Sexuality & Hip Hop

For those of you who didn't have a chance to go -- you missed out. It was a great panel and showed the coming together of the issues of hip hop and sexuality, especially gay and lesbian tensions. When you think about the topic, you tend to think about how women are exploited in hip hop and degraded by men. However, a lot more was pointed out than just the obvious. The panel brought up a lot of points that most people miss by just watching videos or listening to the music.
One of the issues that I enjoyed looking at the most was a video of a gay hip hop artist who was complaining about other artists bashing homosexuality, yet he referred to himself as a faggot in his lyrics. This was really bothersome to me because I don't think that people should use negative terms because they are offensive and if you call yourself something, it makes people think it's okay to refer to you as such. One of the members of the panel said "you are what you answer to." I couldn't agree more with this statement. I don't care even if you are gay, I don't like it when people use this word and I was happy the panel agreed.
I'm really glad they showed a clip of America's Next Best Dance Crew and the backup dancers were all gay and the leader was a trans MTF. I had never seen this before and I found it really interesting that transgender issues are showing up in main stream popular culture.
As a whole, this made me realize that the genre of hip hop is a way for sexuality to be expressed freely, whether it be in a negative or positive manner.