SEEING MR. CEE
By James Braxton Peterson| With thanks to NewBlackMan
Thursday, June 09, 2011.
Hip-Hop is gay. Not in the colloquial/vernacular sense of ‘gay’ as
something negative or deplorable, but gay as in actually gay. I am gay
too – about the possibility of actually having a real conversation
about human sexuality, human resources and Hip Hop culture. It’s high
time that Hip Hop had some real discourse about the homophobia that
plagues us socially and I think at this point any other front(ing) is
simply a thin veneer for the Hip Hop community’s inability to embrace
the sexual reality of this culture that we know, love, and sometimes
hate.
Recently,
HOT97’s Mr. Cee (ne Calvin LeBrun) was arrested for public lewdness
when police allegedly saw him receiving oral sex from another man in
his car. According to the New York Daily News this is the third time
that (in less than a year) Mr. Cee has been caught/detained for
solicitation, loitering and now public lewdness. Even more recently,
Mr. Cee pled guilty to lewd conduct in public. As J. Desmond Harris
reported on The Root.com, the online response to Mr. Cee’s predicament
was typically homophobic and at times downright ignorant. To my mind
this is simply more evidence that Hip Hop is gay.
In
his award-winning documentary, Beyond Beats and Rhymes, filmmaker Byron
Hurt unveils hypermasculinity and homosocialism as foundational pillars
in the construction and performance of black masculinity in Hip Hop
culture. The film also suggests that some of the rampant
hypermasculinity, misogyny, and violent themes are ways in which men
attempt to over compensate for their own homoerotic and homosocial
desires. As more and more narratives like Mr. Cee’s emerge, the
response to the alleged activities/crimes seem to be more indicative of
Hip Hop culture than the actual alleged acts in question.
For
his part, Mr. Cee originally denied these allegations, shielding
himself in a playlist of oddly defensive rap tracks, and ramping up a
twitter account so that he can defend himself against the perceived
‘plague’ of being gay in the homophobic world of Hip Hop.
There are several situations in the not so distant past that have
unraveled similarly in the public sphere. Eddie Murphy was arrested for
a rendezvous with a transgendered person and rumors of him being gay
have pretty much dogged him ever since. In a more honest discourse we
might be able to consider that Eddie is more bi-sexual than gay, or
better still, he, like many folk, have sexual preferences that can not simply be defined by hetero/homo terms.
You
might also remember that New Jersey governor (McGreevey) who frequented
Turnpike truck stops in order to satiate his socially repressed desires
to be with other men. Or you might likewise recall Ted Haggert’s
scandalous meth-drenched affair with a ‘personal trainer’, or former
Senator Larry “wide stance” Craig’s arrest for lewd conduct. Maybe you
haven’t seen the self-photograph of a svelte Bishop Eddie Long, in full
pose – making a virtual/visual gift for his young targets of seduction.
Bishop Long also, very recently settled his case. Mr. Cee is not the
first and certainly won’t be the last public figure to be “guilty of”
engaging in gay sexual activity.
Yet
his recent plea, the responses, defenses and protests tell a powerful
story of repression and utter fear of severe social rebuke. For the
ministers and senators, their professional anti-gay rhetoric belied
their personal gay desires. If we situate Mr. Cee’s alleged activity
within the context of a long history of homophobia in Hip Hop – and
here I am thinking specifically of the ways in which Wendy Williams
stoked the flames of hatred and fear in the very first gay-rapper
witch-hunt-like scandal. Nothing really came out of it except for the
violent verbal attacks on Wendy Williams and the vehement denials of
any rapper ever even having a gay thought.
Seriously,
we cannot at this point in time as adult constituents of Hip Hop
culture believe that no rapper (or DJ/producer) has or will ever be
gay. It just doesn’t add up and this is not to weigh in on how/why you
think people are gay – whether you think they are born that way or they
somehow ‘choose’ their sexual preferences. Somebody in Hip Hop must be
gay, but for me, our exceeding willful denials of this fact simply
belies our culture’s repressed gay identity. We’re much like those
ministers and senators who protest gay sexuality/marriage just a little
too much – or just enough to signal the repression of deep-seeded gay
sexual desires.
In
Hip Hop this repressive denial often takes the shape of hypermasculine
narratives with a no-homo brand of homophobia functioning as the
frosting on the cake. Check out Funkmaster Flex’s seething defense of
his homie Mr. Cee delivered in response to a rival station’s bit about
Mr. Cee’s alleged public fellatio scenario. Flex goes on for at least
five minutes straight, berating the entire station, defending Mr. Cee,
and intimating that (gasp) there may be some folk at that other station
who are actually gay, not (as Flex suggests re: Cee) framed by the NYC
Hip Hop police.
But
let’s pretend for minute that Mr. Cee is gay. Does that mean that his
show, “Throwback at Noon” isn’t hot like fire? Does it diminish his
pivotal role as Big Daddy Kane’s DJ? Is Ready to Die any less dope to
you now than it was before you thought about the possibility that Mr.
Cee was gay? I hope that you answered NO to all of these rhetorical
questions and I hope that starting now the Hip Hop community can at
last be persuaded to confront its irrational fear of the full range of
our community’s human sexuality.
***
James
Braxton Peterson is Director of Africana Studies and Associate
Professor of English at Lehigh University and the founder of Hip Hop
Scholars, LLC. Follow him on Twitter @JBP2.