“I’m Coming Out” was meant to be a gay liberation song but the song’s writer and producer Nile Rodgers didn’t tell Diana Ross that. Which led to a whole thing. It’s a crazy story. The origin of the song is fascinating but more interesting is how disco in general was part of the gay rights movement. We chart the rise of disco and look at the way it dovetailed with the struggle for LGBTQ rights and how being gay is so different for Sylvester than for Tyler the Creator.
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Toure [00:00:05] DJ Toure’ on the ones and twos.
Diana Ross [00:00:11] I’m Coming Out.
Toure [00:00:11] We’ll be here all night spinning the disco classics you need in your souls. Because disco was the sound of liberation for many Black and gay and lesbian people. Anthems like Diana Ross’s I’m Coming Out celebrated gay and lesbian visibility and the joy of being out of the closet and being your full true self on the public stage.
Wesley Morris [00:00:34] The more literal, the better.
Toure [00:00:36] That’s Wesley Morris.
Wesley Morris [00:00:37] I am a critic at the New York Times, and I host a podcast called Still Processing with Jenna Wortham.
Toure [00:00:43] Disco was overtly political because the spaces where people danced to songs like I’m Coming Out, those spaces were politicized for a long time. A lot of clubs did not want a lot of gay and lesbian patrons. So when gay and lesbian people found places where they could go and truly be themselves and wear what they wanted and dance with whoever they wanted to. That propelled the disco movement of the seventies, which helped fuel the gay rights movement of the eighties.
Wesley Morris [00:01:14] I mean, I’m not going to sit here and say that the disco movement was was the gay liberation movement.
Toure [00:01:19] No, no, no, of course not. Of course not.
Wesley Morris [00:01:21] But wasn’t it?
Toure [00:01:24] This is Being Black, The eighties. I’m Touré and this is a look at an epic decade through the lens of some of the great songs of the era, not necessarily the best songs, but the songs that speak best to the issues that shaped the eighties. This time we dive into disco and how it helped change the world. In the early eighties, doctors discovered a disease that was killing gay men with frightening speed. AIDS shaped the eighties in many ways, but for many straight people, especially those in power, it was easy to ignore AIDS because gay people seemed far away. They believed that they didn’t know them. They weren’t in their families. They were deviants in faraway places like New York and San Francisco. Lots of gay people decided that they and others had to come out right away as a way of creating more visibility and making gay people harder to ignore.
Craig Seymour [00:02:21] Coming out is very much associated with a strategy at the time.
Toure [00:02:26] That’s Craig Seymour.
Craig Seymour [00:02:27] I’m a Black gay music critic and activist. Was thought that if more people came out and if you knew that your secretary, your boss or whatever, gay then that so coming out with this strategy, you’d see all these ads in gay papers come out, come out, come out. It became so urgent that that transformed into the outing movement.
Toure [00:02:50] Outing in terms of people revealing that people are gay, forcing them out of the closet.
Craig Seymour [00:02:55] When people started getting sick with AIDS and it was like, well, we really need some, you know. You need more people like that to fight this big AIDS thing in the fight. Come up against like the CDC and to go up against these pharmaceutical, we need everybody and shoot it. They’re not ready to come out now. We might just have to pull you out of like because we really need to right now just to kind of demystify queerness at a time that it was being extremely stigmatized because of AIDS.
Wesley Morris [00:03:24] I mean, that is a controversial act. The the outing of people who don’t want to be outed in the 1980s. People lost their jobs over that. But there was this radical element that wanted to have both as many members as possible, but also to like to expose hypocrisy.
Toure [00:03:38] In the eighties, millions of straight people suddenly discovered that there were people they already loved in their family or in their community who were gay. And because of that, slowly straight people began to take gay rights and gay justice more seriously. Being loud and proud or just being unapologetically gay in public was transformative for society. Here we see what’s meant by the phrase personal as political, because when you’re part of an oppressed class, just being your true self and being proud and being public and being unapologetically you, that is a political act. For gay people to come out and demand space for themselves and reject the stigma of being gay. That is political. It’s personal as political. And some of the roots of those eighties personal as political choices, the imperative to come out in order to save gay lives.
