This week, NBA journeyman Jason Collins announced he was gay, making him the only out active professional athlete in American sports’ “big four." As Will Leitch noted, the announcement was as much of a milestone as the backlash (or the total lack thereof). There were few detractors and those who dared to speak out (most notably ESPN’s Chris Broussard) were quickly told to sit down. With the walls of professional sports officially breached by a gay person, all eyes (okay, a few eyes) now turn to the next great homophobic American stronghold: the rap game. The idea that at least one but possibly many of our rap stars are secretly gay is something of a folk legend, like the Chupacabra. It started with a 1996 interview with an anonymous but allegedly high-profile gay emcee in the zine One Nut and has persevered since. Since then, certain factions have been searching high and low for “The Gay Rapper.” It was a favorite topic of Wendy Williams in the late 90’s when she was on Hot 97. Williams also insinuated that Puffy and Ma$e were fucking, despite their families and playboy personas. It never occurred to anyone that there was no reason you couldn’t have a family, have sex with lots of women, and still have sex your best friend.Any time someone remotely high-profile comes out the closet it makes people think harder than usual about what it actually means to be gay. Miami Dolphins wide receiver Mike Wallace responded to Collins’s announcement by tweeting, “All these beautiful women in the world and guys wanna mess with other guys SMH…” Some took offense to this, but to me (and, for credibility, noted gay columnist Dan Savage), Wallace seems more confused than homophobic, like someone had ordered a burger while dining on a pier on the coast of Maine. It just never occurred to him that being gay doesn’t mean a lifetime ban from vaginas.In 2013, we have a pretty healthy crop of high-profile queer (or gender-norms-challenging) rappers. The success of Le1f, Mykki Blanco, Big Freedia, Nicky Da B, and many others is a testament to the growing tolerance of rap fans and the growing diversity of the genre itself. What we don’t have is a grasp of the nuances of sexuality. Frank Ocean, for example, never said he was gay. All he said was that he had feelings for a man at some point in his life. As far as I know, he said nothing about his romantic life since then. Nonetheless, he’s been plagued by cheap jokes and held up by Tyler as a magic amulet against claims of homophobia. The running theme here is what amounts to a zero-tolerance rule for being gay: if you do anything gay, you’re gay and that’s that.To point out how silly that is, let’s consider who we collectively consider a rapper. After all, we don’t have a consensus on what the definition of a “rapper” is. If you ask the mainstream media, any black singer is automatically a rapper. Is Chris Brown a rapper? What about Tyrese, aka Black Ty? What if we had a similar zero-tolerance rule for rapping? Is Jason Aldean a rapper? What about Ke$ha or Murray Head? “Gangam Style” officially charting as a rap song is way more perplexing than any Lothario rapper that secretly has a dude on the side.It shouldn’t be a surprise that at least one high-profile rapper in the late 90’s was hiding his sexuality, as gay people in lots of professionals feel a need to do. Some of your favorite rappers, singers and producers have probably experimented or fully embraced their sexuality. (Others may have had trouble with that; word to Busta Rhymes’s extreme discomfort in Byron Hurt’s very good documentary Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes). For a hundred reasons, coming out of the closet is a different set of problems for rappers than for athletes. But while we’re making leaps and bounds for gay rights and tolerance, let’s take a small step and acknowledge that sexuality is a sliding scale and nobody is 100% one way or the other.Skinny Friedman is a writer and DJ living in Brooklyn. He's on Twitter - @skinny412
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