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Article Excerpt
WHEN DEEP DICK COLLECTIVE ASKED ME TO MEET THEM AT THE BERKELEY-ASHBY BART subway station near the drumming circle at the Flea Market, I thought it would be next to impossible to conduct an interview for my research on popular art and social change, considering the noise that would be around us. On second thought, what other place could be more appropriate to interview a group of African American gay rappers than among a circle of African American drummers (with a few white hippies present), who find in the rhythm and beat of African drums a common impulse to create local and global change?
Deep Dick Collective (D/DC--also spelled out as Deep Dickollective) is a rap crew of African American gay men seen among African drummers and within the newly emerging culture in the hip-hop community, called homo hop. (1) In 1999, Juba Kalamka, Phil LSP, and Tim'm West formed D/DC in a piano room at Stanford University, and though they started off as a Bay Area-based rap crew, their hip-hop art has expanded into a collective network of black gay rappers and friends in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, South Africa, and Taiwan that is loosely associated with D/DC.
From a piano room at Stanford University, "with a bucket, a piano, makin' up rhymes on a tape recorder" (as Tim'm recalls), the idea for a new style of hip-hop art and activism was formed, as the three founders coined a new cultural, artistic, and political identity: PostPomoHomo.
Whenever I mention to friends and colleagues that I am doing research on gay men in hip-hop, I receive looks of surprise. "Gay men in hip-hop?" they ask, as if it were an oxymoron to have "gay" and "hip-hop" in the same sentence. This surprise is understandable, given the violent, sexist, homophobic, anti-gay, heteronormative, and male-centered culture of hip-hop portrayed in media. Social research on hip-hop, to the extent that it engages with gender and sexuality, usually highlights its expioitative character, misogyny, and violence against women. Even in research that finds within hip-hop culture a resistant strand among women who deconstruct sexism, challenge male patriarchy, and develop new generations of feminist activism (Perry, 2004: 150-190; Collins, 2006; Pough, 2004; Watkins, 2005), (2) most research in this area of study has been hesitant to dialogue with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) artists, who develop "queer" consciousness in the local and global hip-hop communities.
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In response to the look of surprise from fellow researchers and friends, and to address what appears to be in social research a hesitancy to study the contributions and political activism of LGBTQ hip-hop artists, my study on D/DC and PostPomoHomos investigates the role of LGBTQ hip-hop artists, and black gay rappers in particular, in creating social change and transforming cultural spaces. My primary concerns here are (1) how D/DC views social activism through its music and art, (2) what D/DC sees as the historical influences that inspire its art and activism, and (3) how D/DC understands the connection of PostPomoHomo identity to mobilizing social change within African American and LGBTQ communities.
The recent study, Hip Hop Matters, by my friend and fellow sociologist S. Craig Watkins (2005), helps to frame my discussion theoretically. Watkins examines conflicts and tensions that emerge in hip-hop politics, due to an "identity politics" characteristic of the Civil Rights Movement. Although the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN), mobilized by hip-hop "godfather" and entrepreneur Russell Simmons, plays an important role in hip-hop's political advocacy for African American youth at the national level, this activism narrowly focuses on race and neglects to take into account the changing identities, multiple voices, varied needs, and matrices of concerns emerging within the hip-hop community (Watkins, 2005: 134-162). Lipsitz (1997: 27-47) connects the origins of hip-hop (in the pioneering art and music of hip-hop "godfather" Afrika Bambaataa) to global diversity, emerging from the identities of disillusioned transnational and multiracial postcolonial youth. However, this diversity and welcome of broader global identities in hip-hop is limited to the "black identity" political vision of Simmons and HSAN's CEO and president, Chavis Muhammad (the former United Church of Christ minister and president of the NACCE Reverend Ben Chavis, also known as one of the Wilmington Ten): (3)
Simmons and the HSAN are seduced by the legacy of civil rights. Chavis Muhammad's selection [as CEO and president] suggests that Simmons envisions hip-hop politics as black politics. But the vision fails to understand the steadily changing character of hip-hop or black America. From the very beginning the movement has struggled with questions like "who is hip-hop?" and "what is hip-hop?" Now, as it begins to move its political agenda forward, it will have to grapple with another challenging and equally contentious question: "What causes will hip-hop fight for and on whose behalf?" (Watkins, 2005: 160). (4)
Watkins inquires, "Who and what is hip-hop? For whom and for what identities will hip-hop fight?" In the narratives and conversations of D/DC, the answer to these questions characterizes not a unilateral or monolithic politics, narrowly focused on racial identity (i.e., black identity), but a politics, through hip-hop music and art, that builds political consciousness from a diversity of identities, particularly based on race, sexuality, and class.