Toure [00:04:34] That began in the seventies. In the world of New York City Disco . I’m Coming Out was written in 1980 by disco legends Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards from the band Chic, and it was purposely constructed from the beginning to be a gay anthem. But creating a gay anthem in 1980 was not simple. The idea for the song started in the bathroom of a gay club in Manhattan when Nile Rodgers, the leader of Chic, one of the greatest groups in the history of disco.
Chic [00:05:09] Ah, freak out. Le freak, ce chic. Freak out.
Toure [00:05:10] Was at the urinal, and he noticed he was surrounded by Diana Ross impersonators.
Nile Rodgers [00:05:15] Nobody would believe that that there were that many Diana Ross impersonators that night. But it was a lot. It was at least five or six deep on either side. It could have even been more than that.
Toure [00:05:29] On either side. So ten maybe? Yeah, at least ten. No kidding. I mean, it was packed.
Toure [00:05:35] That’s Nile, calling from Europe, where he’s on tour. Back in 1980, Nile and his partner, Bernard Edwards, had already begun working with Diana Ross on an album. And this was a sign that told him what to do.
Nile Rodgers [00:05:48] And I ran outside and I called my partner because you couldn’t make a phone call from inside. One, we didn’t have cell phones yet, and the club was so loud you couldn’t hear the payphone. So I actually went outside, called my partner Bernard, and said, Man, I explained the situation to him and I said, It’s like I’m in a Fellini movie. He’s like, ten. Diana Ross’ is around me. We have to do a song that talks about how the gay community reveres Diana Ross. I said, So write down I’m Coming Out. And he said.
Toure [00:06:24] Why that?
Nile Rodgers [00:06:25] Because I thought to myself we needed to have a title and a hook that would be as strong as James Brown going. Say it loud. I’m Black and I’m proud. You just need that. You needed that catch phrase of the moment. That was sort of that exemplified the movement. So the next day I had a hangover and the cobwebs had to clear. But when you’re young, they clear rather quickly. We then wrote the song in a way where we knew that the gay community would get it, but we also knew that there was double entendre that that it would also just be a really good R&B kind of song.
Toure [00:07:10] Before making the record, Nile and Bernie had interviewed Diana and talked to her about who she was becoming at that moment in her life, and she told them she was in the midst of a change of growth, of blossoming.
Nile Rodgers [00:07:23] No one ever sat down with her and said, Hey, Diana, what do you want to do? Well, she was like, I want to explore new avenues. I want to go. So when we wrote I’m Coming Out, it was because Diana had told us, you know, she had big aspirations. So during the interview, Diana opened up and we knew that she was leaving Motown.
Toure [00:07:46] The legendary record label that had been her home for decades.
Nile Rodgers [00:07:50] So we knew that she had big dreams. And if you listen to the lyrics, this is all about Diana Ross’s new big dream. She was going to the top of the mountain.
Toure [00:08:02] That’s what Diana meant by the chorus. She was becoming a new woman. The chorus makes it clear.
Diana Ross [00:08:11] I’m coming out I want the world to know got to let it show
Toure [00:08:14] The verses make it clearer.
Nile Rodgers [00:08:17] I have to show the world all that I want to be and all my abilities. There’s so much more to me.
Toure [00:08:26] Diana’s voice is big and bright and glassy and clear and direct. It’s the perfect vehicle for an anthem. And I’m Coming Out she radiates self-confidence and self-acceptance and self-love. And it’s a decadently gorgeous sounding record.
Wesley Morris [00:08:43] It’s a perfect record as a production, Right. And it’s some of her most joyous singing, Diana Ross’s.
Craig Seymour [00:08:49] And I also think it’s important that it’s a straight woman singing about the homosexual experience.
Toure [00:08:56] Her voice on I’m Coming Out is the Sound of a Sonic Queen. She’s got an incredible voice and an iconic one. She was a megastar when she made this record, and she’d been a star for two decades. So her singing this record and attaching the stamp of Diana Ross, that alone was special.
Bill Coleman [00:09:15] It’s Diana Ross with her sort of cultural gravitas, was able to deliver that message.
