Gay Hip Hop

This has been something that has actually been brewing for quite some time. The first time I heard about this was two or three years ago in the Advocate. They had an article running about gay hip hop and a few artists. This news item features an openly gay hip hop artist named Dead Lee. What's interesting is to see how this has become more and more pervasive and how and why these artists have decided to come out. What's even more interesting is that you still can't find any of their music anywhere, not even on Amazon. This particular artist though, also takes an interesting stance on the f-word (It used to be avoided altogether on television, but the media lately has equated it with the n-word). His stance is to reclaim the f-word, the same way that African Americans have reclaimed the n-word in early rap and hip hop. I like the idea of reclaiming words, and the gay community already did that with the word queer, but for the most part, we've stayed away from the f-word because it is simply so harsh. It will be interesting to see if this becomes a trend...

• The news item can be watched by clicking here.