knowledge confirming his sexuality. And on the airwaves, the records of the first openly gay hip hop artist to have signed to a major label, Caushun, have been left gathering dust on bookshelves.

Reclaiming The Beats (And The Streets)

As much as white queer love stories that reach such wide audiences provide a counterpoint to all the rest, I'm constantly reminded of the slow-moving threshold. QAF's portrayal of the queer community's response to hate crimes—strengthening a cultural investment in the prison industrial complex by advocating for the gay panic defense and other tools to complement a punitive response to harm—reflects the political context of the day. Whereas the mainstream white-dominated gay and lesbian movement can largely continue pushing for punitive responses to hate crimes, the mass harms of policing and prisons are not easily missed by queer folks of color on the receiving end of police brutality and enforcement of quality of life crimes (I didn't see any folks of color at Pulse over Halloween weekend donning cop or prisoner costumes).

But this is unsurprising: Even a white transgendered guy in prison I once talked to didn't identify the struggle for racial justice with his immediate struggle for trans liberation. This shit runs deep. Even 50 Cent felt the need to apologize for Kanye West's remarks, filing Katrina as an "act of God" rather than the result of years of neglect and abandonment. Reminds me of a conversation with a black lesbian in prison who told me that "Condolleeza Rice is a house slave." And on the streets, colonial legacies continue to play out in very real ways, with bullets coming not just from the cops but from within communities themselves.

Meanwhile, JB Rap's text message is but one dispatch that's reaching people with a different kinds of messages. Many of these calls are coming from independent rap artists whose work is rooted in community struggle, true to hip hop culture's roots. In my own record player are a compilation from homeless MCs sheltered at Oakland's Covenant House, dispatching rhymes, envisioning life beyond black-on-black crime, and a compilation produced by Justice Now called "The We That Sets Us Free: Building a World Without Prisons", which features several queer hip hop artists. They're not blasting this shit on MTV—that's for sure.

I recently participated in a panel at this year's Allied Media Conference on the topic of "Community Organizing Through Hip Hop" because of my involvement with Justice Now. When our conversation came to sexuality in hip hop, we all responded in very different languages, coming from producing and teaching hip hop to electoral-based organizing through the National Hip Hop Convention and community-based anti-prison organizing. One editor of Clamor, the magazine that hosts the conference every year, with whom I had shared a rental car to the conference, told me she credits queer theory with conferences like these being able to bring all these different strategies to the table.

There's something here. As Invincible, a Detroit-based MC, pointed out during our conversation about the commodification of rap on mainstream airwaves, the labels of "conscious" and "gangsta" are owned by mainstream marketers, ultimately dividing the producers of hip hop culture, when what gets labeled "unconscious" (for its bling-bling, for its misogyny, for its homophobia) is a mere reflection of the context. Native American hip hop photojournalist Ernie Paniciolli echoed this sentiment last week when "Rap Sessions," a traveling community dialogue on race and hip hop, came through Providence, saying that hip hop is by definition adaptive, and a "big black mirror" reflecting reality.

For those lusting for a pure, unadulterated, un-unrequited love, independent queer hip hop is where it's at. In contrast with the hate many non-black and increasingly non-white MCs get from participating in hip hop culture through rap, queer hip hop blurs expectation, loving up MCs who aren't scripted into mainstream race and hip hop templates, like San Francisco-based Latina MC JenRo and Oakland-based NaR, a queer Arab girl-boy emcee duo.

The independent queer hip hop scene in Oakland has also allowed non-queer identified white MCs and organizers to build with queer MCs of color and organizers in ways we don't see happening much elsewhere. These collaborations subvert the tired narratives of divide-and-conquer by transcending both the limits of conventional political organizing and the authenticity narratives so often found in mainstream hip hop, and expand the possibilities for building truly compassionate and loving communities. In these hard times, queer hip hop will truly love you back, so long as you're lovin' and respectin' it.

VANESSA HUANG B'06 flirts with unrequited truths.

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