Toure [00:09:24] That’s Bill Coleman.
Bill Coleman [00:09:25] In a way that maybe a brand new singer or maybe somebody who is a bit more fringe. Not that they wouldn’t have been able to deliver the record on a creative level. They just meant it may not have had the sort of mass exposure and pop exposure that it ended up having.
Toure [00:09:43] Diana Ross singing I’m Coming Out was different than anyone else in the world singing it because she was already a gay icon.
DJ Jellybean Benitez [00:09:52] A few years ago I played at a sort of a heritage Black gay club in Philadelphia called Woodies.
Toure [00:09:58] That’s DJ Jellybean Benitez.
DJ Jellybean Benitez [00:10:00] And during my set, I had played The Boss and the lighting man instinctively just turned off all the lights. But then when he put it back on, it was like I had 600 men singing along, thinking they were all Diana Ross.
Toure [00:10:16] Gay icon Boy George said.
Boy George [00:10:18] Gay audiences loved drama queens. They loved tragedy. And they love campiness. And I think that Diana Ross encapsulates all those things.
Toure [00:10:29] She was a regal person and a relentlessly positive person who was associated with stardom and good energy.
Diana Ross [00:10:37] We see I do think we have a choice in what our lives are going to be like. You see,.
[00:10:41] We don’t have a chance about what’s going to hit us.
Diana Ross [00:10:42] When we die. Okay. Let me tell you this. My impression I have a certain, I guess, positive positiveness about my life, but I realize that every time I create a positive thought in my mind, also, I create a negative thought. It’s just like I’m going to be very successful in my mind said oh, no, you’re not, you know? Okay, So since I create positive and negative, it’s which one I give the most attention that is powerful when I think positive constantly. It’s very powerful and it controls me. If I think negative all the time, it’s going to control me too.
Toure [00:11:14] Except there’s this one thing. Diana Ross felt the song was really about her. She didn’t think the song had anything to do with being gay.
Nile Rodgers [00:11:23] You know, she she didn’t associated with coming out of the closet, honestly. She just associated with it. I mean, listen to the lyric. There’s a new me coming out.
Toure [00:11:33] And the guys didn’t tell her that they were looking at it as a potential gay anthem.
Nile Rodgers [00:11:38] No, no, no, no, no. When she heard the phrase I’m coming out, I don’t think she associated that with the gay rights movement at all or a person coming out of the closet or anything. She had no idea.
Toure [00:11:48] She had no idea until someone told her. It sounded like she was announcing that she was gay.
Nile Rodgers [00:11:55] Diana Ross loved this song so much that she went and played it to Frankie Crocker, who was the number one deejay in America.
Toure [00:12:05] Frankie Crocker was the king of radio in the seventies, in the eighties at WBLS. and he helped shape the musical taste of America, making the careers of countless acts from Bob Marley to Grace Jones to Madonna.
Nile Rodgers [00:12:20] When she leaves the studio to play it for Frankie, she was like floating on a cloud. She was so happy. So she goes to play it for Frankie Crocker. And instead of getting his blessing, Frankie says to her, You know, this song is going to ruin your career. And she says, What are you talking about? And Frankie says, Don’t you know what this song is about? And she’s like, Yeah, it’s about me. It’s No, no, no, no, no, no. This is like, everybody’s going to think that you’re getting that you’re coming out of the closet.
Toure [00:12:52] Diana came back to the studio very upset.
Nile Rodgers [00:12:56] She did not float back. She was really upset that this was going to ruin her career. So she comes back and I said to her, and this is the only time in my entire career that I ever lied to an artist, ever. I said, Well, Diana, no, you know, this song is like the beginning of your show. It’s the song that we start the show with.
Toure [00:13:21] It was to be her intro music. Like, literally, I’m coming out here on stage to sing for you. Nile said he never lied to artist, and Diana was the biggest star he’d ever worked with one of the biggest stars in the world at that moment. He didn’t want to do anything to risk that relationship, but he had to get this record out.
