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whooooooooo

"who is the gay rapper?"

The oldest and stupidest question in the history of HipHop.

Back in 1996 this magazine named One Nut Network

published an alleged interview with the anonymous gay rapper,

and ever since then the more gossipy members of our hip hop nation

have been in an endless argument about

"who is the gay rapper?"

"Who is THE gay rapper?"

Because as we all know,

being a gay rapper is like being The Highlander,

and there can only be one on earth at the same time.

However and new book just came out named Hiding In HipHop

by a long time MTV executive named Terrance Dean,

writing about his life as a gay man in the HipHop world,

and lo and behold, according to his book,

there's a lot of gay people in HipHop

just like every other part of the world,

because being gay is normal and it happens everywhere.

I haven't seen the book yet,

and I'm worried it might just be another Karrine Steffans style

saucy tell-all memoir,

but I'm hoping it'll be something more than that

because HipHop has a whooooole lot of baggage

around the topic of homosexuality and manhood in general,

so anything we can do to spark some serious thought and conversation on these issues,

like that Byron Hurt documentary

that made Busta Rhymes run for the border,

the more we can do things like that to challenge ourselves the better.

Because when we find ourselves believing that killing a man makes us more of a man,

but loving a man makes us less of a man,

it's probably time to reexamine our criteria for manhood.