Tyler, the Creator, the Gay Icon

Tyler's queerness is part of the act

Early in Tyler the Creator’s career his music seemed like the same agro homophobic misogynistic hiphop we’d heard so many times before but many people loved it because they understood that it wasn’t. It was different. I always thought Tyler was actually mocking aggro homophobic misogynistic hiphop by creating a caricature of it. He was so over the top with it that he was funny. He left that sound behind but he’s continued trying to shock and troll and provoke. Over the years one of the ways that Tyler’s tried to provoke is by telling us that he’s gay.

Tyler loves to tell us that he’s gay. He says it over and over. He says it in his music and in interviews and onstage and in freestyles. On his album Flower Boy he said “I been kissing white boys since 2004.” He told Rolling Stone that he’s “gay as fuck." He’s said in other interviews that he prefers white boys. He did a wildly entertaining freestyle on Funkmaster Flex’s show where he rhymed endlessly about fooling around with Flex. He had a whole moment on Jerrod Carmichael’s amazing show. He injects his queerness so often and in so many ways that it seems beyond a normal coming out moment. It seems like it’s part of the act. But what point is he making? I think he means to provoke but given the high level of acceptance of queerness among his fans and modern pop music listeners, it’s not very provocative. Another thing he told Rolling Stone seems appropriate: he said, "My friends are so used to me being gay they don't even care.” I think most of the people who like and care about him are the same—they don’t even care that he’s gay.

Nowadays, many people’s coming out story involves being accepted or embraced by their family and their community. When I was in high school it was common to hear of gay people coming out and being thrown out of their childhood home. When I was in high school, in the late 80s, a teacher published a letter in the school paper announcing that there were gay teachers on campus. It was published anonymously. When I returned to campus in the 00s to give a speech there were multiple lesbian couples being affectionate in public and no one batted an eye.

In an era when many people are out and proud and helping to make queerness seem normal, Tyler’s presentation of his sexuality is so over the top and so performative, that it’s like he’s throwing it in our faces to be provocative. But the thing is, it’s not. People are comfortable with him being gay. Even in hiphop, it hasn’t impacted his career at all. Tyler’s public tango with queerness seems like it was meant to seem risky but it hasn’t cost him anything. Not that long ago, being openly gay was dangerous for your career, even in disco.

America is a country that classified gayness as a mental illness as late as the early 70s. America criminalized gayness so perniciously that in the 70s, when people went to gay bars, they brought bail money. In many places it was against the law for men to dance with men or for women to dance with women. Gay and lesbian people in the 70s struggled to find places where they could commune in peace, where they could be themselves, where they could dance without fear of arrest or attack. This void led to the rise of disco in the early 70s in downtown Manhattan.

The first step was a party in 1970 held in a loft owned by the DJ David Mancuso.  The party was held in the place where he lived. [New Yorkers—It was 647 Broadway near Houston.] It came to be called The Loft. Because it was in a loft. But being in Mancuso’s home was critical because that made it possible for him to control who came in, ie, to keep out the police. In 1971 his weekly parties at The Loft were an underground hit and the beginning of the movement that would become known as disco.

The famous DJ Jellybean Benitez went to The Loft when he was a teenager. Benitez told me, “I'd never seen anything like it. It was people from all walks of life, in someone's house. Like his mail was on the table. It was just a loft. That was the first place that I saw, you know, men dancing together, women dancing together. Those initial clubs were really, sort of, safe havens for people that were gay, basically. It allowed them to be free and open and to have a place to congregate and meet other people.”

Disco was a direct result of needing to create gay spaces. And, as such, it had to fight to exist and to demand the space to exist in the way that it wanted. In time, the culture expanded from The Loft to clubs like Paradise Garage and Studio 54 and it became a national phenomenon. There were clubs in lots of major cities and disco was all over the radio and the TV like it was a parade of queerness marching through the culture.

There was a huge victory in that. Craig Seymour, a Black gay music critic and activist told me that decades ago, back in the 70s, he came out to his father and his father said, “I've never met a gay person that's had a happy life.” That stuck with Seymour but when disco culture became a national phenomenon, he saw a world where his father was wrong. Seymour told me, “Part of the disco revolution is: you're seeing happy, fabulous gay people.”

But even though disco was revolutionary, it was still hard to be gay in disco-loving America. In the 70s Sylvester was called the Queen of Disco. He made the iconic “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” which is one of the greatest and biggest songs in disco history. He was a disco megastar but outside the world of disco, he found himself crashing into the gay ceiling. Back then there was a limit to how big an openly gay artist could be because many radio stations wouldn’t play you. The gatekeepers would hold you down. Music historian Nelson George told me, “Getting on Black radio was not that easy if you were out and gay, not at that point. Sylvester being gay definitely limited his audience. He was a tremendous performer. He had a fantastic voice. He made some dope dance records and they were only gonna go so far in that era.”

Sylvester, the disco star, crashed into the gay ceiling but now Tyler, the rapper, can be gay and campy and successful. It’s like Sylvester walked so Tyler could run. And I love that Tyler’s vision of what it is to be male is part of this world. He started with music that was perhaps juvenile but he’s grown into a very deep artist whose entire life is work of art.