Nile Rodgers [00:13:41] I knew that I was lying to her because she was upset about the wrong thing. It became a huge fight. She wound up leaving the studio and we didn’t finish for another like couple of months or so because it was like because such a stir between Motown and us and her and blah, blah, blah. I remember Berry Gordy,.
Toure [00:14:02] The founder and president of Motown.
Nile Rodgers [00:14:05] Calling us up saying, man, that ain’t a Diana Ross record. That ain’t a Motown record. I said, No, I’m sorry, Mr. Gordy, that is. I said, It’s just not an old Diana Ross record. It’s a new Diana Ross record.
Toure [00:14:19] Nile Rodgers is imperative to give the gay community the anthem it deserved was so strong that he broke a personal rule and lied to a massive superstar he was working with. He put his relationship with Diana Ross at risk because he so badly wanted to give the gay community this anthem. And he was right in that the gay community needed some love. America is a country that classified gayness as a mental illness as late as the early seventies and criminalized gay as so perniciously that when people went to gay bars, they brought bail money. Gay and lesbian people in the seventies struggled to find places where they could commune in peace, where they could be themselves until a series of parties in apartments and tiny clubs emerged early in the seventies, parties where you could be free to dance with whoever and wear whatever and be whoever you really were without fear of arrest. Perhaps the first of those parties was called the Loft and it was started and made by David Mancuso. Jellybean Benitez was there.
DJ Jellybean Benitez [00:15:27] But I’d never seen anything like this. It was people from, you know, all walks of life straight and gay, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, young and old in someone’s house, you know, like his mail was on the table. And it just it was like a loft. But those were the first places that I saw men dancing together, women dancing together. It didn’t even have a name. It was just called the loft by the people that went there because it was in a loft. He had his turntable set up there and he wasn’t mixing sort of synchronizing the beats. You know, the songs would end and sometime the next song would catch the end of it, or there’d be silence. People would just stand around, clap, wait for the next song to start, but those initial clubs were really, you know, sort of safe havens for for people that were gay, basically, you know, allowed them to be free and open and have a place to congregate and meet other people.
Nile Rodgers [00:16:31] Disco was a direct result of this desire to be about finding spaces and creating spaces.
Toure [00:16:37] Nelson George covered the disco movement for Billboard magazine and wrote about it in his classic book, The Death of Rhythm and Blues.
Nelson George [00:16:45] David Mancuso’s, parties, and everybody talked about that being a breakthrough party because they were both innovative in terms of music and the idea that he used to put his deejay equipment in the middle of the floor. He wasn’t on the high rise so people danced around. This idea of communal experience was very, very big.
Bill Coleman [00:17:08] David Mancuso had the vision to have loft parties essentially where they would play this music that they liked, which was a combination of funk, disco, hard, R&B, up tempo stuff to keep people dancing and provide a safe space. My name is Bill Coleman. I am an artist, manager, producer, deejay, film music supervisor. It’s like you having a loft space and you’re like, I’m going to invite all my friends and all my friends come from all different walks of life. I want them to be able to come. We all love this music. We want to be able to play this and and be safe. You know? Like that’s really the genesis of how a lot of this started. Then, of course, it graduates to your paradise garages and other spaces within the city. But they really, you know, from standing, it’s like a lot of things really just started off as like is very like me and my friends want to have like a space to play, to hang out and listen to good music. So I think that when you start getting these spaces of that, say, outcasts or Well done, and I include LGBTQ community, that includes people of color. That’s where this all starts to really germinate. I would say it helps inform the gay rights movement in that these spaces or places where gay people that are friends and people who love this music could go and be and celebrate their sexuality without fear of being ostracized or turned away at the door, how they looked who they were with, etc. so and so forth. So yeah, so it was, it was like that, yes. Again fueling fuel is a, is a proper, proper word. It helped fuel it, but Grace Jones used to say about disco. She said. Grace Jones notes how disco united people with one singular sound radical new power being generated by society’s frustrated outcasts. So that to me really stood out as far as that period that we’re talking about. Little period. It really is about, you know, and the LGBTQ community is in, you know, part of the outcast. But it was really about you’re welcome here, you’re welcome here. And when you live in this society, as we see that likes to keep people apart, you can understand how a movement like that that was garnering so much, I hate to say, like the low ball sort of wait folks out to take down what you want. All of these outcasts loving each other, as you said before, respecting one another’s space, being able to be free in their dance and their movements and they love or want to be with.