A definition of PostPomoHomo would be helpful here. In an interview, Tim'm relates PostPomoHomo to a shift in identity from the activism of black gay artists in the generations of the 1980s and 1990s that preceded him:
I had really been inspired by the movements of brothers in the late '80s, early '90s, Marion Riggs, Essex Hemphiil, the black gay poets, and also back then Tongues Untied [a film by Riggs] came out and it was like boom! It was like nothing ! I mean there hasn't been anything of the magnitude like Tongues Untied since that was done in the late '80s. When we talk about PostPomoHomo, it is a way of recalling groups like PomoAfroHomos, who were on the theatrical track organizing the spoken word events, when we were in college. They were doing tours and came around.
Organized in 1990, PomoAfroHomos (literally meaning Postmodern African-American Gay Men) used theatrical performances to create dialogue about race, gender, and same-sex love in the African-American and LGBTQ communities, and, within those communities, to challenge racial and heteronormative representations that suggested that same-sex loving people of African descent did not exist. Brian Freeman, an original member of PomoAfroHomos and currently professor of Theater and African American Studies at UCLA, points to how the theatrical group understood postmodern activism through performing arts when they were organized and on the "theatrical track" between 1990 and 1995. In our conversation, Freeman said:
At that moment we were reading postmodern theory. A lot of the PomoAfroHomos' performances had to do with fragmented identities, taking something fragmented and reconstituting it. Gay theater at the time was only represented as gay male, and black theater was only represented as African American. As PomoAfroHomos, we moved between gay theater and the black community, smashing identity on the ground and making it different--reconstituting it in a different way.
Freeman's words provide a central metaphor to describe the activism of D/DC. In the ethnographic data that follows, the social activism and art of PostPomoHomo (post-postmodern gay men) is centered upon "smashing" and reconstituting identities that are fragmented and marginalized within a white hegemonic LGBTQ political movement and an anti-gay, anti-feminine, and heterosexist hip-hop social movement.
The Study, Methodology, and Findings: Historical Formation and Conversations of Social Change in D/DC
This study utilizes ethnographic methods and is based on a wide variety of data collected between 2005 and 2006. Data sources include (1) observations of D/DC performances at LBGT Pride Rallies in New York and San Francisco, (2) individual conversations and a focus group interview with current and former members of D/DC, (3) individual phone conversations with members of the 1980s Black Gay Literary Movement, particularly with former members of the Black Gay Men United writing collective and the theater group PomoAfroHomos, and (4) poetic writings, media resources, computer blogs with online discussion, and lyrics collected from D/DC's 2001 CD, BourgieBohoPostPomoAfroHomo.
Several interrelated socio-historical influences inform D/DC's social activism: (1) the historical formation of PomoHomo identity, which emerged in the 1990s from the Black Gay Literary Movement of the 1980s, and (2) the merging of this identity with political identities formed in the 1980s through 1990s hip-hop generation, particularly from feminist spoken word and rap artists, politically conscious, "weirdo," and "gangsta"-style rap (Dyson, 1996; Kitwana, 2002; Quinn, 2005; Chang, 2005). These interrelated influences sparked performances and conversations on identity and practices of social change in which D/DC acts to "smash" and "reconstitute" social identities thought to be opposed to one another: gay identity and hip-hop identity. The blending of these identities defines for...
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