Submission by James Worsdale, TNG contributor

Crossposted  from Canonball Blog with permission.

Recent buzz has been made surrounding Hot 97 DJ Mr. Cee’s arrest on public lewdness charges for being the recipient of a blow job from a drag queen whom may or may not have been a sex worker. Unfortunately, and predictably, this sparked a spewing of homophobic vitriol throughout comments sections all over the Internet (the firing range for anonymous disgruntled bigots). This prompted rapper 50 Cent to come to Cee’s defense, saying to Miss Info, another Hot 97 radio personality, that anti-gay attitudes make for bad business and that the queer community is a valuable market, one that the hip hop community can no longer afford to mess with. Anti-gay won’t pay. But what does that really mean?

Hip hop as a music and cultural force is one that has largely been regarded in the mainstream, and oftentimes fringe, media as a locus for misogynistic and homophobic attitudes (though I’d say unjustifiably so, but I’ll get to that). 50 Cent’s comments, though at odds with a lot of the homophobic shit he’s spewed about in the past, could potentially be indicative of a victory for the queer movement. Maybe his acknowledgment of the power of our dollars will translate to increased visibility and consideration and garner more political power. Maybe it could be advantageous for queer rappers who have generally been relegated to fringe markets and not taken seriously because of hip hop’s homophobic infrastructure. The pragmatist in me wants to say that this is true, that this is the case, but the more honest and cynical radical in me is telling the pragmatist to shut the fuck up and stop waddling around in complacency and privilege.

By saying that homophobic attitudes are bad for business, you’re lessening and ignoring all of the other reasons why homophobia is a negative social force and coming at it from an exclusively self-interested and capitalistically-driven perspective. This attitude regards queer folks exclusively as a market rather than as a population and a community. What these attitudes seem to lead to is more of a shift towards monetary pandering of queer folks than recognition of our marginalization, a pandering that has already manifested itself into the pop genre of Top 40, with the likes of Katy Perry , Ke$ha, and the lady who will not be named (for Zack’s sake). It is a pandering that distracts queer folks from proactively working against systems of oppression and straight allies from recognizing and empathizing with our disenfranchisement.

I recognize that by framing this discussion around the issue of hip hop is problematic as a white, queer male. Positing hip hop as a pinnacle problem is placing a disproportionate amount of blame for the greater culture’s shortcomings and prejudices onto the black community. When discussing hip hop’s biases, the ubiquitous question of racism in how we discuss issues of institutionalized homophobia remains. If there’s anything we learned from the queer community’s collective reaction in assigning blame to communities of color after Proposition 8 in California, it’s that many have largely ignored issues of intersectionality and white privilege in the activist community. And why Chely Wright’s severe drop in album sales after coming out did not lead to a media examination of prejudices amongst country music fans in the same way that hip hop, homophobia and misogyny are all so inextricably linked, seems problematic to say the least.

In addition to this discrepancy in attention paid to industry biases and prejudices along race lines, is the fact that, as bell hooks puts it in “We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity:”

…not only is hip-hop packaged for mainstream consumption, many of its primary themes– the embrace of capitalism, the support of patriarchal violence, the conservative approach to gender roles, the call to liberal individualism— all reflect the ruling values of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Closer examination of hip hop than other genres and cultural forces, and designation of the industry’s problematic themes and content outside of context, is missing the bigger systemic issues.

Though even looking at 50 Cent’s comments outside of the realm of hip hop and the direction it may or may not be moving in, thinking of what they mean about the actual implications of media visibility and the attitudes that stem from it, bring up other questions. Turning the queer community into a product is manipulative, reductionist and condescending. There’s no doubt about it. But it’s important that we realize that though dollars and cents are not a metric for progress, at the same time, they’re considered to be for the people in power who determine media visibility and drive representations. It’s possible that acknowledgment of the commercial viability of the queer community by the mainstream hip hop community could drive to create and encourage more queer representations of color that despite the recent uptick in television we seem to be generally lacking in.

This all being admitted, I think it’s most important that we see 50 Cent’s comments not as a problem with the hip hop community and their perception of value, as hip hop is, I’d venture to say, one of the most poorly understood cultural entertainment forces of today and one with huge potential for radical transformation that, in many cases, has been and is being acted on but goes unnoticed because of racial biases. But it is a problem of how, as bell hooks puts it, “the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” is the underlying force in how we measure communities’ and populations’ values, existences, and legitimacy, in this case, ours.

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