Toure [00:20:18] Tim Lawrence once said. Whereas the dance floor was once the place for man to meet woman. In The Loft and The sanctuary, that’s two of the main underground clubs that launched this movement. They recast it as a multicultural, polymorphous, free flowing space where individuals could let go of their everyday selves and dissolve into the mutating desire of the crowd. Marginalized in wider society, gay men and women, as well as ethnic groups ranging from African-Americans to Puerto Ricans, were dominant on these dance floors. But crucially, the experience was open to all. Disco was a rare example of New York’s melting pot ethos put into practice. At these parties, Black and Brown gay people were cultural leaders, and they were revolutionary in that personal as political way. Just being gay and proud and joyful was a political act and on those dance floors, there was all of that and more. There was a celebration of gayness, of freedom, of being the real you in a world that tried to make you hide that eventually the people who DJ’d and attended those small parties grew into the disco movement, and they started taking over medium sized clubs and then larger ones. And it became a national movement. And the music that grew out of this subculture was obsessed with joy.
Sylverster [00:21:42] You make me feel. Mighty real.
Toure [00:21:45] And romance.
Barry White [00:21:51] My first, my last, my everything.
Toure [00:21:58] and rhythm.
Diana Ross [00:22:02] I don’t need no cure. I don’t need no cure
Toure [00:22:08] And dance.
[00:22:10] Get on up on the floor, cuz we’re going to boogie oogie oogie till you just can’t boogie no more.\
Toure [00:22:16] And eroticism.
Donna Summer [00:22:24] I love to love you baby Do it to me again.
Toure [00:22:27] And innuendo.
Grace Jones [00:22:32] Pull Up to my Bumper baby in your long Black limousine.
Toure [00:22:35] And love.
Candi Staton [00:22:40] Young hearts, run free.
Toure [00:22:40] And optimism and resilience and self-empowerment.
Gloria Gaynor [00:22:46] On no, not I, I will survive. Oh as long as I know how to love I know I’ll stay alive
Toure [00:22:53] And self-acceptance.
Diana Ross [00:22:57] I’m Coming out. I want the world to know go to let it show
Toure [00:23:04] Disco made people feel good about themselves. It was a music of exuberance, of exhilaration, of transcendence, a music that fed the self-confidence of people who had been beaten down by the world.
Craig Seymour [00:23:16] Because the one thing that people used to be told about was told this to bed, to my face, you know, by my father, you know, who loves me dearly. But the first thing, the time I came out to me said, oh, well, you know, I never I’d never met a gay person that had a happy life.
Toure [00:23:30] When Craig Seymour saw the world of disco reflected toward him through the lens of culture. He saw a world where his father was wrong.
Craig Seymour [00:23:38] And increasingly, people saw that it was acceptable to be gay that you people are living these lives and being happy. Part of the disco revolution and part of the imagery of things like seventies gay pride marginal. But you’re seeing happen. But this motherfucker looks happy. They look like this Negro over here looks happy. So maybe you have provided information to kind of counter narrative that were kind of given to gay people by the straight world.
Toure [00:24:09] Disco was a culture that was led by Black gay men and Black women, and one that welcomed them and affirmed them and one that gave gay people and gay culture national visibility. And that conveyed a sense of acceptance that gay people all over the country needed.
Craig Seymour [00:24:26] Its visibility because gay men were definitely part of the visibility of women of the cover of disco. And then more so, I think it was planting seed, I heard I’m coming out when I was 12. I don’t know that I. I mean, I knew I had no words to say that I was gay. Everything was coming out. What planted the seeds of them when five years later, I’m coming out. Make perfect sense to me. You know what I mean?
Toure [00:24:53] Disco helped change the country. I’m not saying it was everything. There were activists fighting in the streets and legislators working to change laws. But all of it together laid the groundwork for creating a new world for gay Americans. The culture played a part.
