finding a home in the hip -h o p fa n d o m by sabrina stott Anna (she/her), a 21-year-old NYU student, has loved hip-hop all her life. She’s also bisexual, which means that being a fan of the genre has not always been easy for her. “Rap music is something I’ve always enjoyed, but it still has a long way to go,” Anna says. The rapper DaBaby made headlines this past summer for spewing homophobic and misogynistic remarks during the Rolling Loud festival in Miami. After videos surfaced, he was dropped from multiple music festivals including Governor’s Ball, Lollapalooza, and Day N Vegas, all of which made statements saying they do not tolerate hate or discrimination. Despite all of this, rappers such as Tory Lanez, Boosie, and T.I. backed up DaBaby. In an Instagram Live video, T.I. said the backlash against DaBaby amounted to bullying: “We all stood up on behalf of gays and lesbians and people in the gay community because we thought it was some bullsh*t for y’all to have to be bullied [...] But I don’t think any of us did that to feel like you would now 14
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have the authority to come and bully us.” Comments like this show some in the hip-hop community still have a lot to learn. Toughness has always been part of hip-hop culture and has arguably been essential to its history of empowering oppressed communities. But a byproduct of this toughness has been a persistent toxic masculinity where lack of respect for queer people was accepted. While creating a safe space for one marginalized group, they created a toxic space for another. In playing the victim, T.I. is being tone deaf. Hip-hop has a long history of aggressiveness towards the queer community, and many genre-defining rappers have been homophobic in their lyrics: Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, Nas, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, and Kanye West make up only a fraction of the list. Despite this, many queer people still love and listen to hip-hop/rap music, and openly queer artists like Lizzo, Tyler the Creator, Princess Nokia, Lil Nas X, and Frank Ocean have started to pave the way to a more inclusive
future in the rap community. An increasing number of straight artists such as Jay-Z and A$AP Rocky now consider themselves to be allies of the LGBTQIA+ community. Anna is a fan of many of these newer artists. For her, music isn’t always about the lyrics, but the overall ambiance of a song. “I like hip-hop music and artists like Lizzo because I can listen to them throughout the day, and it helps me to get energized without having to overthink the meaning of the songs too much,” she says. One unique issue that Anna has faced as a bisexual woman in the rap community is fetishization. “Bisexuality in women is often fetishized in the community because men think it’s not valid,” she says— meaning that many men think that if women are interested in other women, it’s only for the pleasure of men. Rappers also oversexualize bisexual or lesbian women in their lyrics and music videos, as recently seen in Kanye West’s “I Don’t Like” and Drake’s “Girls Want Girls,” which seem to encourage men to put themselves at the center of a queer woman’s sexuality. It’s also sad that some artists feel the need to use homophobic lyrics and slurs in their music, Anna says,
