Moving Multitudes: Queer Counternarratives of Authenticity in Hip-Hop

Tyler, the Creator, notorious for years for slinging the f-slur before coming out  as bisexual in 2017, released the song “Sticky” ft. GloRilla, Sexyy Red & Lil Wayne on his number 1 album Chromokopia,  which features several explicit and implicit allusions to queerness, including the line  “all the bi bitches know what’s going down.”  (3:17). Doechii, an MC who flexes “I’m a real bi bitch,” on her latest mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal, was also featured on Tyler the Creator’s single “Balloon” off the album, rapping that she’s “a bi bitch but [she] need[s] that pussy now.” (1:36). We are in a vastly different landscape than the one C Riley  Snorton describes when writing of the glass closet in 2013, in which the public was scrambling to find a Black queer MC upon which to pin the label of the first out gay rapper (25). Smalls discusses how dominant narratives within hip-hop have created “the discursive visual archetype of the gender-variant queer that should be avoided by those adhering to authentic hip-hop Black, masculine ideals.” (130).  Pábon and Smalls outline a view of feminism, queerness, and hip hop as “critical sites and methods of inquiry aimed at exposing and deconstructing intersectional structures of oppression” (2). Through these intersecting modes of analysis, I examine several hip-hop artists which claim queerness in a powerful counter-narrative of authenticity within Hip-Hop as artists fog up the glass closet by consciously getting rowdy and queer on main, disrupting false narratives which see queer hip-hop as inherently disjunct and inauthentic, or as mere novelty. 

 In “The Body: An Abstract and Actual Rhetorical Concept.” Karma Chávez discusses how the bodies of straight white, cis, male and/or abled rhetors are treated as inconsequential while the bodies of marginalized rhetors become the subject of scrutiny (247. I extend this discussion to consider queer rhetorical strategies within hip hop, wherein normative bodies within hip-hop culture are made non-normative as femcees and queer MCs call upon Queerness as a mode of making visible the bodies of their normative rivals, placing them in queer scenarios and engaging in Black queer worldbuilding which rejects regimes of heteronormativity well as white queer respectability politics. Furthermore, I consider how Queerness becomes a site of celebration, authenticity, and ultimately a flex both sonically and lyrically, as artists call explicitly and implicitly upon Queer traditions within and around hip-hop culture.

 In “Denial is a River” Doechii samples Wendy William’s infamous quote: “Denial is a river in Egypt. Your husband is gay.” (Reuploaded from the Wendy Williams Experiences by user itsnotdonuts, 0:40)Williams, of course, is notorious for her continuous speculation about DL and Queer men in hip-hop  (Smalls, 131).  Through the interpolation of the soundbite from her subject position as an Black openly bisexual MC, and using it to bolster her critique of DL culture amidst an album packed to the brim with expressions of queerness, Doechii stakes out a distinction between queerness and DL culture, which dominant Black masculinist narratives within hip-hop have falsely conflated. She shifts the conversation from a discussion of DL men in hip hop as a deviant spectre threatening the sanctity of Black heterosexual masculinity, to a more nuanced discussion of the ways DL culture harms queer people and Black women interpersonally. 

I consider the multitude of ways in which artists align themselves with queerness, even while denying or distancing themselves from an explicit identity label.  Kehrer, quoting hampton, notes how Tyler, the Creator alluded to queerness, and stood in solidarity with his Odd Future groupmate Frank Ocean when he came out, all before publicly identifying with a label (3). Kehrer also notes how Queen Latifah embodied Black butch aesthetics through her portrayal of Cleo in Set it Off (67), wrote the affirming anthem “Come into my House” in which she interpolates house music, emulates ballroom call styles, and harkens back to the drag houses of the NYC ballroom scene (38), as just a few of many examples of her aligning herself with and/or embodying Black queer aesthetics and sonic traditions through her art long before publicly acknowledging her partner, Eboni, in 2021. 

Kehrer, Smalls, and Snorton have all written of the sensationalism that the white mainstream so often frames queer hip hop with, which relies on a false imagining of hip-hop and queerness as antithetical. Snorton links this to an obsession with hyper-visibility and pathologization of blackness as “both too homophobic (too regressive, pre-modern, anti-modern) to allow black people to construct ‘‘proper’’ sexual identifications and simultaneously so lascivious as to be unable to constrain any imaginable sexual proclivities.” (284)  Smalls and Kehrer both dissect this false dichotomy between hip-hop and queerness by tracing the multitude of ways queerness and hip-hop intersect and coalesce. Kehrer outlines the deeply intertwined legacy of house, ballroom culture, and hip-hop, opening up a discussion to consider queerness in hip-hop not based strictly in “queer identity but rather shared references to cultural aspects of queer communities in which [artists] participate.” (45). Shanté Paradigm Smalls also does not restrict their discussion of queerness to identity, considering also how definitions of queerness can be expanded to include challenges to hegemonic heteropatriarchy, as well as how both hip-hop and queerness connote “expansiveness, deconstruction, inclusivity, mixology, and creativity.” (Smalls, 124) 

Conscious of both the harms Snorton outlines and my own subject position as a white queer person, in identifying sites of inquiry for this project, rather than simply than asking who is “out” in the normative sense, or demanding a queer identity legible to me from a white subject position, I ask who sonically claims a Black queer genealogy, who expresses queerness as a rhetorical strategy, who aligns themselves with queer aesthetics and traditions, who places themselves in queer spaces and discourses, and to what end.