Craig Seymour [00:25:10] I think Wesley Morris argues this in the 1619 project. But, you know, at the root of all Black music is this sort of quest for freedom. And so that was something that gay men were very easily able to to kind of latch on to.
Wesley Morris [00:25:25] There’s always been gayness, queerness, some sort of challenge to sort of like a masculine orthodoxy in in black popular culture and black music.
Toure [00:25:36] The way the country has treated and mistreated gay people has had a huge impact on gay lives. As I wrote this episode. I kept thinking about two famous gay lives that played out very differently because of how the country felt about gay issues during their lives. I’m talking about iconic stars from two different times. Sylvester, who was called the queen of disco in the seventies, and Tyler, the creator, a rap star today. Now a word from our sponsors.
Toure [00:26:09] Sylvester was born in 1947 and grew up in Los Angeles, regularly attending a Pentecostal church where people really got the spirit. He often sat in the front row during the hours long service, and he sang in the choir. According to a biography called The Fabulous Sylvester, when he was 11, he complained of pain. His mother took him to a doctor who ordered rectal surgery. She did not understand why he needed rectal surgery. Sylvester explained that a man in the church, a leader of the choir, had introduced him to what he called “the life”. Sylvester never referred to it as rape. Years later, he said the man, quote, turned me out. He said he liked it. But of course, a child cannot consent to having sex with an adult. But his mother took this moment to realize that he was gay and she thought being gay was a sin. And she was disgusted and she shunned him. So at a young age, he experienced two traumas being raped by someone he trusted in his church and being rejected by his mother. A third trauma soon followed. His church community found out he was gay and turned their backs on him. He was invited to not attend. He said, quote, “The people who turned me out, turned me out.” A few years later, as he was spending more and more time dressing as a woman, his mother demanded he leave her house. He said, I’ve been waiting for this for years. And he left. He was homeless for a time until he moved in with his grandmother, who had had many gay friends. She had been a singer back in her day. She let Sylvester continue developing into whoever he wanted to be. During the 1965 Watts riots, while others were grabbing food and TV sets, Sylvester said he and his friends went out and grabbed wigs and hairspray and lipstick. In his high school graduation photo. He wore a dress. Now, this is not an entirely unusual story for that era. A young gay person is taken advantage of by someone they trust when their sexuality is uncovered by their family, it’s met with scorn and shame. They’re ejected from their home. Stories like this are why many young gay people became homeless by many others repressed their true selves. Why many were bullied or beaten and why many others committed suicide at a young age. Sylvester eventually moved to San Francisco and found a community that embraced him, and he began to perform and make records. When he was 30, just a decade and a half, after being kicked out of his childhood home, he recorded You Make Me Feel Mighty Real.
Sylverster [00:28:51] You make me feel, mighty real.
Toure [00:28:55] It would become one of the most iconic disco records ever and be selected by the Library of Congress for Preservation in the National Recording Registry for being culturally, historically or esthetically significant. But in his lifetime, there was a ceiling on how big an openly gay artist could be because many radio stations wouldn’t play you. The gatekeepers would hold you down.
Nelson George [00:29:24] Like it was not that easy if you were gay first. Not at that point, you know. So what I remember Sylvester being so impactful was that he was overtly gay. He didn’t hide it. And because of that, it actually advanced his appeal in certain cities. I mean, I don’t know that Sylvester ever got played a lot in D.C. or Detroit, but in New York, San Francisco, certain other cities, he was a star. His being gay definitely limited his audience. He was a tremendous performer. He had a fantastic voice. He made some dope match records and they were all going to go so far in that era.
Toure [00:30:07] In 1988, about a decade after recording You Make Me Feel Mighty Real, Sylvester died of AIDS. In his last months, his mother was there caring for him three years after he passed in L.A., about 15 minutes away from where Sylvester was born, Tyler, the creator, was born into an entirely different world, a world where the stigma around being gay was slowly dying. Tyler became a star with his group Odd Future, and his early music seemed like the aggro, homophobic, misogynistic hip hop we’d heard so many times before. But to me, to a lot of people, something seemed different. I always thought Tyler was mocking aggro, homophobic, misogynistic hip hop by creating a caricature of it. He was so over the top with it. It was funny. And after he became an established star, he came out sort of. In 2017, he released an album called Flower Boy.
Tyler the Creator [00:31:06] I’ve been kissing white boys since 2004.
Toure [00:31:07] He went out and said he was gay on stage.
Tyler the Creator [00:31:11] Yeah, I’m a fucking homosexual.
Toure [00:31:14] And he said it on Twitter and he said it in interviews.
[00:31:17] How are Norwegian girls? Pretty?
Tyler the Creator [00:31:20] Yeah, they all got this look. Yeah, but I’m in the dudes, so.
[00:31:24] Yeah, that’s tight.
Tyler the Creator [00:31:25] Yeah. I don’t even like.
[00:31:26] Black dudes only?
Tyler the Creator [00:31:27] It’s only I don’t even, like, Black, but I’m in a white guy.
Tyler the Creator [00:31:29] I had a boyfriend when I was 15.
Toure [00:31:31] He said it in freestyles.
Tyler the Creator [00:31:34] Man, it’s weird as fuck. I keep flirting with flexing. He ain’t trying to fuck. Now confuse. I’ma leave. I just think that he hate me. I thought I came here so he date me. He talking about a freestyle. Nigga, fuck rap. Fuck that. I was trying to take him back and take off that hat. We can be like on the lips. But that’s weird as fuck man
Toure [00:31:54] Oh, so that happened. But somehow I thought many people thought Tyler was kidding. Sort of. I mean, okay, he’s gay. Fine. But his presentation of his sexuality is so over the top. It’s so performative. It’s like he’s throwing it in our faces to be provocative. But it’s not. But is it possible that he’s somehow trolling us or trying to or using his queerness in some way? The truth is, I don’t know what Tyler is doing, but apparently all this is in line with a certain gay esthetic.
Craig Seymour [00:32:34] The whole issue of camp that basically kept queer from easy to lie for, always being able to look at something at a distance and kind of be able to make fun of yourselves and stuff like that. So there’s a part of what Tyler is doing that is in the long gay tradition of camp and is the long end of the long tradition of marginalized people not to be pinned down, whether in terms of identity, whether you’re Black, whether you’re gay. There’s that sense of like, you’re not going to pin me down because I had to kind of move. I think Tyler is extremely happy, just the over-the-top ness of it all and the obvious embrace of absurdity.
Toure [00:33:12] I also think maybe he’s using his gayness as part of a game to get attention.
Bill Coleman [00:33:18] I don’t think that someone’s sexuality should be used as a sort of like a carrot dangling sort of trope, sort of to sort of just stir the pot constantly. My question is like, who is his audience? You know, I’m saying like, so when you say he’s using it as either a toy or a ploy or just sort of like a little again, just being a provocative, ah, sort of thing, it’s only going to be a provocateur to Hillary, who already because he not being a provocateur, to me. If your gay your gay, you’re not gay, you’re not gay. If you’re half in the closet. You’re like, okay, you’re just sort of preaching what I’m saying. So the question almost is to me, I know. Fact is like, who is his audience?
Toure [00:34:02] Maybe he’s just doing his own thing because there’s lots of ways to be gay.
Wesley Morris [00:34:07] And I think that we’re in this moment where I think a lot of artists are playing with it in different ways. I think that the idea that you can have on the one hand someone like Lil Nas X being very out, very explicit in the performance, not only of a sexuality but of actual sex, is different from Tyler, the Creator who kind of wants to keep a certain air of mystique about what his orientation, you know, what the what the bounds of his orientation are.
Toure [00:34:36] Maybe he’s being authentic to himself and his generation, which is very accepting of queerness and disdainful of labels and binaries. And some of them are going through some of the same stuff that he.
Craig Seymour [00:34:48] He had like a college age audience where everybody is experimenting and doing it and crap anyway. So I feel like he’s just being authentic to who he is and who his audience that’s going to disappoint the older generation, but young people of the generation, so whatever. I don’t think he owes anything to anybody.
Toure [00:35:06] But his public gain, if you can call it that around his queer identity, is a very modern thing.
Bill Coleman [00:35:12] It’s a privilege for him to be able to have this sort of dialog back and forth. Maybe I’m sleeping with Smith, Jaden, maybe not, but I’m like, That’s a privilege to be able to have that conversation publicly and keep all of your label deals and band deals Sylvester didn’t have that option. A lot of my friends in the ’90s and early 2000 did not have that sort of freedom to be whoever they want to be or wanted to be or whatever, and keep their deals or have the promotion.
Nelson George [00:35:50] There’s lots of gay artists on the charts. There’s lots of gay imagery. Being non-binary is pretty typical for a lot of the generation coming up buying these records, so I don’t know quite who is shocking.
Toure [00:36:02] Nowadays, people are increasingly accepting. Nowadays, many people’s coming out stories involves being embraced by their family and their community. When I was in high school in the eighties, it was shocking when a teacher published an anonymous letter in the school paper announcing that they were gay. When I returned to campus in the double 0s to give a speech, there was a lesbian couple who were extremely affectionate in public and no one batted an eye. Where Sylvester’s coming out cost him a lot. Tyler’s public tango with queerness hasn’t cost him anything. That said, there’s a lot of gay celebrities who still find it more comfortable to be in the closet. But there’s also more room than ever now to be out and successful. This seems like a byproduct of the world that the gay rights warriors fought to create. If you go to Disney World, you’ll hear a lot of Ellen DeGeneres voice. This seems like a byproduct of the world that the gay rights warriors fought to create. But it’s also a byproduct of this other thing called the Internet. See where Sylvester was hot in the disco world? Becoming a mainstream artist meant getting played a lot on mainstream radio. And to do that, you had to be accepted by radio programmers. In the nineties, becoming a big artist meant getting played on MTV. 40 spins a week for several weeks meant most of the country knew your name. There were a small and specific group of gatekeepers who decided who got record deals, who got on the radio, who got on MTV, who got to be famous. Now, in the era of the Internet, when there’s social media and SoundCloud and YouTube and all these ways of getting the audience’s attention, there’s not really gatekeepers who can prevent a Tyler the Creator from rising because he’s too gay for their taste. The guy could sell albums directly to people through a website he can build himself. He could make those albums in his house. He could promote them based on a YouTube video like Frank Ocean did. Artists can shape their own careers now in a way they couldn’t decades ago.
Bill Coleman [00:38:07] And now there’s not the small number of gatekeepers who could say, we don’t want a Tyler who’s talking about all this gay shit because he can get on the Internet. You don’t need those gatekeepers as much. With all due respect, someone like Lil Nas X, he has taken It is social media and just like I’m going to sell this record. I’m going to sell this record. Or how many people do he know that are like getting signed because they , they’re on fucking tik tok. Whatever the fuck. The gatekeeper equaling talent, equaling the reach is so different now that maybe if the situations were different back in these times that we’re sort of reflecting on where the artists could go directly to who their audience would or potentially could be, and you would be able to sustain a career, go tour live, and you didn’t need the radio stations. A lot of these folks may have had very different careers. There’s a lot of reasons why people are successful, and it’s not necessarily because they didn’t have the songs or the talent. There’s other factors that have played into these things, particularly back in the times. There are literally were gatekeepers, literally people like not having it.
Toure [00:39:32] Without the gatekeepers. The people get to decide who becomes a star. And nowadays the people love Tyler and Frank Ocean and Lil Nas, X and Hunter Schafer and countless others. Join us next time we will dive into the battle for economic empowerment for Black women. And Donna Summers, She Works Hard for the Money. I’m Toure’ and this was Being Black: The Eighties. The next episode of this show is already available and soon we’ll be back with Being Black :The Seventies. This podcast was produced by me, Toure and Jesse Cannon and scored by Will Brooks with additional production by Brian de Meglio and executive production from Regina Griffin. Thank you for listening to this podcast from the Grio Black Podcast Network. Please tell a friend and check out the other shows on the Grio Black Podcast Network, including Blackest Questions with Chrissy Greer, Dear Culture with Panama, Jackson, The Grio Daily with Michael Harriot and Writing Black with Maiysha Kai.
